cre8toruk's questions

we were notified by GD that our wildcard SSL cert would be expiring and they helpfully have supplied a new one.. .I say new one I mean 3 files (a .crt, a .pem and a .p7b though I've no idea what the latter two are).

I can't believe it's quite as complicated as it appears to be... I thought I could just right click on the expiring cert, click renew... the select complete certificate request provide the .crt file that was provided by GD and that would be that... when I do that, nothing happens... it sits and thinks for a while then the screen disappears... I asked the man at GD if it would automatically kick over to the new cert when the old one expired but I wasn't confident he knew that would be the case....

Can anyone give me a definitive answer on how to renew an exist SSL cert in IIS ?

I have a symbolic link created (with /D) in a folder on our file server which points to a shared folder on a NAS.

My user can access the shared folder via \nas-address\share but when they try and access it via the symbolic link they get a Network Access is denied message.

Any one any ideas?

we have a real odd issue. Multiple users have noticed that their computers are unable to access various web and file based services at specific times 4 hours apart.

I've noticed the "disconnection" at 12.02pm myself and trying to access internal web based systems gives me a 404 page not found error. Others have noticed file shares becoming unavailable.

The outage lasts approximately 2 minutes each time.

We're running a 2 node Server 2019 hyper-v cluster with an infortrend SSD SAN backend and the services I describe are distributed across both nodes.

I've checked the host servers even logs, I checked the network switch logs and even some client event logs and nothing seems to correspond (or be anywhere near) to the time that the outage happens.

In tests we've run multiple Pings to hosts and VM's from endpoints to see if there is a network interruption but there isn't so much as a fluctuation in the MS response times. I realise Ping is a bit of a sledgehammer but given the duration of the outage I would expect to see something reflected but again nothing.

I'm at a complete loss so would be grateful for literally anything that might point me in the right direction.

thanks in advance,

Paul.

unfortunately we fell victim to Microsoft's KB5000808, 802 and 822 updates.. the latter being on our print server which was falling over everytime someone printed to a Kyocera printer.

I've managed to uninstall the update with the WUSA /UNINSTALL /KB:5000822 command and I've set it for removal via our WSUS server but irritatingly it says it is pending installation when I check in the Update settings on the server.

Is there a way of stopping this from being available to install? I've cleared the software distribution folder but nothing seems to get rid of it.

thanks in advance,

Paul.

I purchased a wildcard SSL cert from GoDaddy. I completed the email verification phase, then they provided me with a "generated-csr.txt" file and a "generated-private-key.txt" file. They then provided me with a zip file containing a .crt .pem and .p7b file. I followed their instructions - installed the .p7b file in the intermediate certification authority repository. I then did a complete certificate request as instructed and went to my websites binding and attempted to select the certificate which wasn't there.

I can see the cert in the web-hosting repository but without as has been mentioned a private key. I have a private key in the .txt file, but I don't know what to do with it.

Can someone please shed some light on where this process might have gone wrong?

I was asked recently if I could stop my boss having his proxy settings automatically applied. Our proxy settings are set by group policy so I figured it should be easy to determine which GPO it is and simply remove him from the group that the GPO scope uses to apply it.

Our group policy is quite complex with quite a few different GPO's being applied to a variety of users and computers.

The question is then how can I find the GPO where the setting is being applied without having to go through each one and determine if it applies to his user / computer account?

I've run through the Group Policy Modelling wizard for both his user account and the computer (just in case), but I can't find anything specific to him. The only GPO that has anything to do with proxy settings is in a user OU which his account isn't in. i.e. the GPO is applying to Domain Users\Users and his account is in Domain Users\IT.

Any ideas? Is there a tool that can better tell me what settings are being set on his account ? Can it be interrogated via powershell?

we have some pretty old Windows XP controlled milling machines (HURCO's). Until recently they were accessing their program files (XML based) from a Windows Server 2012R2 file share.

The physical server the share is located on, is to be decommissioned, so I've copied the data to a Windows Server 2019 VM with the SMB1.0 feature installed.

Since changing the machine tools to point their mapped drives to the new Windows 2019 server, they've been experiencing difficulties accessing their programs, getting a fairly generic "operating system error". If I look at one of the programs they are trying to open / save over and try and change the filename or delete it from the server I get an error telling me the program is in use by "System".

