Windows Server 2008 R2 VMs started giving me errors while joining the domain recently, here is the exact error message that comes up:
netsetup.log (%SystemRoot%\debug\netsetup.log) shows no errors and my VMs appears to be joined properly:
Now to fix this there are two potential solutions/recommendations:
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Very unwelcoming error message just popped during user login process when I was messing around with mapping printer connections:
This will obviously not cause too much of a problem with a single computer but when you have 500 of them throwing this error you know you’re in trouble! Not how do you remove/hide this message? In my case Group Policy was the answer and the particular setting is called Point and Print Restrictions and it exists under User and Computer Configurations:
Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Printers
User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Printers
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Lets assume that you have to decommission a distribution point that’s part of your ConfigMgr 2007 R3 infrastructure. Doing it the clean way would mean manually removing all packages, you have ever copied, which is definitely not fun. Initial copy of packages, when the DP is first setup, has a nice feature called “Copy Packages” but there is absolutely nothing allowing you to remove them. Pretty stupid really as trying to find every single package and manually “Manage Distribution Point” can take literally hours… Fortunately there is very handy tool to help us out here called “ConfigMgr 2007 Distribution Point Package Utility” created by Cory Becht.
This utility queries the primary site server for all of its distribution points including child sites and then displays the packages for each distribution point. You check or uncheck which ones you want on that distribution point. You can also copy the packages list from one DP to another.
This utility was done in Visual Studio 2005, so it does require .NET Framework 2.0
Version History:1.3 – Now includes duplicating the packages of another distribution point.
1.2 – Updated to include new ConfigMgr 2007 classes for packages (SoftwareUpdate, BootImage, etc.)
1.1 – Fixed multiple DP’s per site error.
1.01 – Included “Select All” button for packages.
Default login credentials for IBM IMM (Integrated Management Module) are as follows:
Both username and a password are case sensitive so they have to be in block capitals. Please notice there is a zero ‘0’ in the word PASSWORD instead of letter ‘O’.
That’s it, hopefully this will be useful in case you get stuck 😉
Closer look at what’s happening (or not happening as a matter of fact):
Now, this error has been around for as long as I can remember. There are many causes of it but I will try to cover the one I have experienced (and solved)
Let’s get to it.
In vCenter 4.x this has never been an issue and charts stopped working since I have upgraded my vCenter to version 5.0 Update 2. Generally you look at log files for vCenter (stats.log is what we’re after) to determine the root cause. Location of stats.log depends on version of Windows and its as follows:
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Interesting question and even more interesting is why VMware would use such an archaic version of mpt2sas driver in their fairly recent builds of ESXi. Quick background on why I’m writing about this.
I bought my IBM M1015 RAID controller from eBay for about £65 and since M1015 is not supported by ESXi natively cross-flashing was the only way to get it working without too much of a hassle (if you could call cross-flashing RAID controllers not too much hassle!) I went for IT mode as opposed to IR for simplicity and ease of adding drives without mocking about with virtual disks etc. I will write a separate post about how to cross-flash to IT/IR mode later on this week (if time permits)
Going back to my issue, here is what my IBM card looks like right now cross-flashed to LSI 9211-8i in IT mode:
As you can see it’s running the latest available firmware (P15) and its in IT mode meaning its simply doing straight pass-through for any connected hard drives. Once we’re booted to ESXi we can quickly list all HBAs and the driver names by issuing this command:
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Here is rather not interestingly looking error message popping up when you don’t have Syslog configured properly on ESXi 5.x. I have seen few variations of this error but only have one screenshot at hand!
In a nutshell the cryptic message says that you have logs configured on non-persistent storage and they’ll not survive a reboot of the host. If we look closely at the exact location they’re indeed configured to point at ESXi scratch partition i.e. [] /scratch/log:
There are at least three ways to get us out of trouble in this situation:
Today meant to be just another ordinary day in the office and for most part this was the case. Around 1PM I have noticed that 2AM NetApp VSC backup job was still running… Bit odd I thought as this never happened before – its normally done in 30 minutes tops. vSphere client was showing 1 VM in recent tasks as being in progress. Hmm so what’s up with that VM then? It looked completely stuck, I couldn’t edit settings, power off, reset etc. Nothing worked. Tasks and events tab was explaining the situation a bit better:
So basically backup started and its stuck while taking snapshots due to being unable to quiesce the file system. Beyond this point vSphere client is pretty much useless so its was time to hit the command line via SSH to get me out of trouble. First you need to know the name of your stuck VM, it doesn’t have to be letter for letter as you can simply search for it using grep in a list of active processes on ESXi host. My VM had ‘STD’ in its name (aka Standard flavor of Windows Server 2012) and to find the actual PID number I’d to run the following command:
to kill the process (that run your VM) its simply kill command followed by PID number, in my case:
Now it should be gone. Quick check for PID number that we killed shows there is no such PID anymore – good.
At this point my VSC job simply timed out and moved on to backup other VMs in the datastore.
Happy days.
So I finally managed to replace my aging ZyXeL ZyWALL 5 firewall with ASA 5505 from Cisco. VirginMedia (again, finally!) doubled my speed from 50 to 100Mbps downsteam and ZeXeL just couldn’t cope. In fact my download, when still having 50Mb/s, was around 30Mb/s anyway due to CPU being maxed out. Amount of LAN to WAN traffic (and vice versa) was simply too much for 266MHz Intel IXP422 CPU.
Anyway my ASA has been with me for some time and I didn’t actually do anything with it until last week. Here is my post from June, 10th 2012 talking about upgrading CF card and RAM. It really has been that long!
I started configuring the device and I have most of my stuff already done apart from one thing that became apparent today – my WAN IP is responding to pings! Not good. Quick command to get it fixed:
icmp deny any outside
Now the command above will deny pings on the OUTSIDE (untrusted) interface. In reality you just knocked off any pings that ASA will allow even on the internal interfaces – to fix this you have to allow ICMP as a protocol in default global policy map. Once done ICMP will be allowed back in (from OUTSIDE to INSIDE) because ASA will “know” about the connection that was made in the first place.
Commands (assuming default policy/inspections name):
policy-map global_policy
class inspection_default
inspect icmp
This problem was bugging me for a while now. Every time I have to connect to a different DC, status for one of them is showing as “Unavailable” In my case this hasn’t got anything to do with the domain controller actually functioning or having connectivity. DC works fine and I haven’t had any problems with it.
Few screenshots demonstrating the issue as well as explaining what’s the cause:
