Hi,

Now that Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 are out, any company that uses KMS keys needs to add the new ones from Microsoft's Volume Licensing Service Center https://www.microsoft.com/Licensing/servicecenter/Downloads/DownloadsAndKeys.aspx

First, there's a hotfix for your existing KMS server available here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2691586/EN-US

Once you request the hotfix, get the email and download it, and install. The install will require a reboot, so if you've got this on a critical server you're going to have to schedule a reboot.

A few change request forms and approval signatures later, you'll be finally ready to add your shiny new keys in.

Now, here's the installation instructions from the link above:

Installation instructions

If you have a KMS host that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 or Windows 7 SP1, follow these steps to perform an upgrade: Install this update (KB2691586). Restart the computer when you are prompted. ...

It's been some time since I revisited the need for Windows 2008 R2 SP1 hotfixes. The last list I published was in August 2011 - and it's held up pretty well overall! The original purpose of the list was to provide the essential hotfixes for a System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 or 2010 install on Windows 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1. I've allowed other fixes to appear there - either because I felt they were important to stability or performance, or because they fixed an issue I'd observed. I went into some detail on this in the last post, but I do like to have a bunch of fixes in my kit for both general and more specific purposes.

 This list provides a number of new hotfixes that have appeared since. These additions are constrained almost entirely to issues that can affect DPM and other backups. It's by no means comprehensive, just a useful list of important fixes. As with the previous article, I've coloured the hotfixes most relevant to DPM in red. A number of these hot ...

By now, you may have heard that System Center 2012 has reached GA (General Availability) stage. It's been available for download for a little while, but Microsoft naturally wanted to align the announcement with the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) that's happening this week.

 System Center is, of course, Microsoft's integrated management platform for IT, and one of its fastest growing product lines in business terms. That's no accident, either - management is the single most consistent challenge across IT shops, regardless of size, technologies, and headcount. We've come a long way from the days where Systems Management Server (SMS) was the only Microsoft offering in this regard -  and even since the introduction of Microsoft Operations Manager. These products were clunky and limited in contrast to their modern counterparts, System Center Configuration Manager and Operations Manager.

Times have moved on; now the System Center portfolio also covers backup, virtualisation, service ...

13th April

I had to rush off to the airport and crashed out, back home in Adelaide now. It was a very interesting event, and was great to get the opportunity to talk to some key HP staff. I'll summarise the whole event in a few days once I've absorbed it all.

3:30pm
Bit of a gap as this section was particularly technical around layers, zones, repositorys, pools, catalogues - you get the idea :)

3:00pm
Architecture Deep Dive for HP Cloud:
IT becomes the service broker, and also needs to choose where to put what. It should also be designed to be able to be moved from one environment to the next.

2:25pm
If someone uses your hosted severs for an attack, who is at fault? The provid ...

This is a crosspost from my blog at flamingkeys.com.

One of the people I was lucky enough to meet at Tech·Ed Australia 2011 was Mr Paul Cunningham, who runs the popular website Exchange Server Pro. Paul is one of the most respected names going around when it comes to Exchange, and he has the real world experience to back it up. As a favour to the community (and our profession) Paul has decided to produce a free (as in free beer) boot camp for those wanting to learn Exchange 2010. The boot camp consists of four modules  containing physical challenges, early morning runs, rope climbs*, text, screen shots and videos to help you learn the basics of Exchange Server 2010. Having worked through this boot camp myself, I can say that this is an invaluable resource for those getting started with Exchange Server, and also those who may have managed an Exchange environment but not installed one before.

Please make sure you check the boot camp out, and also be sure to stick Paul’s blog ...

This is my first real foray into blog posting. This was originally written for someone that had recently implemented Microsoft DFS Replication and was having a bit of trouble. Having dealt with some evil DFS replication issues in my past, I thought it would only be proper to lend a helping hand. I have decided to share these tidbits with the world so that hopefully it helps someone else out in the future.

So here goes:

File Quotas are a pain -  File quotas in DFS replication can burn you – hard. The DFS health report will come up with an error about being out of disk space, but will not reference anything to do with file quotas. Essentially, DFS will try to replicate a file that has ownership to a user. The user will have filled up it’s quota at one side of the replication. When this occurs, DFS will error out. If you decide to setup user folders with quotas and DFS, make sure that you use FSRM and set up the quotas to email the users when they are rea ...

