Posted November 18th, 2008 by mattshadbolt
If you are receiving the Windows Event-ID 13042 “Self-Update is not working” errors in your application logs and your clients aren’t receiving their WSUS updates here is the fix.
The problem is more than likely due to the Default Web Site on your WSUS server either being disabled or its port has been changed. Although WSUS creates its own IIS site, it also creates a directory in the Default Web Site called /SelfUpdate. This directory updates clients to use the newest version of WSUS and you guessed it - it requires port 80.
If you have another site running on your WSUS server that needs to use port 80, you will need to move the virtual directory to that site otherwise you will have to change the non-standard site to a different port and start the Default site.
Tags: Event-ID 13042, Self-Update, WSUS
No Responses
Posted November 16th, 2008 by mattshadbolt
I performed my upgrade over the weekend and thought I would post some quick tips on little gotcha’s that you need to know before starting.
- The most important consideration is transferring the VHD files from the old server to the new one. I was upgrading the hardware that the VM’s were running on, so I needed to transfer the VM’s onto a USB hard drive, upgrade the server and move them back.
There are a couple of things to consider. Firstly, large VM’s take AGES to move! So be prepared to sit an wait a long time. Secondly, ensure you have multiple copies of the VM’s. I had a VM become corrupted on a USB drive and it was just luck that I had another copy on my PC.
- Remember to enable DEP (called a bunch of different things in different BIOS versions) in your servers BIOS. Hyper-V will install successfully and you can start to import VM’s - however they won’t start until you have enabled DEP.
- You need to start any Server 2008 VM’s with a Legacy NIC. This is for a couple of reasons: 1. You need to update the HAL on the VM before Server 2008 will recognize the new hardware. 2. You will have access to the VM remote connection via Hyper-V manager but as the VM tools aren’t installed yet you won’t have mouse access to enable the HAL lookup. The only way around these is to start the VM with a Legacy NIC and then run the HAL & VM tools.
- Don’t use VMM to import the VHD files. VMM creates a copy of the VM’s and takes a long time to process. Import the VM’s via the basic Hyper-V manager and then configure the extra settings via VMM.
- Double check the CPU settings. This is important as one of the migrated VM’s was set to use a maximum 25% of a CPU and the server was really slow. It must have just brought across a strange setting from Virtual Server 05.
- Finally, ensure you run Windows Updates on your VM’s after the move. There are a couple of updates that improve the performance of Hyper-V.
I’ve just completed the migration, so if you have any questions regarding the process feel free to add some comments.
Tags: Hyper-V, Migration, Upgrade, Virtual Server 2005 R2, Windows Server 2008
No Responses
Posted November 10th, 2008 by mattshadbolt
Here’s a handy file for remembering all of the default PowerShell Alias commands. These save so much time when working in the shell. Print it out and tape to your cubicle for easy access!
powershellalias
Tags: Alias, PowerShell
No Responses
Posted November 5th, 2008 by mattshadbolt
Firstly, the setup.exe will not run if you are using an installer that doesn’t included Service Pack 1 - even if you 2008 server is fully patched. You will receive an error stating that there are known incompatibility issues with SharePoint Server 2007 and this version of Windows Server. To fix this you need to install SharePoint with the SP1 files included.
Visit http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AD59175C-AD6A-4027-8C2F-DB25322F791B&displaylang=en and download the officeserver2007sp1-kb936984-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe file. (Obviously you will need the x64 file if you are running a 64-bit OS)
Place the file into the Updates folder of the SharePoint 2007 installation path (in my case C:\Server12\x86\Updates\). Now unpack the files contents by running a command line and browsing to the directory. Type:
officeserver2007sp1-kb936984-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract
You will then be prompted for an extract path. Browse to the Updates folder mentioned earlier and unpack the contents into that directory. Basically the original setup.exe file will apply any patches that it can find in that Updates folder.
Now run the original setup.exe file and your installation will run smoothly.
Tags: officeserver2007sp1-kb936984-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe, SharePoint, SharePoint Server 2007, SP1
No Responses
Posted October 30th, 2008 by mattshadbolt
If your email messages are not being delivered - just sitting in the Outbox, it could be due to 2007 resource monitor pausing the delivery due to “insufficient resources”
You can check to see if your server is showing these symptoms by TELNETTing to the localhost on port 25 and attempting to manually deliver a piece of mail. You may receive the “insufficient resources” error.
