The hosting venue has changed to serve you better.
While staging a clustered Hyper-V environment this week, I ran into a head-scratching issue. After provisioning a few LUNs, masking them, and adding them as available storage to Failover Clustering, I began setting up the virtual machines on one of my cluster nodes.… [ Continue reading ]
I recently found myself in the position of having to expand a virtual disk on a Dell MD3000i. The Dell MD3000i is a great entry-point SAN, but the GUI lacks some of the functions that you think would be there (such as online volume growth).… [ Continue reading ]
I recently found myself in a place where I had misspelled the name of a company during one of the SBS Setup Wizards and could not find where to change it.
The file that needs to be modified is C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Data\RWWConfig.xml… [ Continue reading ]
Dell has this great NAS device that runs Windows 2008 Storage Server Standard–the NX3000. The only problem is that Dell treats it like an “appliance,” meaning you can’t partition it the way you want. I recently ordered two with 6x1TB drives and wanted to deploy DPM to them.… [ Continue reading ]
This morning, I found myself in the unfortunate circumstance of the dreaded 0xc0190036 error. There is not a lot of information about this particular error code. It is, in fact, related to inaccessible or corrupt files.
During an update process, many files are flagged for replacement during the next system boot–that way, the system can keep running until the next convenient restart.… [ Continue reading ]
For any of you that use Postini for email services, setting up reinjection for the receive connectors in Exchange 2007 is a lot more work than allowing connection and relay through a vSMTP server in Exchange 2003.
Exchange 2007 has a lot of great features, such as the uber-powerful Exchange Management Shell.… [ Continue reading ]
LDIFDE is an oldie-but-goodie tool for finding specific information in Active Directory. If you know the name of the attribute that contains the data you’re looking for, you can construct a pretty powerful query.
For example, you can search for all computers in the Active Directory domain mydomain.com:… [ Continue reading ]
We have a customer with an IIS 6.0 application that crashes randomly–either the Application Pool worker process runs the server out of memory or hangs.
If you have a need to recycle the Application Pool between scheduled maintenance intervals, there are a couple of available solutions.… [ Continue reading ]
I recently found myself in a spot where I needed to troubleshoot a delegate issue–a user was set as a delegate but no longer was with the company and didn’t have a mailbox anymore, so periodic NDRs were being generated for mail destined for the delegate.… [ Continue reading ]
Recently, we renumbered a client’s network to reduce broadcast traffic and introduced two new redundant internet connections. Everything seemed fine in the initial testing, and we all went home.
The next day, when we were sifting through the fallout tickets, there was a recurring theme–Windows Mobile devices were no longer synchronizing.… [ Continue reading ]
A customer approached me with a some puzzling issues. They noticed a bunch of 1053 and 1054 Userenv errors in their event logs on their virtual machines. 1053 and 1054 error messages have very similar wording:
1053 – Windows cannot determine the user or computer name.… [ Continue reading ]
From time to time, many administrators have found themselves faced with a corrupt WMI repository. Here’s a quick fix. Copy/paste into a .bat file and run on the affected computer.
NET STOP WINMGMT /y RD /S /Q C:\Windows\system32\wbem\Repository %windir%\system32\rundll32 wbemupgd,UpgradeRepository FOR %%i in (%windir%\system32\wbem\*.dll)… [ Continue reading ]
Blue screens are no fun. Trying to resolve them without the proper tools can be even less fun.
In my experience, a large percentage of blue screens are the result of some poorly-tested or incompatible third-party device drivers. For the desktop crowd, a round up of the usual suspects includes scanner, printer, and video drivers.… [ Continue reading ]
For anyone who manages an Active Directory environment, you’ve undoubtedly come to understand the need for keeping time in sync. In short, you won’t be able to log in if the local computer time has more than 5 minutes difference than the logon server.… [ Continue reading ]