The Grumpy IT Admin

We have had an ongoing issue with our EqualLogics systems where they have a massive disk latency problem. We have narrowed this down to 11 second periods where there is no network activity on the controllers. We have passed all the information to Dell but are still without a fix. This problem has been with us from the start across all the firmware revisions. The most affected system is the system that receives the most replication traffic, had has the fewest live servers on it. The only thing we have got back so far is that there is something going on with replication even though the periods we are seeing this are not confined to when replication is happening. Dell obviously want us to upgrade to the latest firmware but this is not a good idea at the moment as a replication bug has been found that appears to throttle replication to around 25MB/s which is not desirable. Dell are not acknowledging this but our suppliers are definitely seeing it and have advised us to not update to ...

I have been imaging hard drives over the network as part of my working life for more years than I care to remember, this has involved mostly using Altiris' RDeploy tools but also occasionally Ghost and Disk copy and some Paragon tools. Things can wrong if you don't pay attention, I remmber once dropping a DOS image on to our Exchange Mailbox server rather than taking an image of it for DR testing, oh how we laughed, fortunately it was just teh system drive so was quite easy to fix. However after a recent purchase of some Samsung SSDs I had occasion to investigate am recent copy of Ghost 15. Oh dear what were they thinking, or perhaps they weren't. Symantec seem to be making one mistake after the other of late, every major release of software seems to be changed beyond all recognition and useabilty, Altiris 7/7.1, Backup Exec 2012 and now Ghost. Disk imaging should be simple, put a bootable CD/USB drive in, boot to it say copy this disk to this disk and job done. That i...

As we support 1500 users we don't manually install anything on PCs. it is all done remotely using, at the moment, Altiris Deployment console (not the nasty web based 7.1 but the rather more pleasent 6.9 with win32 console). We use simple command line stuff to run installers in quiet mode such as MSIs with a /qn or setups with recoreded ini answer files. Every now and again we come across an installer that either doesn't support silent install or tries to do something stupid at the end like display a read me file, complete Muppetry! However we often come across stuff that requires prerequistes installed like Exchange 2010 Management tools. This needs a bunch of Windows features set up in advance, but guess what? The installer knows this but doesn't install them for you and Microsoft doesn't tell you what they are in any documentation or how you should go about installing them, though it does say if you run Setup /r:MT it will install silently, don't believe it, it...

Here's some more weirdness related to Exchange. Basically we saw a lot of slowness, not all the time and not on all sites. This slowness would manifest itself in response times from the CAS/HUB server that sit behind a loadbalancer which comes from Kemp. The CAS/HUB servers use the loadbalancer as the default gateway, now for all our traffic this worked extremely well, the only issue we got was this slow down. Even connecting to the server via RDP would be very slow and unresponsive, the cure was to vMotion the loadbalancer. More of a workaround than a fix but it helped. After much troubleshooting and packet sniffing and a conversation with Kemp it was ascertained that if we change the NIC type from a VMXNET3 to a E1000 all our problems would disappear. Surprisingly this actually worked. Now the CAS/HUB servers are much more responsive and don't fall in to an apathetic well of despair. Would I build an Exchange system that was fronted by a loadbalaner again? Probably n...

Didn't think I would have to revisit this one so soon. Our Exchange servers were patched up to date with Windows patches and lo and behold all hell breaks loose. Nothing major just users can't connet to their mailboxes from Outlook, again. OWA is fine, it's just Outlook shows as off line, except for users in cached mode, or users that tried 20 times to connect... or that user sitting over there. Moved some affected users to cached mode and all was well again for them, not me though, tried cached and non cached and no joy, tried and new profile and got straight in, back to old profile and no joy, was it the PC updates that went out last night? Well affected users were on a different patching schedule to me so probably not. It must be the patches applied to the Exchange server, we had this last time they were patched with Roll-up 3. So we dropped the one of the CAS servers out of the (load balanced) cluster and rebooted it, dragged it back in and then did teh same w...

To do this for Windows 7 and server 2008R2 you need to do the following ·          Pick a 2008 R2 server ·          Apply the 2008 R2 KMS licence key for the server (see below for which one). Do not under any circumstances apply any other licence key. ·          To apply the key type the following at an Admin command prompt o    slmgr.vbs -ipk <KMS key> That’s should be it For Office 2010 do the following 1.        Download and run the KeyManagementServiceHost.exe file on this page on a supported operating system. ( \\codms-1\Apps\Office 2010 ) 2.        Enter your Office 2010 KMS host key when prompted. 3.        Click OK to continue with activation. 4.        Open port 1688 and allow the KMS host service thr...

After lots of poking around by Microsoft it would seem this is a spurious bug that is falsely reporting an error. Basically Microsoft couldn't find anything wrong with our AD configuration and from what they have gleaned from other users that have the same problem it isn't a problem. Most of the initial symptoms we suffered such as not being able to add a mailbox into a profile seems to have disappeared but the logged error persists. Apparently it will be fixed in roll up 5, which suggest that they have already finalized roll up 4 and it is not worthy of an interim fix. Problem – Getting event-1(Source-MSExchange Autodiscover) after installing Exchange 2010 SP2 RU3 KB2685289 on the CAS Server Resolution – This is a known bug and is to be fixed in Exchange 2010 SP2 RU5