A quick and dirty way to resolve this error without actually giving the server more resources is to disable the monitoring - this is recommended as a short term fix only.
To disable the Exchange Monitoring:
1. Browse to the EdgeTransport.exe.CONFIG file (normally found at %systemdrive%\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Bin) and open the file in notepad
2. Find the string <add key=”EnableResourceMonitoring” value=”true” />and change the “true” to “false”
3. Now either restart the Exchange services or reboot the server (I like to reboot the server just to be sure!)
Again, this is only a temporary measure - and I would only suggest using it in a lab environment. However if you plan to upgrade your hardware in the short term this trick might just get you though.
Tags: EdgeTransport.exe.CONFIG, Exchange 2007, Exchange Monitoring, localhost
No Responses
Posted October 26th, 2008 by mattshadbolt
If you find that your Exchange 2007 Standby Continuous Replication isn’t working correctly, firstly run the following command from the source server using the Exchange Management Shell (EMS):
Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus - StandbyMachine EXCHANGESERVERNAME
You will then receive the Copy status queues etc. If you receive the following “Suspended” output your replication isn’t working:
There are a couple of commands to restart the replication. Firstly, from the EMS suspend the replication by using:
Suspend-StorageGroupCopy -identity ‘Storage Group Name’ -StandbyMachine EXCHANGESERVERNAME
You will be prompted to confirm - choose Yes. Now restart the replication by using:
Resume-StorageGroupCopy -identity ‘Storage Group Name’ -StandbyMachine EXCHANGESERVERNAME
You should the replay the Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus command and hopefully you should find that the SummaryCopyStatus is now “Healthy”
Tags: Exchange 2007, Exchange Management Shell, SCR, Standby Continuous Replication
No Responses
Posted October 26th, 2008 by mattshadbolt
If you have just created a new Public Folder Database on an Exchange 2007 server and you wish to replicate the data from another 2007 public folder structure you may receive the following error when enabling the replication:
set-publicfolder - Mapi Exception not found: Unable to set properties on object
The details in the error message suggest that it’s a permissions issue - however I found that it is not.
The fix for this error is surprisingly easy! All you need to do is create a public folder in the new public folder database. This seems to enable the new database and replication should start working.
Tags: Exchange 2007, Public Folder Replication, set-publicfolder
No Responses
Posted October 23rd, 2008 by mattshadbolt
Microsoft Provide a bunch of really handy tools to test the performance of your Exchange 2007 configuration including:
Exchange Server JetStress - a test to verify the disk subsystem performance.
Exchange Load Generator - lots of options from IMAP and POP tests, to auto-generation of logs. This isn’t to be used on a production system!
Exchange Server Stress and Performance - used to simulate a large number of client access requests on your front end servers
There are other more specific tools available (including a Management Pack for MOM) all free to the public.
You can download these tools via http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/bb330849.aspx
Tags: Exchange 2007 Tools, Exchange Load Generator, Exchange Server JetStress, xchange Server Stress and Performance
No Responses
Posted October 22nd, 2008 by mattshadbolt
Please be aware that Microsoft Exchange 2007 RTM is NOT compatible with Microsoft Windows Server 2008. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me, however when you try to install Exchange 2007 the Readiness Checks will fail with the following error:
“Exchange 2007 cannot be used with the version of Windows operating system running on this computer”
To install Exchange 2007 on a Windows Server 2008 machine you need to run the installer for Exchange 2007 SP1. You can find a download of the Service Pack below (841MB)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=44C66AD6-F185-4A1D-A9AB-473C1188954C&displaylang=en
Tags: Exchange 2007, RTM, SP1, Windows Server 2008
No Responses
Posted October 15th, 2008 by mattshadbolt
Upgrading your IOS is generally a pretty strait forward task. There is one consideration you should make before attempting to upgrade your router - the required “feature set”.
If you install an IOS image that doesn’t include some of the features included in your previous IOS version you may find that some functionality is lost.
You can quickly check the feature set by running the show version command on your router. You will find the feature set version either in the System Image file name (ie “flash:c1234aa-advsecurityk9-mz”) or you can find it on the very first line of the output (ie “(c1234aa-advsecurityk9-mz)” ).
Once you know your current feature set, just find the new IOS image that complies with the current feature set and you should be good to go.
Tags: cisco, Cisco IOS Software, Feature Set, IOS
No Responses
