Adam Robinson's questions

I currently have a Storage Spaces pool with eight 4TB disks allocated to a single virtual disk in mirror mode (two columns, two copies). I am attempting to add a single 6TB disk to this array and am unable to do it in the Storage Spaces UI or through PowerShell, as I get an error message saying "One or more physical disks encountered an error during addition to the storage pool. The request is not supported."

I have tried reseating the disk, restarting, etc. all to no avail. The interesting thing is that while I cannot add it to this pool, I CAN create a new pool with that disk as its sole member.

While I don't believe it should be relevant, the existing pool is 8xSATA drives and this additional drive is SAS. All installed in a Lenovo SA120 enclosure connected through an LSI 9200-8E HBA.

Any thoughts on why I can't add this disk, and (more importantly) if there is anything I can do to correct that?

We've been dealing with clock inaccuracy in the office for a few months now as a result of our DC's internal clock drifting, and I finally have a few spare cycles to try to take care of the problem.

We're running a Server 2008 R2 domain controller (this is a physical box, not a virtual server) and it seems that no matter what I do I cannot get it to sync to an external NTP server.

For instance, I've tried this command to configure it to sync to a couple of external NTP servers:

w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:"0.north-america.pool.ntp.org 1.north-america.pool.ntp.org" /syncfromflags:manual /reliable:yes /update

But it just won't take. Here's what I get when I query the peers:

C:\Windows\system32>w32tm /query /peers
#Peers: 1

Peer:
State: Pending
Time Remaining: 820.7812500s
Mode: 0 (reserved)
Stratum: 0 (unspecified)
PeerPoll Interval: 0 (unspecified)
HostPoll Interval: 0 (unspecified)

As you can see, the peers that I specified are not listed and the one "peer" (which seems to have no information) is listed as "pending".

Here's the status:

C:\Windows\system32>w32tm /query /status
Leap Indicator: 0(no warning)
Stratum: 1 (primary reference - syncd by radio clock)
Precision: -6 (15.625ms per tick)
Root Delay: 0.0000000s
Root Dispersion: 10.0000000s
ReferenceId: 0x4C4F434C (source name:  "LOCL")
Last Successful Sync Time: 7/20/2012 11:24:24 AM
Source: Local CMOS Clock
Poll Interval: 6 (64s)

I'm pulling my hair out here; what am I missing? I've tried stopping and starting the service, and I've tried registering and unregistering, but so far no luck.

I'm having a problem similar to that posted in this question:

Missing Certificate template From certificate to issue

The short version is that I've created a duplicate certificate template and I'm trying to add it to my domain CA so that I can issue certificates with it. However, when I go into the Certification Authority MMC and go to "Certificate Templates -> New -> Certificate Template To Issue", my template is missing (along with quite a number of other templates that are present in the domain).

Unlike the previous question, however, my CA is running on Server 2008 R2 Enterprise. Our organization has a single DC and a single CA, so I'm not seeing where there could be propagation delay.

Any ideas how to get my template to show so that I can issue certificates?

The basic question is this: what issues might I encounter if I have an existing Exchange 2010 server and I install the domain controller role on it? This is a small organization (<10 people).

For background as to why I need to do this...

Our network currently has a single domain controller and a single Exchange server that fills all Exchange roles. Bear in mind that I realize that this is not an ideal setup (we should have an additional DC and should have our internal Exchange roles on a different server from the external roles), but with the size of our organization it's very difficult to justify purchasing additional hardware.

Our current online backup solutions (two of the big names; no need to mention them here) support backing up Active Directory data as well as the Exchange database, but in order to do this the backup client must run on the DC and the Exchange server, respectively. Since we only have one server backup license, our current process is to back up all of the other machines and servers to a central location, then allow the backup client to back up this data. However, since the client must run on the DC to back up Active Directory and the Exchange server to back up Exchange, this obviously presents us with a problem.

We also use Windows Server Backup to back up fill images of all of our servers to external hard drives that get swapped out once per week, but we'd like the added security of having our AD and Exchange data current (and not potentially 6 days old).

The solution we're tossing around right now is simply to convert the Exchange 2010 server into another domain controller, which would allow us to back everything up to that machine and grab our files, AD, and Exchange data all at once. What sort of problems might this cause?

I'm trying to stand up a new ASA5505 on our network (previously we used IPCop), and I'm having a bit of an issue getting the VPN to work. I ran through the IPSec VPN wizard in ASDM (6.3) on the ASA (8.3) and I selected the second option, L2TP over IPSec. After enabling both L2TP/IPSec and IPSec in the profile, I'm able to connect with the following clients:

• OSX built-in VPN client
• OSX Cisco VPN client
• iPhone
• iPad

I'm trying to get our Windows clients to connect, but using the Cisco VPN client is unfortunately not an option for us, since most of us run Windows 7 64 bit, but the ASA came with version 5.0.06 of the VPN client, but 5.0.07 was the version where 64-bit support was introduced.

