Jesse's questions

This morning, we rebooted our Server 2008 R2 box. No problem, came right back up. Then we shut it down and let it install windows updates. While it was off, we added some RAM. Then we turned it back on.

The system came right back up to the "press ctrl-alt-delete" screen, so far, so good.

I logged in. The system got as far as "Applying Group Policy" -- then spent almost an hour applying drive mappings. Finally finished that, and has now spent 30 minutes on waiting for the Event Notification Service.

I still haven't been able to log in. Remote desktop service doesn't appear to be running yet.

I tried viewing the event log from another machine. I see that the box is writing to the Security log, but there are no events in System or Application in the last 45 minutes.

Digging through the System log of events from 45 minutes ago, I see a bunch of timeouts:

• A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the ShellHWDetection service. [lots of these]
• A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the wuauserv service.
• A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the SessionEnv service.
• A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the Schedule service.
• A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the CertPropSvc service.

What can I do? Should I try shutting it down remotely, or will that do more damage?

I ran gpresult /z and found this policy:

GPO: Local Group Policy
KeyName:     Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\WindowsUpdate\DisableWindowsUpdateAccess
Value:       0, 0, 0, 0
State:       Enabled

I want to disable that. How do I find the source of this policy and turn it off?

I'm logged into a Windows Server 2008 R2 box as a domain admin. I'm trying to explicitly make myself local admin. From netplwiz, I choose add user, administrator, and click OK. Netplwiz becomes unresponsive and has to be killed. I try again: choose standard user, click Finish -- same result.

EDIT: Here's what was in Event Viewer:

The program NetplWiz.exe version 6.1.7600.16385 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Action Center control panel.

I've never seen this before. Any ideas?

I open the Windows Update control panel, and it says "some settings are managed by your system administrator." Problem is, I'm logged in as a domain admin.

Tried so far:

• Searched the output of gpresult /z (see this previous SF question) for references to Windows Update, but everything there looked OK.
• Searched the registry, and found a few more settings that looked relevant, but everything seemed to be set correctly.
• Checked with gpedit to try to find anything suspicious
• Checked with RSoP, confirmed that "Configure Automatic Updates" and "Allow Automatic Updates immediate installation" are enabled.

Everything looks fine. I logged out, logged back in (as domain admin), and I still can't manually check for updates or apply them. I just get that "some settings are managed by your system administrator" message.

Where else could this be disabled?

EDIT: Just found this in the event viewer -- could it be related?

Log Name:      Application
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-CAPI2
Event ID:      4107
Description:
Failed extract of third-party root list from auto update cab at:
<http://www.download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/trustedr/en/authrootstl.cab> 
with error: A required certificate is not within its validity period when 
verifying against the current system clock or the timestamp in the signed file.

I have a 5TB volume (non-bootable) on a Windows Server 2008 box. I need to copy it to another server over the network. Because the volume has 30 million files, filesystem copy tools like robocopy will take forever; I need a block-level copy. The source volume has to stay online during the copy -- so booting to Linux is not an option.

Acronis has to go from old volume -> image -> new volume.

What will let me go old volume -> new volume, without the image step in the middle?

My w3wp's are recycling every 60 seconds after using too much virtual memory.

I ran the IIS Debug Diagnostic Tool to capture a memory dump before the worker process recycled; the most interesting part seems to be this:

Virtual Allocation Summary

Reserved memory 4.88 GBytes  
Committed memory 328.27 MBytes  
Mapped memory 17.36 MBytes  
Reserved block count   524 blocks  
Committed block count   1082 blocks  
Mapped block count   43 blocks

So that 4.88 GBytes of reserved memory seems really big. But neither the DotNetMemoryAnalysis or the regular Memory Pressure Analyzer seems to tell me where that 4.88 GB went.

How can I find out?

I've got a 64-bit Server 2008 (R1) box running IIS. Users were complaining about extremely slow-loading pages. After digging around I found:

1. After isolating the box so only one user was able to connect, each web request caused the CPU to jump to 30% for about two seconds, even on the simplest of pages. Looking at the code, no obvious reason for this usage is apparent.

2. NewRelic shows > 10s lost to "networking", even though all the access is over a 100-meg LAN, and perfmon shows a network Output Queue Length of zero.

We can't find anything in the code that should cause so much CPU activity, or any answer to why NewRelic thinks there's a network problem.

Looking for suggestions of where to go from here.

From time to time, something happens to our website that makes it slow and unresponsive. Inevitably, this happens at like 3 AM, on a day when all the devs have gone to bed early.

Are there any good tools for taking a "snapshot" of the state of the webserver and the db server at that moment? I want to get an email with a full report -- what was the CPU doing? any process thrashing disks? ASP.NET worker process queue out of control? long-running db queries?

