Chad Harrison's questions

Working on a vendor built system, we've realized that OS partition (C:) they created was rather small (38 GB). The object is to update Windows 2008 R2 to SP1. Several sources state that 8 GB is needed during the install process which includes extracted temporary files. I managed to clear up to 4.6 GB of space on the partition, but still is not cutting it.

Another partition exists on the volume that has sufficient space on the same system, but experience has shown me that these installers like to exctract to C:\temp (or some other variant). My questions are:

• Does the service pack installer use environments variables to extract temporary files (%TEMP%)?
• Is 4.6 GB enough space for a post SP1 install if the temporary files are routable?
• Are there any installer switches other than what's shown on TechNet that could assist in this issue?

As a side, I have tried other options like shrinking the bigger, application partition (D:), but that only alots space AFTER that partition which keeps the OS partition from being able to take advantage of the freed up space on the volume. Also, I am not currently at the station to try this, but it would be nice to know if this worth trying before hand. Thanks!

First, not sure if this question belongs here or SU, so please advice accordingly before wildly down-voting or blasting me.

We have a UPS unit for which we recently configured to work on our network. The UPS unit uses an AP9606 network card, but also has what looks to be a serial port for terminal use (putty is awesome). I am NOT familiar with the latter. Long story short, I was able to configure network adapter using telnet. All was good.

For whatever reason, when we reboot our machine that we had configured for auto-shutdown with our UPS unit, the NIC on the UPS seemingly just dropped it's IP configuration (still trying to figure that one out). Ever since, any attempt trying to make contact with the NIC fails.

Steps attempted thus far:

• I did manual arp entry to reach out to as per these instructions.
• Hit the reset button, and the reattempted the previous step.
• Ran WireShark while attempting previous steps to see if the NIC's MAC or IP appeared anywhere for ARP requests.

The only thing that seperates me from the UPS unit is 48p switch, so there shouldn't be any network filtering within the same subnet. I don't have any way of telling if the card is just wnt bad, or if I really have to attempt the serial as these instructions. Because we inhereted the UPS unit, this smart-signalling cable is nowhere to be found. However, I have here in hand a Cisco YC Cable that looks like it could work, but I am having hard time trying to find the wire configuration to see if they would match up. OTOH, getting this APC cable would also mean I would have to find an antiquated computer that also has a serial port.

The other day, we notice a terrible burning smell coming out of the server room. Long story short, it ended up being one of the battery modules that was burning up in the UPS unit, but it took a good couple of hours before we were able to figure it out. The main reason we were able to figure it out is that the UPS display finally showed that the module needed to be replaced.

Here was the problem: the whole room was filled with the smell. Doing a sniff test was very difficult because the smell had infiltrated everything (not to mention it made us light headed). We almost mistakenly took our production database server down because it's where the smell was the strongest. The vitals appeared to be ok (CPU temps showed 60 degrees C, and fan speeds ok), but we weren't sure. It just so happened that the battery module that burnt up was about the same height as the server on the rack and only 3 ft away. Had this been a real emergency, we would have failed miserably.

Realistically, the chances that actual server hardware is burning up is a fairly rare occurrence and most of the time we'll be looking at the UPS the culprit. But with several racks with several pieces of equipment, it can quickly become a guessing game. How does one quickly and accurately determine what piece of equipment is actually burning up? I realize this question is highly dependent on the environment variables such as room size, ventilation, location, etc, but any input would be appreciated.

You know, you see pictures like below and sort of chuckle until you actually have to deal with it.

I have just inherited something that looks like the picture below. The culture of the organization does not tolerate down time very well, yet I have been tasked to 'clean it up'. The network functions as it is, and there doesn't seem to be rush to get it done, but I will have to tackle the bear at some point. I get the ugly eye when I mention anything about weekends.

So my question goes, is there sort of a structured approach to this problem?

My Ideas thus far:

• Label, Label, Label
• Make up my patch cables of desired length ahead of time
• Do each subnet at a time (appears that each subnet are for different physical locations)
• Replace one cable at a time for each subnet
• It's easier to get forgiveness than permision?

I realize how some might think this isn't exactly constructive, buuuut, I was wondering how come you can't resolve com, org, us, ru, or any other top level domain? I am taking this is as a learning exercise because there might be some holes in my understanding of how DNS works. For example, I tried;

nslookup com
Server:    dns.server.com
Address:   123.123.123.123

*** dns.server.com cant find com: Non-existent domain

I always thought that all other sites under the .com top level domain depended on the existence of an actual domain name called com. At the very least, I thought it kept track of existing domains under the .com domain. What am I missing?

