Dan's questions

I have a user (Win 7 Pro 64-bit) in a satellite office (10.1.0.0/24) that is trying to access web services in our main office (10.0.0.0/16) over a site-to-site VPN between a a Meraki MX60W and a Meraki MX80.

They are able to access sites that are hosted on Windows machines (running Apache 2.2.x and IIS) but they are not able to access sites that are hosted on Linux machines (Debian 7 and Apache 2.2.x). They get the initial password prompt but can't get to the site itself. They are able to ping by both hostname and IP address and the target machine is also able to ping them by IP. All machines (source and target) can ping both gateways (local and remote).

If I telnet on port 80 to the hostname and excute "GET /" it returns the default apache page. Dial in VPN (L2TP/IPSEC) users are unaffected.

The browsers do not have any proxy settings configured and it affects all browsers. I have restarted the dnscache service, flushed DNS and have had them run with the dns cache service stopped. I've had them reboot and run as a different user as well as on the wired and wireless network in that office. They are the only user in that office for the next while so I can't get them to test with another users machine.

Are there any additional steps I've missed in relation to troubleshooting apart from running a packet capture on both ends?

I've recently had to replace the System Board on my P4300 G2 SAN due to a failure to find a boot drive. Unfortunately after replacing this it won't boot past the POST screen, it identifies that there is a fan missing and that "The Fan Solution is insufficient".

There are 6 headers and only 4 connections. I can't take it's partner in the pair out to look at it's connections as it's running our production systems.

I've tried the following permutations (see table Below) and I've identified that the required connections are 1,2,3,5 and 6. The only header that appears to be ignored is 4.

I've contacted HP already (via the system board replacement) but they don't seem to understand the problem, I'm getting an engineer out ASAP but ideally I'd like to solve this sooner than that so that if there is another underlying problem he can bring the right kit with him.

Permutations attempted to identify required headers

1,2,3,4 (error 1611 Fan 5, error 1611 6 missing)

1,2,5,6 (error 1611 Fan 3 missing)

1,2,3,5 (error 1611 Fan 6 missing)

1,3,5,6 (error 1611 Fan 2 missing)

2,3,5,6 (error 1611 Fan 1 missing)

All my Windows 7 Enterprise Edition 64bit laptops have now failed to get an IP address from DHCP via either a wired or wireless connection. The majority of these machines are Dell Latitude 1545 but Latitude D520/530s are also affected. I have been able to resolve connectivity on the wired network by doing the following but it is also not reliable.

1. Set the service to run under Network Service, restart it (it fails), set it back to Local Service and restart again.

2. Set a manual IP address in the right range, it then connects and identifies the network successfully, the network adapter can then be set to DHCP and it will get an IP address correctly.

This is not persisted after a reboot.

THe wireless interface is able to connect correctly to the WLAN but cannot get an IP address, if a static address is set it is able to send and receive traffic but DHCP fails. The fix above does not work for any of the WLAN devices affected.

DHCP is from a variety of sources, a LInksys Wireless Router (WRT54G) and a Windows Server 2003 R2 DHCP server, they were working initially but stopped. Other devices are working fine (Macbook pro, iPhones, HTC, linux laptops etc)

I'm at my wits end as I am the only sysadmin at present and cannot afford the time to rebuild 8 or so laptops.

Thanks

The host in question is a Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter edition host with 64GB of RAM set up as a dedicated Hyper-V server with a 2TB backing store attached via a PERC 5/e controller to a Dell MD1000. The server is a Dell Poweredge R900 Quad, quad-core.

Using Windows Server Backup it attempts to put some non-integration services available guests into saved state and use Volume Shadow Snapshots on the rest.

This takes at least 9min to do as there are at present 35 live guests, as a result the Volume Shadow Snapshot times out and the backup fails.

Is there a way to extend the timeout of Windows Server Backup to say 20 min for the volume shadow creation? Or is there a way to programatically put the guests into a saved state, run windows server backup and then bring back only the guests that were put into a saved state after the snapshot completes? This was how I back up our existing Virtual Server instances.

As per this question I want to monitor the network utilisation of my Windows Servers using Nagios (not Cacti).

Does anyone have any guidance on querying the WMI counters using NSClient or via SNMP so that rrd data can be collected by nagios for graphing using pnp4nagios?

Or does anyone have a plugin that does this?

Thanks

I have 2 active directory forests, each containing at least one domain but in both cases I am dealing with the top level domain.

I have a group on each domain, group1 (domain A) group2 (domain B). group1 in domain A has the group2 (from domain B) as a member.

Is it possible using "Active Directory Users and Computers" from a domain A member to enumerate the members of group2 from domain B. At present it only appears as an object in group1 and I can see what it is a member of but not the members contained in it.

Is this possible or must you enumerate the object via a domain member in domain B?

Our WIndows Server 2003 DHCP scope is being filled with BAD ADDRESS leases. This happened after we started deploying Vista to the domain. It is most prevalent when a user disconnects from their wired connection and plugs back in on an alternate location.

I have ran wireshark on the DHCP server and can see the client machine refusing the DHCP address. The client requests the DHCP Address as evidenced by a DHCP REQUEST entry in the wireshark log and this is immediately followed by a DHCP DECLINED entry. It is a limited number of laptops affected by this (only Vista so far, it does affect our XP and other laptops when we run out of addresses though) The addresses it declines are valid and not currently in use.

I have turned of conflict detection on the DHCP server but it is still filling it with BAD ADDRESS entries. In these cases the user cannot get an IP address.

Another possibly related issue is that there are several users reporting IP Address Conflict messages on their laptops and workstations. These are all served from the same DHCP server. The problem is most apparent when they disconnect either wired or wireless connections or bring their machines out of hibernate mode.

My belief is that this is caused by something in Vista but it has not been resolved by deploying SP2. All machines that users report both issues (NOt able to get an address, IP address conflict) are running Vista while machines running XP get only the IP Address conflict message.

THe DHCP Lease time is 3 days. Should this be reduced? Should I reenable conflict detection? Or should I just put XP SP3 on the machines that I can?

There are 2 DHCP servers in play, they share the same scope but have mutual exclusions, it's to cover us in the event of a failure as per the 80:20 rule. The problem occurred before I added the second DHCP server.

I have scanned the network for rogue DHCP servers, I have also disabled our DHCP server (only one at that time) and requested a DHCP address, none was received.

Also, most of the machines affected have virtual PC or virtual server running.

Hi All, I'm trying to restore our Active directory infrastructure from System State backups. This normally isn't a problem but I'm trying to do it onto a Hyper-V based server while the backup "source" is a physical machine.

I've managed to get around the HAL problem by copying the HAL file from the source server after performing the active directory restore (when the kernel32.dll would have changed) and bringing up the windows server 2003 recovery console, then replacing the current HAL.dll in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32

This worked and allowed Windows to boot, BUT when booting into normal startup I get the following error message

Directory Services could not start because of the following error:
The specified network password is not correct. Error Status:
0xc000006a. Please click OK to shutdown this system and reboot
into Directory Services Restore Mode, check the event log for more 
detailed information.

It has the same hard drive layout (one physical drive with one partition)

The backup file is only a few days old and therefore does not exceed the tombstone lifetime for the domain that is being restored.

THIS IS WRONG. Backup was very old indeed.

My gut instinct tells me that I'm fairly close to a successful restore but that I am missing something fundamental.

Hope you guys can help.