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Posts Tagged ‘installation’

Failing VMTools installation

April 29th, 2013 No comments

Problem

When I was installing VMTools on Windows Professional 2000 server I received weird error:

VMTools installation error

Server didn’t specify any error so I tried to dig into it.

Solution

When you do the installation of application, most of the time, this application installation unpacks its sources into temporary location. So I have looked into %temp% directory while error windows was displayed and I found one directory with actual date. So I have looked into it and I found couple files. One of them was called VMware Tools.msi. I tried to run VMware Tools.msi and it worked out.

I hope this saves someone time 🙂

What’s new in WSUS in Windows Server 2012

March 27th, 2013 No comments

Installation of WSUS on Windows Server 2012

I started to install WSUS service on Windows Server 2012. I selected to install Windows Internal Database as store of WSUS metadata.

WSUS installation

I selected to store updates on local C:\ drive (it’s just testing machine):

Store updates localy

After first run on Windows Server Update Services management tool WSUS asks again if I want to store updates locally or not:

WSUS complete installation

When I click Run, post-installation starts to run:

Post-installation

And I received Post-installation “notification” 🙂 in Microsoft word it means I have a problem (Failed to restart the current database. The currecnt database is switched to master):

Post-installation error

So if computer has problem with restarting database, let’s restart service. Didn’t help 🙂 Let’s restart whole computer. Didn’t help either. So the problem will be somewhere else.

I tried to install WSUS from scratch. I uninstalled WSUS and also Windows Internal Database feature. I also deleted data for Windows Internal Database from directory C:\Windows\WID. Then I installed WSUS with all dependecies – WID, IIS, …

Now I’m getting different error:

WSUS illegal character in path

Problem was backslash in input window for defining directory to store updates 😀 This path was predefined by wizard and it was wrong. This is really funny 🙂

So after reinstallation of WSUS and WID and defining “correct” path to update store directory (without backslash on the end 🙂 ) everything looks to be done correctly:

Post-installation done

Let click Close and look what’s new in WSUS. First we need to configure WSUS and I did it using WSUS Wizard. I don’t see any news in this Wizard compared to older one.

Exploring WSUS

I haven’t notice any news in WSUS mmc console. I always use client side group targeting. This feature allows you to create groups of computers in WSUS structure. It can be used to target updates specified for testing to just group of computers and so on. To make this working you need to set client side of group targeting by defining name of Group and also you need to create new Computer Group in WSUS structure. What I always forget it to create these Computer Groups in WSUS structure 🙂 I would love to see some option to allow WSUS to create these Computer Groups automatically. But this didn’t happend of this version of WSUS.

I think the most powerful thing Microsoft added into WSUS is support for Powershell cmd-lets. Most of the time WSUS settings about update Classifications and update Products are same from customer to cutosmer, so you can automate this settings using cmd-lets Get-WsusClassification, Set-WsusClassification, Get-WsusProduct and Set-WsusProduct.

To get some information about WSUS Server it selft you can use cmd-let Get-WsusServer:

Get-WsusServer

There are more interesting cmd-lets. One is Get-WsusComputer which prints out some more information about computer reported into WSUS:

Get-WsusComputer

Get-WsusComputer has lot of ability to filter out computers on some conditions. Failed, Needed, …

To manage updates from powershell you can use cmd-lets Get-WsusUpdate, Approve-WsusUpdate and Deny-WsusUpdate. You can for example approve all updates that are Unapproved and FailedOrNeeded:

Get-WsusUpdate -Classification All -Approval Unapproved -Status FailedOrNeeded | Approve-WsusUpdate -Action Install -TargetGroupName “All Computers”

And the last cmd-let I really love, because I can make scheduled task to run Clean-up Wizard. Cmd-let is Invoke-WsusServerCleanup. You can do every cleanup task you can make from GUI.

Conclusion

I don’t think there is too much to improve on WSUS, but little powershell support for WSUS is handy.

Microsoft Lync 2010 server – preparation of OS

February 25th, 2013 No comments

Today I started installation of Standard version of Microsoft Lync server. There are some prerequisites for OS where Lync server will run. Here is a quick step-by-step howto:

  • Installation of .NET Framework 3.5. Run following commands in Admin Powershell:
    • Import-Module ServerManager
    • Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework-Core

Install .NET 3.5

  • In same Powershell windows run following command to install IIS Feature with all required components:
    • Add-WindowsFeature Web-Static-Content,Web-Default-Doc,Web-Http-Errors,Web-Asp-Net,Web-Net-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Filter,Web-Http-Logging,Web-Log-Libraries,Web-Http-Tracing,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Filtering,Web-Stat-Compression,Web-Mgmt-Console,Web-Scripting-Tools,Web-Client-Auth

Install all IIS requirements

 

  • Install RSAT-ADDS by running following command in same Powershell windows:
    • Add-WindowsFeature RSAT-ADDS

RSAT-ADDS installation

 

  • Reboot server
  • We need to install Windows Media Format Runtime. We can do it by running following command from elevated command prompt:
    • %systemroot%\system32\dism.exe /online /add-package /packagepath:%windir%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-Media-Format-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.1.7601.17514.mum /ignorecheck

Install WMFR

 

  • Press “Y” to reboot server again.

Tomorrow we will prepate Schema, Domain and Forest to support Lync 2010.