So my System Center (sic) alert logs are constantly being bombarded with
In PerfDataSource, could not find counter Process, Working Set, IEXPLORE* in Snapshot. Unable to submit Performance value. Module will not be unloaded..........
It appears it’s a well known fault with an equally well known workaround, a few clicks of the mouse and it’s all quiet on the SCE front!
Data Protection Manager (DPM) relies heavily on the Virtual Disk Service (vds.exe).
As your backup sizes grow and uptime increases it’s not unusal for VDS to consume all free memory, adding more RAM to the DPM server just delays the inevitable.
With a bit of hunting I found the following symptoms and related hotfix 958387.
A memory leak occurs in the Virtual Disk Service when an application uses the Virtual Disk Service to enumerate disk resources. In this scenario, you notice that the memory consumption of the Virtual Disk Service (Vds.exe) increases continually.
So far so good… here’s hoping the issue is long gone
No matter what the MS documentatation states with regards to DPM agent installer automatically setting firewall rules I had no luck with a remote install on a firewall enabled server.
The workaround is remarkably simple.
1. Disable the firewall on target server
2. Deploy the agent and reboot
3. On the target server in an administrator’s command prompt run C:\Program Files\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\bin\SetDpmServer.exe -dpmServerName <servername>
4. Re-enable the firewall on the target server
Enabling Verbose Logging
Rather than poking in the dark trying to work out the delays you can turn on verbose logging for the userenv process.
Userenv will now log to %systemRoot%\Debug\UserMode
Grab a copy of Policy Reporter from SysPro Soft, this will help you in parsing the log files, alternativley you can open the files in notepad/wordpad and run through them manually
So i got sick of hearing the system beep chiming through the office, luckily there’s a service that can be stopped to bring silence back.
net stop beep
will do the trick for a temporary fix, to stop it permanently just disable the service
sc config beep start= disabled
The process of configuring a SSL certificate has changed between IIS6 and IIS7.
Here is how to create a new AD Domain based SSL certificate and apply it to your virtual site.
Creating the Certificate
Open IIS Manager and select the instance.
Select Server Certificates
I’ve been going through a few headaches with deploying System Centre alongside ISA 2004.
All of my managed servers/computers were coming up with the following status
MODEL: unkown
Last Contacted: not contacted
Deployments and Inventory: error
After a bit of poking around I worked out it’s related to the windows update service.
One one of the workstations I inspected the WindowsUpdate.log file and came across this entry
Server URL = https://systemcentre.foo.local:8531/SimpleAuthWebService/SimpleAuth.asmx
WARNING: GetAuthorizationCookie failure, error = 0×80244021, soap client error = 10, soap error code = 0, HTTP status code = 502
Browsing from the workstation to https://systemcentre.foo.local:8531/SimpleAuthWebService/SimpleAuth.asmx gave me the error
Error Code: 502 Proxy Error. The specified Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) port is not allowed. ISA Server is not configured to allow SSL requests from this port. Most Web browsers use port 443 for SSL requests. (12204)
To get around this, I installed ISA Tunnel Port Editor and added port 8531 to the SSL tunnel range.
I recently used GParted to resize a server 2008 partition, all went swimmingly until I rebooted and was prompted with a Windows Boot Manager error.
File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Status: 0xc0000225
Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt.
The Fix
1. Boot the windows server 2008 cd
2. Select your language
3. Select repair your computer
4. c:\
cd \windows\system32
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot
5. Restart
I have since learned that you can just use shrink volume from within the storage manager.
Something as trivial as setting up a domain controller has become slightly tricky with the lack of a GUI. Normally I wouldn’t bother with deploying server core but i’m keen to keep overheads low on the VMware servers.
Set server name
In a command prompt type:
netdom renamecomputer %computername% /NewName:dc-dev-2
Set IP
Determine the name of the interface to change, more often than not it will be Local Area Connection
netsh interface ipv4 show interfaces
Idx Met MTU State Name
— — —– ———– ——————-
2 10 1500 connected Local Area Connection
1 50 4294967295 connected Loopback Pseudo-Interface 1
Time to change the IP
netsh interface ipv4 set address name=”Local Area Connection” source=static address=192.168.10.11 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.10.254
And set the DNS
netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name=”Local Area Connection” address=192.168.10.18 index=1
Repeat as needed for secondary, tertiary etc, just be sure to increase the index value
Join domain
We return to the netdom command, the trailing asterix will prompt you to type in the password (safer) but you can just hard code it in
netdom join %computername% /domain:blerg.local /userd:Administrator /passwordd:*
Install DHCP and DNS services (optional)
the following lines install DNS and DHCP, handy to have but not essential, really depends on your existing network topology
start /w ocsetup dns-server-core-role
start /w ocsetup dhcpservercore
DCPROMO
To run dcpromo in a GUIless environment you need to create an unattend file
edit unattend.txt
paste in the following
[DCInstall]
UserName=comitfarm\administrator
Password=*
UserDomain=blerg.local
AutoConfigDNS=Yes
ConfirmGc=Yes
RebootOnSuccess=Yes
ReplicaDomainDNSName=blerg.local
ReplicaOrNewDomain=Replica
ReplicationSourceDC=dc.blerg.local
SafeModeAdminPassword=YourPassword!
Run DCPromo
dcpromo /unattend:unattend.txt
you will be prompted to enter the administrator password, upon completion the server will reboot and clear passwords from the unattend.txt file.
If you’re planning on running 2003 and 2008 domain controlers in the same domain you need to update the AD schema on all of your 2003 DC.
To do this pop/map the CD and execute the following
d:\sources\adprep\adprep.exe /forestprep
d:\sources\adprep\adprep.exe /domainprep /gpprep
d:\sources\adprep\adprep.exe /domainprep /rodcPREP