Perpetuum informatio - Never ending IT story

You’ve just created couple of internal network switches in your Hyper-V Manager. Or you’ve just installed Docker for Windows and played with it a little. Now want to create NAT to allow your fresh new containers and/or virtual machines to have access to the Internet. Unfortunately there is no simple way to say which of the HNS Internal NIC adapters associated with proper vSwitch.

I’ve created PowerShell script to collect all important information about windows physical disks, partitions and volumes (logical disks) and its connections.

Quick cheat sheet:

1. Physical disk, represented by Win32_DiskDrive and MSFT_Disk WMI classes. This is hardware presented to your computer. It is HDD, SSD, FC LUN or iSCSI LUN.
2. Partition, represented by Win32_DiskPartition and MSFT_Partition WMI classes. Partitions are walls that transforming your physical space into rooms, which later can be used to store your data. Physical disk can have 0 or more partitions.
3. Volume, represented by Win32_Volume and MSFT_Volume WMI classes. Volumes are named spaces, from abstract rooms you get living room, kitchen and bedrooms. You format room to make it “named room”. Or in other words, you format partition to some file system, i.e. NTFS, FAT or ReFS. Volumes can store data and provide access to it. One partition can have 0 or 1 volume. When partition has 0 volume, in most cases this means that there is no data accessible by user.

Recently I’ve needed to apply 2 patches to our Windows 2008 R2. But both patches show me error “The update is not applicable to your computer”. But I knew for sure, that these updates were applicable, because installed file’s version was lower than the one contained in hotfixes. In Setup log I’ve got “Windows update could not be installed because of error 2149842967” error. The problem was that someone disabled Windows Modules Installer service on this machine, which is TrustedInstaller.

Sometimes you just need quickly deploy Android x86 server in your production environment using Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization. Now you can do it with Remix OS.

Installation to Hyper-V virtual machine is a bit tricky, but possible.

To make fully unattended install package you need to do following steps:

1. Download install package: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45015

2. Extract package content:
   CRM2015-Client-ENU-i386.exe /extract:c:\CRM_TEMP\1\2
   Do not remove sub folders 1 and 2 from the path, because we need it later

3. Create Redist folder in c:\CRM_TEMP. Do not put it in the sub folders

Sometimes you want to apply your policy to every client PC in many OUs. To do such you can use WMI filter. This is especially useful in messy AD structures, where is no dedicated OU for client computer objects.

Namespace: root\CIMv2
Query: select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where ProductType="1"

Recently one of our customers installed Microsoft Dynamics CRM Outlook add-in and discovered that after this action Microsoft Outlook became absolutely useless, because after start of the program there are no other tabs except Enterprise Vault, which is also used by this customer. Little research showed that the root of the problem is in some components of earlier version of Microsoft Office. To fix problem you need to delete following registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{2DF8D04C-5BFA-101B-BDE5-00AA0044DE52}\2.4

Sometimes you just need a big file. For example to test network speed, of backup speed. And to prevent software of hardware compression you need this file to be absolutely random. Also you do not want to write this file byte by byte, as it can be really slow. Here is my version of powershell script to generate such file:

Recently I have encountered strange TMG behavior. I have permitted all RPC connections to Domain Controllers with system rule and disabled RPC Filter plus switched off “Enable strict RPC compliance” option. But my WMI requests and any other RPC traffic from TMG servers to internal resources was still blocked.

There is a problem with DAG cluster backup in TSM. When you create script with /PREFERDAGPASSIVE key, your script return error 464 – nothing to backup. So I’ve created script to analyze Exchange’s databases if there is healthy passive copy of database to backup, so you run backup for the only healthy copy of database and for passive healthy copies of database. If there is nothing to backup than script returns 0.

Today we’ve found that one of our servers can make backups manually and works fine with polling mode, but when it is switched to prompting mode then schedule never run. After some investigation we’ve found http://www.tsmblog.org/tag/tcpclientport/ because we thought we have a problem with port of CAD.

By default if you try to connect to any Hotmail e-mail with Boxer app (current version 2.0.0), which is a default in CyanogenOS 12s, it set up your account with IMAP and SMTP. Such setup prevents you from using your calendar and contacts. To fix this you should set up your connection with ActiveSync, but such option is not available by default. To set up it correctly you need to do following steps.

Today our network administrator applied latest patch to Cisco ASA. After that, any new connection with AnyConnect was starting update procedure, which failed every time even after reboot. I’ve uninstalled application and installed the newest version. After that any connection showed:

Repairing vpn adapter

Recently we’ve found that one of our TSM servers stopped to back up all virtual machines. After examination of dsmerror.log files we’ve found strange messages:

03/20/2015 09:48:42 ANS0106E Message index not found for message 2252.
03/20/2015 09:49:01 ANS0106E Message index not found for message 14320.
03/20/2015 09:49:01 ANS0106E Message index not found for message 14180.

And so on.

Some time ago we have faced problem that our script which calls wmic to get some values stopped to work. After a short research we have found that on some servers wmic utility stopped to work, showing exception every time we run any command:

wmic os get caption
ERROR:
Description = Exception occurred.

To find all virtual machines created in a given period use the following SQL script:

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select ev.CREATE_TIME, EV.VM_NAME AS OldName  
from VPX_EVENT EV  
Where (EV.event_type = 'vim.event.VmDeployedEvent' OR EV.EVENT_TYPE = 'vim.event.VmCreatedEvent' OR EV.EVENT_TYPE = 'vim.event.VMClonedEvent') AND EV.CREATE_TIME >= cast('1.01.2013' AS DATETIME) AND EV.CREATE_TIME <= cast('31.01.2014' AS DATETIME)

Just a simple commands sequence with comments.

tdpsqlc.exe q tsm SOURCE_DB_NAME f /all

write down Database Object Name for needed full backup.

Yesterday I’ve stuck with restoring some MSSQL database, because of incompatibility between used differential and full backups, after I’ve found correct full backup, restore process completed without any problem. The following error identifies that:

The log or differential backup cannot be restored because no files are ready to rollforward

After installing Windows 2012 on old Fujitsu Primergy RX200 we lost ability to manage it with serial console. We’ve even tried to update iRMC firmware with no luck. Problem was resolved after we enabled EMS (Emergency Management Services) with the following set of commands:

BCDedit /bootems {Boot_entry_id} ON

bcdedit /ems on

bcdedit /emssettings EMSPORT:2 EMSBAUDRATE:115200