Garrett's questions

We have had a handful of instances where corporate iPhone users will be syncing Calendar/Contacts/etc in their iTunes settings, and we would like to prevent this.

Unfortunately, when they sync their empty home Outlook calendars it then overwrites everything in their iPhone calendar. This has the unpleasant side effect up "updating" Exchange and wiping out every meeting they have. Luckily, our backups have bailed us out in each case - there seems to be no recovering from it any other way as the data is gone.

We prefer to allow our users to continue loading media on their phones, which we believe requires iTunes.

Is there a way, through Exchange ActiveSync or iOS mobile management, to prevent this from happening?

Our particular tape drive inventories tapes based on barcode. Until it's done inventorying new tapes, it registers in BE as "Robotic door open" and we can't run a scan to update the tape inventory in BE.

We're a smaller shop and there's always something to get distracted by, which has led to backups failing a few times. BE thinks there's no tapes, but it never tries to scan the drive. Is there a way to enable "if you're out of tapes, make sure" or at least schedule a scan every day at a certain time or something?

We have several notification e-mails that get generated by various systems for our users. I've been asked to make sure all e-mail to [anything]@ourcompany.com doesn't wind up in our users' junk folders.

What is the best and easiest way(s) to do this?

I have seen that you can write a GPO for Outlook to import a list, but it seems like a one-off import... I'm not really sure how that would be manageable in the future.

We just deployed the latest Citrix XenApp 6 onto Server 2008 R2, and we'd like to run an application usage report. I've googled around, but all the how-to's seem to be aimed at XenApp 5 and lower, when apparently it was much easier.

I came across this Citrix expert thread: http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?threadID=265554

Which gives a powershell command, Get-XAApplicationReport, but when I run that on our Citrix Server in PS2 it says it's not recognized.

Do I need to register the Citrix commands in PS some how?

Is there a better way to generate the application usage report?

We need to make a quarterly off-site backup of all our servers that run in ESX 3.5. We can't shut down the servers, and there are about 65 of them.

Currently we use scheduled clones that have to be set up manually. This of course necessitates all kinds of copying and disgusting datastore hoops to jump through to get the data out.

It seems like there must be a better way of doing this, and there's no way I am the first to attempt this.

Thanks!

We are running Backup Exec 11d (I know, I know... next year's budget).

We'd like to set up backups to go to the current backup server, which hosts a tape drive, and to a remote server which has a large RAID we've set up as our "off-site" backup.

The plan is to send our tapes weekly, and do a nightly differential over the fiber to the RAID.

What's the best way to configure backup exec for this?

We have a company doing development for us in-house and they have access to several service accounts. The company rotates people in and out, and instead of requesting accounts the developers are using service accounts to log on to the servers.

What is the best way to lock out the ability to use that account without affecting the purpose of a service account?

Can we safely check the "Deny this user permissions to log on to any Terminal Server" tickbox in AD under Terminal Services Profile?

If we created a domain policy to prevent logging in for that OU would that be a better way to go?

I am hoping that somewhere in Active Directory the "last logged on from [computer]" is written/stored, or there is a log I can parse out?

The purpose of wanting to know the last PC logged on from is for offering remote support over the network - our users move around pretty infrequently, but I'd like to know that whatever I'm consulting was updating that morning (when they logged in, presumably) at minimum.

I'm also considering login scripts that write the user and computer names to a known location I can reference, but some of our users don't like to logout for 15 days at a time.

If there is an elegant solution that uses login scripts, definitely mention it - but if it happens to work for merely unlocking the station, that would be even better!

I have a server using 10-25% of the CPU time on Hardware Interrupts according to Process Explorer.

How would I go about logging/diagnosing the cause of all these IRQ calls?

The machine is virtual, so I know the physical hardware is not the problem (although could be drivers, etc).

UPDATE: Tried the information from this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms797921.aspx

Regarding using tracelog.exe and tracerpt.exe to capture DPC and ISR events, but when I run the trace it doesn't have any of that information, even with the -dpcisr switch. I get disk and process info in the report but no interrupts... I know interrupts are happening because Process Explorer is still showing them using 6-15% CPU

SQL 2005 Management Studio

I have a replication job that is flooding the log with errors. We took the replication destination offline on purpose and we are aware of the issue. We dont want to delete the replication job yet though because (I'm told) there's no "disable" for replication jobs... It's either there, or it isn't; and they don't want it to do "isn't" until the new server holds its water for a while.

Is there a way to hide the constant errors it's spilling into the logs? A filter view? Maybe an app that you all love for parsing these things?

Best answer to anybody who can recommend a good program for checking jobs and logs across SQL 2005 and SQL 2000 machines :)

Thanks!

What's the best way to convert a VMWare VMDK HDD file to a HyperV VHD file?

I've been tasked with converting our environment to HyperV for evaluation purposes. We are MSDN subscribers, so the MS software for the job is probably available to me if you know it.

I have been having hit or miss success with "vmdk2vhd" - about half the time it tells me "Invalid vmdk" and as far as I know they should be fine.