When I quit psql after setting up a new role, psql now complains on exit;

Sessions still open, not unmounting

Doing a quick google search didn't reveal anything of value in regards to this msg. What does it mean and should I do anything about it?

EDIT

This is a setup on Ubuntu Server 12.04 32 with lvm encryption on file system.

Say I need hand write some queries in the console, what's the most efficient way of executing multiline queries like CREATE TABLE statements?

I am used to using Microsoft Management Studio, but I now find myself having to learn about PostgreSQL on the fly.

I suppose this is more of a house keeping question, but here it goes.

If I create a backup file of my index.html called index.html.bak, is it possible that someone from the outside using http on my apache2 server is able to list the contents of my /var/www directory? I currently know no method of doing this, but this could be due to my lack of experience in this area. Should I store files that need not to be in view somewhere else?

Currently, the only feasible way I can think that someone might discover the file is if there was an explicit link somewhere pointing to the file. How visible is my web directory?

Ive seen tons of examples where a & follows the end of a command string, but I can't seem to find an explanation on what it does. It's not even in nohup's man page. Is this a shell thing?

Either using & or not, I find that any process ran with nohup seems to exhibit immunity to any hangup signal.

I thought that I had this under control before. But for some reason during our last email marketing promo, I start receiving from our mass email client (built in house)..

The message could not be sent to the SMTP server. The transport error code is 0x800ccc67. The server repsonse was 421 4.3.2 The maximum number of concurrent connections has exceeded a limit, closing transmission channel

again. There's several places I've checked to make sure that wouldn't be an issue. First I checked that receive connector was set to receive an adequate number of connections on our relay connector (1000 connections). Then, I would later find out about Throttling Policies. I created one and set all the properties I knew to set in terms of the policy following properties to 1000; EWSMaxConcurrency, OWAMaxConcurrency, CPAMaxConcurrency, and CPAMaxConcurrency. Still, the email client starts receiving the error shortly after 100 has been sent and takes about 15-30 seconds. The process is then repeatable, but still the error gets received at the same spot everytime.

Is there a rate setting that I am missing? Was there a windows update that I missed looking at? Should the software have it's own throttling feature?

Does bind9 keep track of DNS entried for each new node that is added to the local network like Windows Server? Or will I have to add a forward and reverse entry manually for each node?

The first thing I see wrong is that its a recursion problem. But I'm not sure where the problems lie in my reverse lookup file. ns should report back as ns.example.com but instead getting ns.example.com.ns. Of course it wouldn't find any entries for that name because there isn't one, nor is it supposed to.

Here's my reverse file:

$TTL    86400
@       IN      SOA     ns.example.com root.example.com. (
                              16071990          ; Serial
                         3600           ; Refresh
                          1800          ; Retry
                        604800          ; Expire
                         86400  ; Minimum TTL
)

@       IN      NS      ns.example.com

It's not extraordinarily complicated. What my question is, what other files affect the output for named-checkzone when checking a name against the revers file?

So, I've set up a few Win Servs in my time and always did the .local thing when there was a router that sepearated my internal from external networks. Now that I'm setting up an *nix box for the first time, does this concept still apply? Do I still want my FQDNs (/etc/hostname) to show .local or .com for all my machines (mixed: linux servers, win workstations) inside of my network.

This question comes in context of always having Active Directory hold my hand every step of the way, where now I'm setting up an DNS machine manually.

So, I made a bunch of my users mad today when they all the sudden couldn't get their email, printers, or network shares because I inadvertently restarted our Exchange server while working on some changes. How did it happen? Automatic updates insisted on poping up with a window to restart at wrong place at the wrong time. I went to click a user with Active Directory, and there popped up the restart message just as soon as I clicked.

I've done ok to avoid the prompt in the past, but now I'm ready to do something about. Is there a way to suppress the popup window asking to restart?

So, we are trying to push out the full .Net Framework 4 to all out client workstations within an Active Directory environment via the login batch file in the SYSVOL folder. I added the following command:

\\server\documents\dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64 /q /norestart

Works like a charm in terms of sielent initializing in the background when a user logs in. However, I noticed it wasn't installing on some our lesser privelaged machines. Sure enough, when running the intaller, it reports "Blocking Issues" and says "You do not have sufficient privileges to complete the operations for all user of the computer." I'm open to other ideas, but this would seem the simplest if it is possible.

