Archive

Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category

Windows 2012 Hyper-V limits

September 10th, 2012 No comments

I just explored Microsoft Academy and there are limits for Hyper-V in Windows 2012

 

 

 

Categories: Windows Tags: , ,

Quickie: Microsoft makes its error messages worse

September 5th, 2012 No comments

We do have access to Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center. So I checked if we have right to download Windows Server 2012. And we do. So I downloaded and installed it. I wanted to Activate it. I went to Action Center // Windows Activation. I clicked button called Activate and I’ve got following error:

Windows Activation error

Windows Activation error

So I tried to google for an error: 0x8007007B. Nothing similar to my problem was found. I tried to call licence call centrum and they redirected me to support call centrum. After waiting on line to get to technician I checked status of our contract with Microsoft. I found out that all our contracts Expired or Ended. So in short: Error message:”0x8007007B The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.” means you don’t have right to activate Microsoft Windows 2012 Server product 🙂

Thank you Microsoft to make your error messages more and more understable.

Windows 2012 Data Deduplication

September 4th, 2012 No comments

Today is a day when Windows Server 2012 was released and it’s available for download. First new feature I wanted to test is Data Deduplication.

Theory

Data Deduplication in Windows Server 2012 is performed as background job, which runs by default every hour. This process runs when server is idle and it doesn’t eat all server’s free resources. One job can run per one volume. It can deduplicate/check 100GB/hour. It does deduplication of variable-sized chunks (32-128KB) of files. Nice picture is on the bottom of this page. By default it deduplicates files which were not accessed for more than 5 days. It doesn’t deduplicate following file types: aac, aif, aiff, asf, asx, au, avi, flac, jpeg, m3u, mid, midi, mov, mp1, mp2, mp3, mp4, mpa, mpe, mpeg, mpeg2, mpeg3, mpg, ogg, qt, qtw, ram, rm, rmi, rmvb, snd, swf, vob, wav, wax, wma, wmv, wvx, accdb, accde, accdr, accdt, docm, docx, dotm, dotx, pptm, potm, potx, ppam, ppsx, pptx, sldx, sldm, thmx, xlsx, xlsm, xltx, xltm, xlsb, xlam, xll, ace, arc, arj, bhx, b2, cab, gz, gzip, hpk, hqx, jar, lha, lzh, lzx, pak, pit, rar, sea, sit, sqz, tgz, uu, uue, z, zip, zoo.

Let’s play

This feature is not enabled by default. You need to enable it by wizard Add Roles and Features:

Adding Data Deduplication feature

Adding Data Deduplication feature

When this is done you can use all Data Deduplication Powershell Cmdlets. To use these cmdlets you need to run Powershell as Administrator :-).

Microsoft engineers gave us one tool DDPEVAL.exe which can do little check data on our drives and tell us expected deduplication savings. You can copy utility DDPEVAL.exe to other system and run it to check deduplication expected ratio before even trying deduplication.

Read more…

Quickie: New Windows Server 2012 copy status

September 4th, 2012 No comments

Today I installed final version of Windows Server 2012 and I noticed new copy window which looks very nice:

 

New Windows Server 2012 copy window

New Windows Server 2012 copy window

 

I hope Metro look have more than that 🙂

 

Categories: Quickie, Windows Tags: , , , ,

Mail-enabled System Public Folders on Exchange 2010

September 3rd, 2012 No comments

Today one customer sent me an e-mail with a following problem. They wanted to use e-mail address microsoft@DOMAIN.TLD, but when they assigned this e-mail address to someone they received error that e-mail address is already in use.

Read more…

Quickie: How to connect to projector over the network

August 27th, 2012 No comments

Once upon the time I was at one campus and I wanted to do presentation. When I they gave me IP address of projector I wanted to use, I started to wonder how to connect to it 🙂 Now I know, Windows 7 has utility to do so. It’s called netproj.exe. You run it, enter IP/host name, password and you are connected. Really nice to know 🙂

Categories: Windows Tags: , , ,

Quickie: New application AD Replication Status Tool

August 24th, 2012 No comments

Today Microsoft released great utility to check health of Active Directory Replication in your environment.

More information about utility is HERE.

I tested it and it’s nice tool to check vitality. You don’t have to use command line utilities.

Just check it and you’ll love it 🙂

Exchange 2010 is still looking for Demoted Domain Controller

August 23rd, 2012 No comments

When I was checking events today at one of our customers I mentioned one weird event. It was:

Event 2070

Process MSExchangeMailboxReplication.exe () (PID=1388).  Exchange Active Directory Provider lost contact with domain controller OLD_DC_NAME.  Error was 0x51 (ServerDown) (Active directory response: The LDAP server is unavailable.).  Exchange Active Directory Provider will attempt to reconnect with this domain controller when it is reachable. 

Read more…

Quickie: Remove data in AD after unsuccessful domain controller demotion

August 23rd, 2012 No comments

Today my ex-colleague called me that Windows 2000 Active Directory domain, he is taking care of, is not fully functional. He mentioned that “primary” domain controller is dead and now domain has some problems.

I had to seize all FSMO roles to live Domain Controller using ntdsutils as mentioned at this Microsoft article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255504

I manually deleted dead domain controller’s information from Active Directory using following Microsoft article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216498

After checking events I found out that there was also Certification Authority on dead domain controller and I needed to clean up all Enterprise Domain Certification Autorhority information from Active Directory Domain using following Microsoft article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555151

PS: Don’t forget to put your account into all “administrative” groups: Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins and Schem Admins.

Quickie: List Copy Status of Storage Group

August 22nd, 2012 No comments

We have Exchange 2007 environment which contains 6 Failover Exchange clusters and each with 24 mailbox databases (total 144 mailbox databases). When there is a problem with replication of databases we needed to click every Failover cluster and check Copy Status of databases. To get rid of this hassle I wrote little script which lists all databases which Copy Status is not “Healthy”:

Get-MailboxServer | % { Get-StorageGroupCopyStatus -Server $_.Identity | ? {$_.SummaryCopyStatus -NotLike “Healthy” } }

For Exchange 2010 it would change little bit to:

Get-MailboxServer | % { Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus -Server $_.Identity | ? {$_.Status -NotLike “Healthy” } }

Now I’m ready to check in couple of seconds the health of databases 🙂