Posts from 2012

Learning Styles from Scott Lowe

Richard Green on

I had the privilege of attending VMUG UK at the National Motorcycle Museum this week for the second year running. I felt like I got more out of it this year, in part due to the fact that I wasn’t spending half the time overwhelmed by attending my first proper IT conference (albeit a local free one).

One of the interesting things to come out of it for me was the closing keynote from Scott Lowe, entitled “Stay Sharp and Relevant in IT”. During this keynote, Scott talks about topics he feels are relevant to IT Pro’s learning over the next twelve months in order for them to stay relevant. What was interesting for me wasn’t actually the subject matters we defined, but the chatter before it surrounding learning.

All my IT life, I’ve studied and obtained my certifications predominantly using bookings and self-study, a hard thing to do for someone who’s never really liked reading too much. I took some time last night to take some online tests and assessments to try and calculate my learning style, and wow: it’s amazing how you can find yourself in printed verse doing these tests.

Based on the results of about four or five different tests I took, I come out every time as a kinesthetic learner. This means that I learn best from the act of doing with hands-on interaction, touching things. When I think about how I go by my daily life and compare the information online relating to kinesthetic learning it just all fits into place.

Take this report at Dirjournal for example (http://www.dirjournal.com/guides/study-tips-for-kinesthetic-learners/). They say that kinesthetic learners are likely to fidget and can’t sit still for long periods and when forced to do so, often resort to tapping or bouncing their feet and legs and like to fiddle and play with inanimate objects like pens or pencils when in classes. These two attributes alone describe exactly my behaviour when at work at my desk or when in classes learning new topics. Kinesthetic learners also find it hard to read materials and are more attracted to reading or looking and content when it is visually appealing which explains my passion for good design and striking documentation and materials.

So now that I’ve identified how I learn best and what I should be doing to aid my learning, I think it’s time to cut back on the books and get my hands dirty with more home labs and play time, and hopefully, that will give me the motivation and inspiration to learn more, faster and to be a better IT Pro.

I want to thank Scott for his keynote at VMUG for making me think to stop and asses my learning style, identify it and to help me to help myself. Thanks Scott 🙂

Windows Home Server 2011 Cross Subnet Client Computer Backup

Richard Green on

Windows Home Server 2011 is a great product for home use, but it’s design is centred around homes with very basic single subnet flat networks.

A lot of home networking devices shipping these days give you the ability to separate your wired network and wireless network into separate VLANs, such as Linksys products which by use 192.168.1.1 for the wired network and 192.168.2.1 for the wireless network by default when the feature is enabled, or there are geeks like me who run their homes like a miniature enterprise with router-on-a-stick topologies or even vast OSI Layer 3 switched networks.

This causes problems for Windows Home Server 2011 Connectors installed on your client computers running Windows XP, 7, 8 or Macs as out of the box, they can’t communicate with the Home Server and complete their daily scheduled backup jobs leaving you unprotected.

Fortunately, this is fixed very easily with a quick Remote Desktop onto the server. It’s wise to point out now that Microsoft don’t support this modification, however it’s such a small change that I would argue Microsoft would be crazy to deny support for an end-user based on the change and it would be very easy to change back to default if they did complain.

  1. Start a Remote Desktop Services session to the server and logon as the Home Server Administrator account.
    (If you are unsure of how to do this, then you can find this elsewhere online. Anyone unsure of using Remote Desktop probably isn’t a great candidate for making firewall configuration changes either).
  2. From the remote session, open Windows Firewall with Advanced Security from Control Panel Administrative Tools.
  3. Scroll through the list of rules until you find the block listing the following services:
    Windows Server Certificate Service
    Windows Server Client Computer Backup
    Windows Server Connect Computer Web Site
    Windows Server Discovery
    Windows Server Mac Web Service
    Windows Server Provider Framework
  4. For each of these services, open the properties, and select the Scope tab.
  5. If you are unsure of the address boundaries of your subnets, then the easiest thing is to change this from Remote IP Address Local Subnet to Remote IP Address Any IP Address, although I don’t recommend this configuration.
  6. If you know the address boundaries of your subnets, then click the Add button and add either the slash notation for the subnet address in the top box, or select This IP Address Range and enter your starting and ending addresses.
    In my case, I added the slash notation of the subnet for my wireless network (eg. 192.168.2.1/24).
  7. Once you have updated the scope, select theOKbutton to commit the change. No server restart, client computer restart or anything else is required to make it work. The server will simply now start accepting connections from the addresses you specified.

