Ondrej Žilinec – IT Blog

At one of my customer I had following request. They have Exchange server inside their network. They have two Internet connections. All mail communication goes via primary Internet connection. Second Internet connection is used for Internet browsing.

Internal IP network is 10.0.0.0/24. First Internet connection is called primary and there is default gateway at 10.0.0.1/24. Second Internet connection is called backup Internet connection and it’s default dateway is 10.0.0.2/24. Exchange server has IP address 10.0.0.21/24 and it had default gateway 10.0.0.1/24. MX records are registered to public IP address of primary Internet connection. Problem is when primary line goes down. E-mail communication stops completely – e-mails don’t come and don’t leave company.

To solve this problem we need to make two changes:

• Change MX records for Internet domain
• Change routing for internal Exchange server

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Last week I was playing with application virtualization. I do have experiences with VMWare Thinapp applications. I already did couple of those virtualized applications. When I was forced to use App-V to create virtualized application I needed to make one application and I needed make this application to write registries into real registries and not to virtual ones. I thought it would be same as in VMWare Thinapp. That means I would expect to set some “isolation” mode on registry branch.

Problem is that you can define only two modes in App-V for registries:

• Merge with Local Key – This will merge real registries with virtual ones. Change will be written into virtual registries.
• Override Local Key – This will show only virtual registries to application and changes will be written into virtual registries.

In VMWare Thinapp there are isolation modes (for file system structures and also for registries) defined as following:

• Full – Real are not shown. Any modification goes into virtual. New elements go into virtual.
• Merged – Real are shown. Modification of virtual goes to virtual. Modification of real goes to real. New elements go to real.
• WriteCopy – Real are shown. Modification of virtual goes to virtual. Modification of real goes to virtual. New elements go to virtual.

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When I upgraded from ISA 2006 to TMG 2010 I found some special problem. There was HQ with TMG 2010 and one branch with ASA 5505. Between those two location there was Site to Site VPN tunnel created. Everything worked fine, beside one problem. Users in branch couldn’t access anything on TMG server. They couldn’t ping it or do anything with it. They couldn’t browse Internet, because TMG was also web proxy server for them.

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I wanted to solve one issue. This issue is described in article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2722729. But there are two problems:

• There is no English version of KB
• Hotfix cannot be downloaded

I found that I’m not the only one with a same problem and here a question on Microsoft forum. Now we can wait for Microsoft engineers.

Customer wanted to upgrade his ISA 2006 server to “new” TMG 2010. I thought it would be nice and easy process. It could be if there were no problems which I didn’t expect to be a problem in “new” software. Old server was still functional and I wanted to prepare new server and migrate all settings and certificates.

Requirements

To install all requirements you can install required packages by yourself or you can use Run Preparation Tool from installation screen of TMG. Why didn’t they include it into installation package it self?

Messed up console

When I was done with installation I ran TMG console and I received following error:

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Regarding to official blog article from Directory Service Team MaxTokenSize for Access Token tickets, which is four times more than before.

What a cool command in PowerShell 🙂 It doesn’t even ask if you are sure 😀 Boooooooooom….server rebooted.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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