G'day All (and anyone else listening in),

Just a heads up to let you know that SMBiT Professionals Brisbane is running a Spotlight Session this coming Sunday (2011-10-23) at the Chalk Hotel in Woolloongabba where we're delving into Group Policy with Alan Burchill and Remote Desktop Server with Bryce Telfer as related (in particular) to an SBS 2011 environment.

The event will be streamed live for financial SMBiT Professionals members in our SharePoint site, under the Brisbane sub-site.

For everyone else, the event will be streamed free (of cost, password, however not advertisements) at:

http://www.justin.tv/hiltont

http://www.Ustream.tv/channel/SMBiTPro-Brisbane

So, feel free to get your geek on with us this weekend - the show starts around 10:00 AM and will be over just in time for us to watch the Rugby Union final!  :)

Please click here and check out our website, PowerShell Down Under for more info!

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. ...

So you've applied Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 SP1. You're probably happy with it. You're not likely to go back.

Why then, does your disk space continue to be kept hostage by old files?

The answer is the winsxs folder, referred to as the component store. It's taken a larger role from Windows Vista and Windows 2008 onward. Microsoft use it as a way to escape DLL hell, apparently, although I can't vouch for its efficacy.

In pre-Vista days, we had the $NtServicePackUninstall$ folder, along with $NtUninstallKBxxxxxx$, in C:\Windows that you could delete to reclaim space. Nowadays it seems that these backups have merged into winsxs, along with key components for your system to operate.

Legend has it that in Windows Vista SP1 and Windows 2008 SP1 days, there was a tool included calld vsp1cln.exe that would clean out the old superseded files from before the service pack. I've not personally used that one, but I know it certainly doesn't exist on Windows 7 and Win2k8 R2 systems. So ...

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 ...

Yes, it's totally true - with SCCM 2012 you can now reign in those pesky consumer mobile devices running rampant in your precious organisation, and stamp your mighty will upon them from on high. Yea, they shalt tremble and quake at thy new policy sets :-)

But first, you've got to actually get them into SCCM first.  Fortunately, it's pretty straightforward, so read on to see how it's done.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm doing some work with SCCM 2012 at the moment, and one of the things I'm interested in looking at is how SCCM 2012 handled non-Windows-based mobile devices (ie: iOS and Android).

I have an iPod Touch which I don't mind tooling around with (given that I don't actually use it for anything related to its primary function), but I don't have any Android devices to hand.

Fortunately, there's an x86 port of Android called, unsurprisingly, Android-x86 which works quite well in a virtual environment.  And despite the fact that Hyper-V's capacity to support Linux is, quite frankly, pretty limited, Android-x86 installs and plays quite nicely on a Hyper-V host.

This is how I put it all together - read on.

On Microsoft Connect, no-one can hear you scream (unless you file a big report).

System Center Configuration Manager is a seriously powerful, and seriously complex piece of management kit. Setting it up and getting it to run well involves much hair-pulling, uncontrollable swearing and frantic searching of online forums (it's like owning a Linux machine...).  But, once it's playing ball it's a brilliant investment and you wonder how you ever managed.

SCCM 2012 is shaping up to be a major leap forward, with support for OS X, iOS and Android, just for tantalising starters.

I'm doing some presentations throughout May which leverage strongly of SCCM demos, so I've had to get labs up and operational in my home Hyper-V environment.  SCCM 2007 is running fine, but I'd not encountered SCCM 2012 before now, and given that it's still in beta (Beta 2, to be exact) there's a dearth of documentation and available information on what to do.

After some frustration and backtracking ...

Hello autechheads,

Continuing on from my post a while back about my initial experiences with SCSM SCSM Initial Experiences there have been a few developments.

Firstly, the Exchange Connector I referenced which allows connection to an Exchange mailbox for jobs, has been finalised. Hopefully it will appear in Microsoft Downloads soon...

SP1 was also released on 16th December (Technet Blog Click Here) which has a bunch of improvements, including SQL Server 2008 R2 official support. The install for me was incredibly easy and smooth, just running the update on each server/client without any issues or anything notable.

So, there's a few more reasons to consider migrating to SCSM. Some of the limitations I mentioned on my first post are still there, but there's a bit more support and maturity with the product already.

I have found myself in a situation now, where I need to move the databases from one SQL server to another. Sounds easy? Why am I asking you question ...