This is for a Windows Server 2008 R2 box running IIS, and a SQL Server 2008 R2 instance.

Basically, I want to be able to see enough stuff that I have some hope of figuring out what was making things slow.

My PowerShell script works from the command line, but not from Task_Scheduler. This is PowerShell v1 on Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise.

From the command line, I type:

c:\> powershell -File "C:\Program Files\mystuff\foo.ps1"

My one-line PowerShell script runs fine -- it copies the most recent file named *.bak. Here's the script, in case that's useful:

gci X:\backups\*.bak | Sort-Object LastWriteTime -Descending | Select-Object -first 1 | foreach { xcopy $_ z:\backups\ }

I created a scheduled task, with the same command. The script completes instantly with result code 0, but the script didn't actually do anything.

So I tried to see my script's output and changed my scheduled action to:

cmd /c powershell.exe -File "C:\Program Files\mystuff\foo.ps1" > c:\ps.log

Now I see the output: "0 File(s) copied"

Go back to the command line and try it again, and it still works correctly.

The scheduled task is running as the same user as the command line. What is making it behave differently?

I'm running a database server that's under moderately heavy load. I just kicked off xcopy on that box to copy a database backup to a remote server.

I see that xcopy is using almost all my available bandwidth. I'm worried that it will hog bandwidth that the database would otherwise use.

If I lower xcopy's priority in taskmgr, will that de-prioritize the network traffic, or just CPU time?

I need to get robocopy to exclude any file whose path contains a directory with a particular name. For example, "bar":

c:\foo\bar\a.txt
c:\bar\c.txt
d:\baz\bar\flub\d.txt

should be excluded, but not

c:\foo\barf\b.txt

Here are the things I tried -- each of which was rejected by robocopy:

/XD \bar\
/XD *\bar\*
/XD *^\bar^\*

Any ideas?

I'm running IIS on Server 2008 R2. Recently, I've seen a lot of errors like this:

The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool. This may have occurred because all pooled connections were in use and max pool size was reached.

When I go into the IIS manager and look at the worker processes, I see that this application pool has a bunch of requests that have been running for over an hour each. I'm guessing that they're holding on to db connections, which is why nobody else can get one.

So, two questions:

1. Why didn't IIS timeout and kill off these requests? (They normally complete in 1 - 2 seconds.)
2. How do I make sure this doesn't happen?

Thanks!

I need to back up a single server (Windows 2008 R2) onto an external drive. Because the server has millions of small files, block-level backup, not filesystem, is a requirement.

I can use Acronis Backup & Recovery, or Windows Server Backup. Is there any compelling reason to pick one over the other? (I already own the Acronis software, so price is not an issue.)

I've got a server with a LOT of small files -- many millions files, and over 1.5 TB of data. I need a decent backup strategy.

• Any filesystem-based backup takes too long -- just enumerating which files need to be copied takes a day.

• Acronis can do a disk image in 24 hours, but fails when it tries to do a differential backup the next day.

• DFS-R won't replicate a volume with this many files.

I'm starting to look at Double Take, which seems to be able to do continuous replication. Are there other solutions that can do continuous replication at a block or sector level -- not file-by-file over a WAN?

Some details:

• The files are split up into about 75,000 directories.

• 99% of the daily change comes from adding new directories; existing files are rarely changed.

There's some other relevant discussion here.

I've got IIS 7 running on two Server 2008 machines. One is a Domain Controller.

How do I let my web guy manage IIS -- create applications and virtual directories, modify all settings -- without putting him in the administrators group (local or domain)?

(I know there's a similar question posted here, but the accepted answer was "make him an admin", and that's not an option for me.)

I copied a few million files from one disk array to another on a Server 2008 box. Then I wanted to move the share that people used to access those files, so it would point at the new location of the files.

I innocently clicked "stop sharing" on the first share, thinking it would just delete a record somewhere, and deny network access to the directory.

That was three hours ago, and Windows still says "Stop sharing... this may take a few minutes". I assume that means it's updating the permissions on every file in under the shared directory. yay.

How can I figure out how much longer I have to wait?

What happens if I click cancel?

I need to back up some huge files (100GB) and a zillion little ones (2,000,000 x 50k) over the internet via SSL, from one Windows Server 2008 box to another.

What I want is to have the directory structure on the backup server mirror the production server -- but with a version history. rsync does the first part, and I know a few products combine rsync with a version history, but I don't know which ones are really ready for prime-time.

My plan was to use Syncrify, but since nobody seems to have any experience with it, I'm looking for other ideas.