Practical Technology

Seems to have a lot of dependencies! Installing on a bare-bones 2008 x64 VM, and it requires: - Schema extensions (warning) - WSUS SDK on site server (warning) (needs WSUS, IIS (app/web), .net 3.0, SQL 2008 SP2, Report Viewer 2005 - MS Remote Differential Compression library registered (Features) - SQL server sysadmin rights (needed to add the current user to the SQL installation with sysadmin permisson) - SMS provider communication - IIS not running (Features) - BITS installed/enabled (Features) - WebDAV installed/enabled ( http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1621 ) Update: Finally able to finish this. After the debacle with Microsoft and AD replication, it's working great so far. I'll be looking at building the Office2007 package this afternoon. ( Refs here ) Update: Turns out if you don't extend the schema (we were hoping to avoid that), then it just doesn't work as it should. So we've extended the schema, rebooted, and we'...

Got a few calls/emails missed while I was out at Transformers 2 - the Exchange 5.5 box filled up!! it reached its 16GB limit, and shut down all mail functions...sheesh! So now the migration is happening now...11:35pmEST, instead of Friday morning. Jeepers! So instead of having 2-3 days to set up SCCM 2007 at their site, I have hours. Ah well, gotta have some excitement!

So, lesson for y'all! When you are running exmerge on an NT box with Exchange 5.5, here's how it works: You give it the list of boxes you want out, and it then exports each box to a PST file wherever you want it to go. The hidden catch is: It removes the data from the Exchange store, and creates a PST file! So say you just want to test the utility, but not do anything, while it's functioning users are losing Outlook data left right and centre! Crazy fun times. Also, when you try to exmerge a user's mailbox that is larger than 2GB, exmerge crashes. If you restart exmerge, everything you took out prior to that will be overwritten (since you say 'sure, why not start from scratch'), but since you didn't know that exmerge removes the data from the Exchange store, you are effectively deleting all their emails. It's awesome. So then, after you've tried restarting the exmerge process a few times (deleting all users' emails earlier in line than the 2...

This is SO weird. That SQL timeout issue was caused by network timeouts, and it disappeared when we moved the SQL server to another ESX host. However, the issue re-appeared, this time on the host with the vCenter guests... Further analysis reveals this interesting tidbit: 29/06/2009 12:08:29 PM -- Reply from 10.1.0.41: bytes=32 time 29/06/2009 12:08:34 PM -- Request timed out. ... 29/06/2009 12:09:24 PM -- Request timed out. 29/06/2009 12:09:26 PM -- Reply from 10.1.0.41: bytes=32 time=1028ms TTL=128 29/06/2009 12:38:29 PM -- Reply from 10.1.0.41: bytes=32 time 29/06/2009 12:38:35 PM -- Request timed out. ... 29/06/2009 12:39:24 PM -- Request timed out. 29/06/2009 12:39:27 PM -- Reply from 10.1.0.41: bytes=32 time=1445ms TTL=128 29/06/2009 1:08:14 PM -- Reply from 10.1.0.41: bytes=32 time 29/06/2009 1:08:20 PM -- Request timed out. ... 29/06/2009 1:09:09 PM -- Request timed out. 29/06/2009 1:09:12 PM -- Reply from 10.1.0.41: bytes=32 time=1772ms TTL=128 29/06/2009 1:38:27 PM -- Rep...

While troubleshooting, I've had the RDP connection drop out on me a few times, while the VM console is still relatively active. After this happening the last time I tried pinging it, and discovered that it was unreachable - timed out. I'm not sure how to get a ping log done with a timestamp without scripting, so for now we're going to try another VMnic on a different adapter, but same network. We'll give it the same IP and disable the old one. Ok, that's done - new vmnic on a different adapter, but same IP setup. I'm running another ping log. The last one had 5 instances of 10-20 request timed outs over three hours...should know more in an hour or two. Well it's still dropping the connection. So, we need to narrow the problem down to: VMware or the guest OS. I now have pinglogs going to all the guests on that ESX server, so if I see timeouts on all the VMs, then we know it's VMware, and if no timeouts occur, then we know it's SQL4 being silly....

We have been having GP (on the mentioned SQL4 box) heck over the last week or so, probably caused by all the network changes all at once, but who knows, so I'm digging! Clients are fed up with massive lag, errors, and general unusability. Up until a week ago or so, things were just peachy. While troubleshooting SQL connection issues, I've come across about 1000 entries in the netlogon.log from the past three days like this: 06/23 23:30:02 [LOGON] ORTHOTIC: SamLogon: Transitive Network logon of orthotic\sqlsvc from EXCHANGE (via EXCHANGE) Returns 0xC000006A 6A, recall, being bad password, and the account shows as locked out in the adlockout tool. So a service is trying to access something on Exchange from Exchange...weird. I took a look at one of the SQL boxes, and it uses this sqlsvc account for its SQL services. The security log in SQL shows no failed logon attempts. The event log is showing W32time warnings however - might not be that important - the clock is only off by...

SO. LAME. We've been having issues for the last week because dcpromo was failing across the VPN. We thought it was the firewall causing the problem, so we got a completely new firewall - no dice. We then tried a VPN within the site-to-site VPN, and it worked! Really weird. Dan checked the ports using portquery, and they matched up just fine, no errors there. But when we did a dcpromo from a remote site in, the dcpromo would fail at the replication stage - it would time out and say 'RPC call ended'. Keep in mind this machine was able to join the domain just fine. So while on hold with Microsoft, we check the error logs, and nothing shows up. Then Dan starts checking the network settings, and BOOM! Lo and behold the DCs in our site have IPv6 disabled, and the server we're trying to bring up to DC status HAS IPv6 enabled!!! Disabled it, tried the dcpromo again, worked! It was promoted in 30 seconds...used to take 5 minutes to time out. When the lady came back to i...