I'm attempting to use the built-in L2TP/IPSec client in Windows 7 to connect to the VPN, but here's the chain of events that I see in the monitor (set to Debugging level) when I connect:

Built inbound UDP connection 66792 for outside:x.x.x.x/27917 (x.x.x.x/27917) to identity:IP4/4500 (IP4/4500)
Group = DefaultRAGroup, IP = x.x.x.x, Automatic NAT Detection Status:     Remote end   IS   behind a NAT device     This   end is NOT behind a NAT device
AAA retrieved default group policy (vpn) for user = DefaultRAGroup
Group = DefaultRAGroup, IP = x.x.x.x, PHASE 1 COMPLETED
IP = x.x.x.x, Keep-alives configured on but peer does not support keep-alives (type = None)
Group = DefaultRAGroup, IP = x.x.x.x, All IPSec SA proposals found unacceptable!
Group = DefaultRAGroup, IP = x.x.x.x, QM FSM error (P2 struct &0xca3609e8, mess id 0x1)!
Group = DefaultRAGroup, IP = x.x.x.x, Removing peer from correlator table failed, no match!
Group = DefaultRAGroup, IP = x.x.x.x, Session is being torn down. Reason: Phase 2 Mismatch
Group = DefaultRAGroup, Username = , IP = x.x.x.x, Session disconnected. Session Type: IKE, Duration: 0h:00m:00s, Bytes xmt: 0, Bytes rcv: 0, Reason: Phase 2 Mismatch

(IP Address replaced with x.x.x.x)

At this point, the Windows client just sits and sits and eventually times out.

Does anyone have any idea what I might need to change to get this working for both the clients that already work and Windows?

I'm not terribly experienced with Cisco equipment yet, so I apologize if there's any debugging or additional logging information that I should have included. Feel free to ask and I'll amend my question.

I've created a couple of distribution groups for our organization, and we'd like to start using these distribution addresses as our outgoing address (for things like support) rather than our personal email addresses.

To test, I've added "Send As" to myself for our support group, but I'm having some issues sending email.

• If I manually type in our support email address (which is set as the primary [and only] email address for the DG) and send the email, I get the "You can't send a message on behalf of this user..." message from the postmaster and the email does not go out.
• If I select the DG by clicking on "From..." and browsing the address book, then it works fine. Curiously, the DG does not show up in the GAL, but if I go to "All Groups", it appears
• If I try to send another email by clicking on the entry that shows up in the "From" popup now, it fails again.

I'm willing to live with having to select the DG from the address book the first time, but having to browse to it every time is going to become tedious. Is there something that I'm missing here?

My employer has business-level cable modem service, and we have a block of five static IP addresses. Until this morning, we've been using IPCop running on an old box in order to facilitate NAT'ing and port forwarding from the five external IP's to various servers within the internal network. Unfortunately the IPCop box died a sudden death this morning, and we're left limping along on a temporary Linksys wireless router. We've been able to restore email by using that single static IP as the external address it's using, but we need to service all five in order to run the business.

I'm looking to purchase as inexpensive of a router as possible that can handle port forwarding across multiple external IP addresses. While particular product recommendations are welcome from my point of view, I'm more interested in what I need to be looking for to be able to determine if a particular model can support this configuration.

TL;DR Version: What is the term (assuming that there is one) that is used to describe the a router/firewall that supports forwarding ports from multiple external addresses to various internal addresses?

I'm attempting to troubleshoot an issue with one of our customers who's using SQL Server 2005 SP3 Express to house their application data. The automatic backups that we perform when upgrading our application are timing out after 30 minutes, and I've been sitting and watching the backup take place in SSMS for about 20 minutes now and it's only gotten to 30%.

The database is only slightly over 1GB, so I'm baffled as to what could be causing this sort of horrible performance. The machine is a 1.87GHz Xeon with 3GB of RAM running Windows Server 2003 R2. While that's hardly a powerful box, this seems ridiculous.

Does anyone have any idea why these backups could be taking so long and, more importantly, how I can do something about it?

I'm in the process of trying to install Exchange 2010 Standard onto one of our servers, and I've hit a bit of a snag.

Two of the readiness checks fail, saying:

Coexistence between Exchange Server 2010 and Exchange Server versions older than Exchange Server 2007 SP2 in the same Active Directory Site is not supported.

The trouble is...we don't have Exchange 2007.

It does, however, seem that we had it at one time. The server didn't get used, and rather than uninstall Exchange, it appears that the server (a virtual machine at the time) was just done away with. Because of this, I can't go through the normal process of removing Exchange 2007 (or just upgrading it to SP2) to satisfy this condition.

I've followed directions that I found online to use ADSI Edit to remove all traces of Exchange-related objects from AD, but the readiness check is still failing. Is there something I'm missing? Something else that I need to do in order to remove Exchange objects from the schema so that I can install 2010?