Tech.Ed Australia starts up this week, and I'll be presenting 4 sessions on DPM. One of my sessions is "Making Data Protection Manager Hum!", and you can bet that I'll be talking about hotfixes as part of this - it's not by any means the only consideration, but it's definitely an important one. I've written a couple of blog posts already on recommended hotfixes for DPM servers on Windows 2008 R2 SP1, but my list of hotfixes has since expanded. It's high time to consolidate the previous hotfixes and include the new ones.

To recap briefly, DPM is a resource intensive application. It will make the most of CPU, memory, storage, and network given a decent workload. As a result, like any other application that pushes the OS and hardware, it will more than likely trigger load-based bugs in the underlying OS. This isn't particularly different from other backup apps, even on other platforms - I was dealing with Novell Netware ABENDs with ARCServe back in the 90's, and I've seen it on Linux and Mac OS X too. ...

It's a shameless cross-promotion, of course (like all good cross-promotions!) but here's a blog post outlining my sessions at TechEd New Zealand and TechEd Australia.

I'm speaking on User Device Affinity (UDA) in SCCM 2012, and how to migrate from SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2012.

 UDA is going to revolutionise user, workstation and application management in SCCM, and the architectural changes in SCCM 2012 will make you want to jump ship from SCCM 2007 as fast as possible (awesome product though it is).

So check out my sessions and say Hi at TechEd :-)

I recently blogged about my experiences with Cloudflare, a cloud-based service that offers increased performance and security for your website. In the post, I touched on an issue with the IP address presented to web application, which would be Cloudflare IP addresses as a result of the reverse proxying that the service performs. I mentioned that there was a solution presented by Cloudflare to correct the IIS logs, but this didn't address the presentation of IP addresses to web applications.

This is by no means a unique issue. It's not uncommon for reverse proxying to present the proxy server's address to a webserver, and in fact the solution described for IIS logs originally arose from the use of F5 load balancers. To get more technical, the issue is that the webserver - in this case, IIS - sets the HTTP header REMOTE_ADDR to the IP of the reverse proxy. This is entirely correct from the standpoint of a webserver interacting with a web browser client, but it doesn't help for correctly identifying t ...

From an IT Pro's perspective, website security and performance can be a real pain. More often than not, you're not responsible for the website's code, yet you're responsible for its operation. Even the best developer can sometimes leave security holes and less-than-stellar performance in your lap ... and sadly, a lot of developers aren't anywhere near "the best". Paula Bean might be brillant, but it doesn't mean she should be allowed near your precious website.

 But let's not pick on developers. The ever-changing nature of the web, the constant demand for new and innovative solutions, working with a bunch of nongs who have no appreciation for proper coding standards - I can understand all of this well, and the frustration behind the humour on sites like The Daily WTF is very evident from both developers and IT pros alike. I'm a frequent reader.

 Like any aspect of IT security, websites are an ongoing concern that need continual review and improvement. I'm hardly a security expert ...

Shameless cross-post from my blog here. This one comes up quite often, so I figured I’d make a quick and easy script for it. The first step is to make sure you’re on a machine with the Exchange Management Tools installed, and logged on as a user with privileges to read mailbox properties. If you don’t want to read the explanation, skip ahead to The Script.

Next, we’ll grab all the mailboxes from the organisation. By default Exchange will only return the first 1000 results, so we need to specify the ResultSize parameter to ensure all mailboxes are counted.

Now loop through each mailbox using a ForEach statement:

Per each mailbox, let’s loop through the email a ...

As a backup product, Microsoft’s System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) does a wonderful job of protecting Microsoft workloads – from file system to SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint, Hyper-V, Active Directory, Sharepoint, and beyond. To accomplish this, though, DPM makes heavy use of a Windows feature called the Volume Snapshot Service (VSS). Introduced in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, this was very much the Microsoft answer to a range of open file backup agents for the various backup products on the market, amongst other considerations.

These agents, normally an extra cost on top of the standard backup agent, typically introduced a file system filter driver to handle file locking that often prevented successful backups. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, these 3rd party file system filters tended to introduce their own problems – from performance issues to incompatibility with antivirus, file corruption, and system instability. I’ve hit some particularly ugly examp ...

IIS 7.x, included with Windows 2008 and up, does a much better job out of the box at optimising website performance. For example, static and dynamic compression are enabled by default - a major improvement - and the defaults for compression are reasonably good.

There is still more tuning that can be done, though. I've found it necessary to hunt around for these optimisations, so I thought I'd present them here in one place, in the hope that it's of use to someone! This isn't intended to be a comprehensive guide, but rather a pointer at a number of common settings that it's useful to know about and consider using.

First stop - advanced settings for your application pool. The below shows some sample settings, which aren't actually derived from the AuTechHeads website settings but from a test instance - note that these are dependent on application, and your mileage may vary. You should test these before putting into production!

The bolded items ab ...

As you may know, I've been chasing down some instability on our System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 primary server. Although the previous set of patches did notably improve the stability of the server, I have still had at least one incidence of a BSOD. The stop code in this instance was 0x000000D1, but before I hook up a debugger to look at the memory dump, it was worth taking a look for any more stability hotfixes for Win2k8 R2 SP1. There are plenty of hotfixes for post-SP1 problems (many which seem to actually pre-date the service pack), but I'm generally looking for storage and networking fixes. Remember that DPM is particularly susceptible to load-based bugs in the underlying OS, and of course these are the two areas it most heavily relies on.

 Happily, this time around I've actually come across 2 hotfixes which directly relate to the snapshot driver and the Volume Snapshot Service. Because DPM makes such heavy use of these, Microsoft have kindly explicitly mentioned DPM as a use ca ...

Recently, a problem with applying Windows Updates led me to rebuild our otherwise stable System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 primary server. The server would apply new updates, but after a reboot we'd get the dreaded "Failure configuring updates", accompanied by a long rollback process involving multiple reboots. While I spent some time on diagnosing the problem, the reality was that a rebuild would be far quicker overall - this was the only server with the issue, so it was obviously a local software fault.

To streamline the rebuild, I used the Windows 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 ISO (over the network - we never use physical media nowadays). The previous build - and our still-running secondary DPM server - predated SP1, so had the service pack applied after the fact. It turns out, though, that there are some SP1 bugs that come to light more readily in a fresh SP1-integrated build.

It should come as no surprise that DPM, as a particularly resource intensive backup application, i ...