It’s worth noting that this change will also now allow you to join clients to the Home Server from your wireless subnet as again, by default, I found you had to resort to a physical connection to get the connector client installed as it wasn’t able to detect the Home Server otherwise.

Missing Patches and Updates in SharePoint

Richard Green on

I drafted this post quite a while ago, but I’ve only just got around to completing it and posting it.

Recently, I was completing some out of hours work to apply the August 2012 Cumulative Update to our production SharePoint 2010 SP1 environment.

After completing the installation of the SharePoint 2010 Foundation and SharePoint Server 2010 update packages, I tried to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard to initiate the timer job that upgrades the database schema, and it wouldn’t run, reporting that one of the servers was missing the updates that I had just installed.

When searching for the answer, I came across SharePoint Management Shell Cmdlet Get-SPProduct -Local. This useful little Cmdlet for PowerShell forces the local installation of SharePoint to rescan all of it’s installed components and by the looks of it, where needed, updates the SharePoint_Config database with the installed updates for the server. Before running the Cmdlet, I did an iisreset /noforce. Doing this ensures that the web applications are in a suitable state and reloaded with all the latest files.

After running these two commands, running the SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard successfully validated the servers and allowed the wizard to complete.

Windows 8 Battery Life

Richard Green on

I wanted to get a quick post out there regarding Windows 8 battery life.

I’ve been at a meeting today where I’ve been using my Windows 8 Lenovo X220. The machine has the standard Lenovo hard disk (and not an SSD like some of my other machines) and has the standard 6 cell battery.

I left the house with this morning with about 80% battery, used the laptop for about four hours for note taking with OneNote 2013 and now I’m at home, I’ve still got 50% battery.

That’s some pretty amazing consumption if you ask me. Give me a 9 cell extended battery and an SSD to replace the rotating disk, and I think I could quite easily get a full days’ compute out of this machine.

SQL Single User Mode Logon Failed

Richard Green on

Ran into an issue today with one of our SQL instances where we needed to bring it up in Single User mode to recover the sysadmin role, however every time we tried to login we got the fateful “Only one administrator can connect at this time. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18461)” error.

Found this great page on MSDN which you should pay close attention to if you are in a clustered environment as we are:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188236.aspx

The important thing to note is that the cluster resource .dll will allows get the first and only connection before you have a hope in hell of getting it. The way around this is to start the MSSQL$INSTANCENAME using the net start command manually on one of the nodes and not using the Failover Cluster Manager.

This will allow you to use sqlcmd to generate the login you need to regain access.

Enjoy 😉

Installing RSAT on Non-US Windows 8

Richard Green on

I want to dedicate this post to Bartek Bielawski who has already blogged the solution to this problem. I used the en-GB build of Windows 8 to build my desktop and a few other machines and have been failing to get the RSAT for Windows 8 RTM to install. Bartek found the issue to be caused by the fact that you can only install the RSAT tools on machines whereby the en-US language pack is installed.

His post with how he found the answer is at http://becomelotr.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/rsat-on-windows-8-works-but-fails/.

To resolve the problem, I have downloaded the Windows 8 Multi Language x64 DVD, and installed the en-US language pack from it, which now begs the question, what is the difference and benefit of running the localized build if you have to install the en-US pack anyway?

 

Configuring VMware Data Protection Appliance (VDP)

Richard Green on

Yesterday, I had the chance to stand up a VMware Data Protection (VDP) appliance virtual machine. This is the replacement for VDR in vSphere 5.0 and upwards and is based on the EMC Avamar product.

When configuring the VDP appliance for the first time using the https://hostname:9543/vdp-configure URL, you are asked for credentials to connect to vCenter. The interface tells you that this is used to register with vCenter, but what it doesn’t tell you is that this account is actually then used for on-going access to vCenter and creating and deleting the snapshots on the VMs it is backing up. Therefore, make sure you use a service account and not your own account.

There is also a requirement for this account to be directly permissioned in vCenter and not via a nested group membership, so make sure you do this before attempting the registration.

SQL Server Setup Failure Error Code 0x84B10001

Richard Green on

Picture a scenario. You have a SQL Server failover cluster, with one or more nodes in the cluster, and the databases for your instances are presented via remote storage such as Fibre Channel or iSCSI.