There's plenty of administration literature out there how to properly manage Windows servers. But in dealing with real life, things don't always occur like you want them to. In Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Administrator's Companion, out of 1400+ pages, theres only one page that I could find when it comes up setting up additional domain controlers. They make it sound seemless and don't reveal a whole lot on what happens if "peer" DC's are unable to replicate.

Down to the specific issue at hand, we had a DC go down about a month ago due to a bad RAID controller. There was nothing critical that waranted imediate attention, so bringing it back up got put on the back burner. A month later, we get the DC back up and running and everyting seemed ok. The next day, nobody is able to logon complaining that the "user does not exist" or "unable to establish a trust relationship". Knowing that I had just put the downed DC back on the network, I immediately took it back off the network and had everybody restart the workstations. After that, exchange was fine, shares became available, and everybody was able to log in. After doing some event log swimming, it would appear that everything started due to replication issues on the SYSVOL. I've read where you can force replication, but that would mean putting it back on the network. I am afraid to put the DC back on the network in fear that something else could go wrong. So, what other issues could one expect to run into where two DC's are unreplicated for over a month?

So we have a mixed node set on our network with Win XP Pro, Win 7 Pro, Ubuntu 11.04, Win 2k3 Server Std, etc all within in an Active Directory Environment. We also have network printers that are shared out via servers at each site where ultimately each site has a different subnet (Site 1: 132.98.1.x/24, Site 2: 132.98.2.x/24, etc with a subnet mask if 255.255.255.0). However, the few Win 7 Pro machines we have error out when trying to connect. With our Win XP machines in site 1, there are no issues connecting to the printers at site 2. The error reads exactly as follows:

"Windows couldn't connect to the printer. Check the printer name and try again. If this is a network printer, make sure the printer is turned on, and what the printer address is correct."

Other Important Details

• Windows firewall is turned off
• The network location is set to Work for Win 7 machines
• Other network related programs (WinVNC, FTP, Etc) do work between sites
• Back-door access to remote directories does not work (ex: \\132.98.2.100\C$) in differeing subnets
• Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 is installed on ALL machines
• Connection to network printers does work within the same subnet.
• Subnets connected via Cisco routers on 192.168.1.0/24
• Routers are unrestricted between sites

My hunch is that theres an authentication issue, but not sure where to start. How can I get connected to a network printer in a different subnet with Windows 7 Professional?

As the question states, is it possible to have more than one Exchange service serving the same domain for a single store? Is clustering required or is it like Active Directory (just promote and add to the domain).

This question has server standard in mind (not enterprise or data center where clustering is possible).

If this is possible, what steps should I take to make this happen? The benefit I am looking for is replication and fault tolerance (take one of the two servers down, but still have service available).

So, I'm looking at a bare metal restore situation with my current setup. Not sure if this is possible, but looking at a hypothetical restore path to bounce off of with some Server Fault gurus ;).

As of right now, our DC currently hosts our Exchange 03 services along with some IIS websites. We are currently using Backup Exec 11d to do our backups. It's on a weekly rotation with a full backup performed every night. If I find that we have catastrophic OS failure (putting me in the same place as if I were doing a bare metal restore), I will not be able to get back to point of operation (at least not easily).

I'm thinking that creating an image (using Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image) of the system would give me the base needed to get back to where we were. Even if the image gets to be 6 months old, as long backups were being performed to point of failure, the image could be reloaded and a restore of the last backup could be performed only putting us a day out from the point failure. Are there any flaws to this thinking?

What got me thinking along these lines in the first place is that while doing an inventory of all our software media, it would turn out we are missing quite a few disks in order to build a box from scratch that provides the same services (no Exchange 03 disks, no BackupExec 11d disks, no Windows Server 03 VLK). I am currently addressing this issue, but in the mean time, I need a plan for recovery. Any insight is appreciated.

I am quite new to Exchange in general. I have done some server administration, but never with an Exchange box. Can someone point me in a direction that will give me a good overview and a set of best practices? I inherited a box with Exchange on it and works great all on its own, but would not know where to begin to start fixing it if something went wrong (gotta love technet). Ultimately, I am looking at this from a disaster recovery standpoint. Worse case scenario, If I have to build the box from the bottom, how to I get back up and running. Any insight would be appreciated.