If I check in Open Files I can see (this time but not always) the file is opened for read (at least twice) with no locks against it.

I appreciate this is pretty obscure but I'm at a loss to know how to proceed.

We can't upgrade the Machine tools operating system as it would cost £1000's

Any suggestions would be gratefully received.

we have a two-node Server 2019 Hyper-V cluster with an SSD SAN providing the shared storage. I'm in the process of trying to update the host servers with their windows updates.

I planned to move all the VM's from Host-01 to Host-02 install the windows updates on Host-01, then move all the VM's to Host-01 and repeat the process on Host-02.

I managed to move all the VM's to Host-02 except 1 Server 2012 VM which when I try to do a live migrate gets to about 62% then simply stops migrating and remains on Host-01.

If I try to Move the VM instead of live migrating, it appears on Host-02 but with a big red X on it and it then refuses to start.

The event logs show the following errors:

Event ID: 1205 - The Cluster service failed to bring clustered role <<'MY Server'>> completely online or offline. One or more resources may be in a failed state. This may impact the availability of the clustered role.

Event ID: 1069 - Cluster resource 'Virtual Machine Configuration <>' of type 'Virtual Machine Configuration' in clustered role 'SVR-IIS-INTRA' failed.

Event ID: 1254 - Clustered role '<>' has exceeded its failover threshold.....

Event ID: 1205 - As above

Event ID: 1069 - Cluster resource 'Virtual Machine Configuration <>' of type 'Virtual Machine Configuration' in clustered role '<>' failed. The error code was '0x5' ('Access is denied.').

Event ID: 21502 - 'Virtual Machine Configuration <>' failed to register the virtual machine with the virtual machine management service.

The Virtual Machine Management Service failed to register the configuration for the virtual machine '03059663-1988-4147-929F-4D543925C4EA' at '\\host-01\c$\ClusterStorage\Volume1\<<My Server>>': General access denied error (0x80070005). If the virtual machine is managed by a failover cluster, ensure that the file is located at a path that is accessible to other nodes of the cluster.

The last 2 / 3 error events were generated when attempting a standard move rather than a live migrate. I've checked that both hosts can access the above folder location so I'm at a bit of a loss.

If push comes to shove I will have to create a new VM and move the disk but if anyone knows how to fix this I'd be grateful.

To be clear I have over 40 VM's (20 per host) and this is the only one that is refusing to move. All VM's use the same CSV (1).

Thanks for any thoughts.

Paul.

We have two Synology Rackstation RS2418RP+'s and for a separate project we needed to add some more disk to them. We purchased a pair of RX1217RP's as according to Synology these are compatible.

I received them yesterday and set about racking and connecting them.

I've connected one box up with it's supplied connection cable and added some power to both CPU's and the box beeps, the connection light goes green and that's it. I can't see the expansion in the Synology admin console, the drives don't spin up and all I have is a green power light on the front.

I've tried connecting the second box too and this behaves exactly the same.

I've reported the issue with Synology tech support and so far the best they've come up with is that I should test both sets of hard drives individually using the manufacturers test tools! To say I'm un-impressed is an understatement.

Anyone experienced this and have any tips for what I can try next ?

I've deployed an Azure VM (woohoo!) and now I'm advised that it's really important that it keeps working. I've had a read up on Availability Zones and It looks like this might be the thing to do but I'm not sure if I understand it correctly.

If I have one VM in an availability zone, will that VM be replicated across the zones ?

thanks in advance,

Paul.

I have a few oldish Dell PowerEdge servers which I'm planning to recommission as DR servers. I'm able to access one of them currently via it's idrac card and the virtual console seems to work ok.

That said I'm not able to do any bios / disk related config since this happens at boot time and I get disconnected from the virtual console when i reboot the server.

Using our new HP servers with their ILO's in the same way I'm able to do a full config on the pre OS bit of the boot so I figured it should be the same with the IDrac's.

Is there some setting I need to err set to make virtual console work pre os boot ?

I note the server has two LOM NIC's which are disabled in the OS, however they seem to be what's providing the IDRAC network since they're connected to access ports I configured on my switch to a different VLAN to the server. Sorry that's probably a red herring...

Grateful for any suggestions.

Paul.