When trying to install SQL 2008 R2 updates, including Cumulative Updates and Service Packs using the application .exe files downloaded from Microsoft (SQLServer2008R2SP1-KB528583-x64-ENU.exe  for example), the first thing that happens after launch is that the executable extracts the files required to drive, by default, with the largest percentage of free disk space.

Once the files have been extracted, the install wizard will start. After clicking Next, Next, Update through the wizard, the first thing the installer does is to take the SQL Server and the whole cluster resource group offline to allow it to be serviced. If the disk on which your SQL databases exist happens to be the drive with the most free space, the drive where the files where just extracted to, this drive will actually now be offline and will cause the installation to fail with the following error:

Cannot execute a program. The command being executed was “C:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFramework64v2.0.50727csc.exe” /noconfig /fullpaths @ “C:UsersUsernameAppDataLocalTemp6xb11xcu.cmdline”.

Error Code 0x84B10001.

The resolution to this problem is to bring the clustered disk resource online using the Failover Cluster Manager, and copy of the GUID folder which was generated by the extraction process to a local disk, or a remote storage disk which you are not servicing with the installer. I found that you need to copy the files to the local disk path before you click OK on the error message as once the update wizard terminates, it removes the temporary files.

Error 0x84B10001 can actually be initiated by other problems, however the knowledge base article at Microsoft Support advises that these other issues are resolved in a Pre-SP1 update for SQL Server 2008 R2.

KMS Activating Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8

Richard Green on

In our environment, we have a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual guest serving as our KMS host. With the recent RTM releases of Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, we wanted to be able to activate our hosts and guests using KMS. If you try to activate one of these new Windows editions using a Windows Server 2008 R2 KMS host, then you will likely encounter the following error:

Error: 0xC004F050 The Software Licensing Service reported that the product key is invalid.

Luckily, Microsoft have released an update for the Windows Server 2008 R2 KMS host services to support the application of new KMS keys and to accept the KMS activation requests from these operating systems. You can download the update from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2691586/EN-US and register to receive the hotfix.

Something you should note which I ran into which is not explicitly defined in the article is that this update only applies to Windows Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1. Trying to apply this update to the RTM release of Windows Server 2008 R2 produces an Windows Update error that this update is not applicable to this system.

After applying the SP1 update to the KMS host, I was able to install the update, and after a reboot, we were nearly ready to start activating. The final step is to update the KMS key, which is something not terribly well explained on the web either. You will have a KMS host key if you are a Microsoft Volume License customer, and you will have a Windows 8 or a Windows Server 2012 KMS key if you subscribe to Software Assurance for the products.

If you subscribe to Software Assurance for Windows 7 client operating systems, but not for Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2, then you will receive a Windows 8 KMS key via your Volume License Servicing Center, but not a Windows Server 2012 KMS key. If you subscribe to Software Assurance for Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 then you will receive a Windows Server 2012 KMS key via your Volume License Servicing Center. One thing you need to be aware of regarding KMS is how the down-level clients are licensed.

On a KMS host, you can only apply one license key. If you install a Windows 8 KMS key, then you will be able to activate Windows Vista, 7 and 8 clients, but will not be able to activate any edition of any server operating system. In you install a Windows Server 2012 KMS key, then you will be able to activate any combination of Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, 7 and 8.

In my scenario, our VLSC site showed a KMS key for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, so I used the Windows Server 2012 key. On the KMS host, first uninstall the old KMS key using the following command:

cscript slmgr.vbs -upk

You will receive a message that the key was successfully uninstalled, after which you can enter the new key.

cscript slmgr.vbs -ipk XYZXY-XYZXY-XYZXY-XYZXY-XYZXY

You should now receive a notification that the key was successfully installed onto the server. Lastly, you need to activate the key which requires going out to the Microsoft activation service, so if you use a proxy server for internet access, be sure that you allow this user and host combination to do that.

cscript slmgr.vbs -ato

Once all the above was complete, I entered the KMS client key for Windows 8 onto my Windows 8 Enterprise desktop and it successfully activated, as did a Windows Server 2012 Datacenter virtual machine which I deployed a couple of days ago. If you need the KMS client keys to get you back to a KMS state after you may have MAK activated your machines to get you up and running, you can get them from the TechNet page at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj612867.aspx.