Chris May

This article from Petri is pretty nice for showing you quickly and simply how to do basic shadow copy tasks:

http://www.petri.co.il/how_to_use_the_shadow_copy_client.htm

Very useful if you need to explain the process to someone.

 

On Dell machines running Windows Server 2003 they are nice enough to stick an ugly bitmap on your background.  So when you VPN and RDP into the server, you get to sit and wait as it paints this image:

Thankfully, you can remove it.

Just use regedit and navigate to:

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop

Then delete the key for WallPaper.

It's that simple!

 

Microsoft appears to be ready to offer a windows based service similar to Amazon's ec2.

I am not sure that I would make much use of this type of service, as I am looking for something more like GoGrid or Mosso (which I wrote about a few days ago).

Should prove to be very interesting...

In the next 72 hours, you expect the new campaign to generate 10x more traffic than you have had in the last 72 days.  How do you scale to deal with this problem?

Do you buy more servers?

A few companies are starting to offer instant scalability for needs like this.  Amazon has been doing this for a while with their web services, but it isn't very useful for people who need the site to be running 24x7 (and it isn't very MS friendly).  But now there are other companies coming into play to provide the service I am talking about.

https://www.gogrid.com/

and

http://www.mosso.com/

Both offer the ability to instantly scale up your infrastructure as needed.  You can buy more CPU cycles, storage space, bandwidth etc, for a short time period.

This may (or may not) be ready for prime time, but it an interesting development for sure!

With Windows Servers, you can setup a cluster using built in Network Load Balancing.

The interesting thing about doing load balancing via software, is that once you get up around 4-5 servers, you stop gaining in performance when you add new machines, because of the added overhead associated with mainting N number of new relationships between the servers.

Also, if you use NLB and you set them up to not use any type of server affinity (i.e. a users request might hit any of the servers at any time) you will pay a serious penality if you are using SSL because each new request to a new server will require a new negoation of the SSL credentials.

I had one of my clients call me today with this message showing up on their production server after the power went out (big storm in the area):

17xx-Controller in lock up State

The server is old, and so I started to think worst case scenarios:  the controller probably died, the data is probably lost, backups probably don't have everything, we are going to need a temp server, we are going to need a new production server etc.

Thankfully, this did not come to fruition, so if you get this error message on your Proliant, there may be some hope.

Go into the setup menu for the raid controller and you should be able to clear out the lock state simply by saving the settings.

Of course if your controller really did die, then this won't help you.

We had a problem last night as we attempted to update our site certificate on our NLB website.

We have 2 machines in the cluster, and after updating the certificate on both of them, the site stopped responding over https.

We spent a LOT of time trying to figure out what was wrong with our new certificate, or the way we had set it up.

In the end, it turned out that that when we updated the certificate, it AUTOMATICALLY removed the NLB IP address from the IPs that are listening for port 443. 

So the result was that each server would respond over SSL on it's own, but when you tried to access the cluster by it's IP address over SSL, there would be no response.

It was really easy to fix, but a real pain to find. 

I have been getting this error in the event log of one of my clients servers:

Access to performance data was denied to UserName as attempted from C:\WINNT\System32\WinMgmt.exe

I first tried this:

Open the "Computer Management" app
Expand the "Services and Applications" section
Right-click the "WMI Control" entry & select "Properties"
Go to the "Security" tab
Expand the "Root" node and then select the "WMI" node
Click the "Security" button
Add the account & give it access

That didn't work, so I found another suggestion:

1. Run regedt32
2. Select the key SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib
3. From the menu select 'Security/Permissions'
4. Add the Internet Guest Account granting only 'read' permission

In case that doesn't work, here are some more articles on the subject

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/226494

http://www.eventid.net/display.asp?eventid=1000&eventno=1700&source=Perflib&phase=1

 

FreeNAS allows you to quickly convert an old PC into a NAS hosting machine for extra storage.

I have been researching ways to reset a domain admin password for a client who forgot what they typed in when they set the password.

Most password crackers work only on local accounts, not for anything on a domain.  It seems like the way to go about this is to reset the local admin account, then login using Directory Service Recovery Mode to reset the domain admin account.

Here are some of the articles I have been reading:

http://www.jms1.net/nt-unlock.shtml  <-- this idiot won't let you view his pages if you are running IE, so use firebox, but again, that's just stupid

http://www.nobodix.org/seb/win2003_adminpass.html

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

http://www.loginrecovery.com/about.html

http://www.petri.co.il/reset_domain_admin_password_in_windows_server_2003_ad.htm

 

Slashdot is running an Ask /. article on alternatives to Citrix.

At Walsh, we run a lot of applications over Citrix, mostly apps that really aren't meant to be run remotely, to allow remote users to run them against databases that are stored in our main offices.

MSi is interested in a solution such as this as well but for more daily operations than specific application access.

The details of my contract with Dell might be here somewhere. They are clueless. They said they will mail the details because they don't know what their webiste's address is. Man they are dumb. www.dellcustomer.com? Nope. www.dellcustomerservice.com? Nope... Idiots.