Seagate GoFlex - testing USB 2.0 vs eSATA performance

Recently I picked up some of the new Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drives with the swappable interface dongles since we've had good luck with the previous generation of drives and we were interested in seeing if we could eek out a little bit more performance by changing interfaces for it. Running virtual machines off external hard drives is slow enough as it is so every 1MB/s you can get is a plus to me. My test platform was a Dell Latitude e6410 and a 500GB GoFlex drive with both the USB 2.0 and eSATA dongles.
First I tried out a few large file copies (500MB to 2GB) and noticed that windows was reporting a higher sustained rate for the USB2.0 but I also noticed a very long delay on the last 1-2% which I'm pretty sure was a cache delay. This delay at the end offset the perceived higher transfer rate that the USB transfer had shown. The eSATA transfers all went smoothly with no lag at the end at all. What can I say, I liked the honesty of the eSATA estimates better.
I then tried out some disk benchmarking tools like CrystalDiskMark (below) for further data and fortunately they all seemed to show the same significant advantage toward the eSATA:



Now I'm by no means an expert but I think eSATA will be the way to go for my Virtual Machines. At the very least the high sequential read/write should make the startup/shutdown for the VMs faster than they currently are under USB. So I shall sent out my little guinea pigs and wait for Murphy's law to kick in...

TMG 2010 and hyper-v guest issue with windows update 80072EE2

I was trying to set up a temporary hyper-v server for demo/training purposes this week and ran into a windows update issue with a 2008 r2 guest on it. I turned on logging at my TMG server just to make sure the packets were getting out okay and then I noticed an odd error that popped up - 0xc0040018 FWX_E_BAD_LENGTH_PACKET_DROPPED - the packet was dropped because its IP length field does not fall within the allowed range or is inconsistent with the actual length.


So I tried looking that one up on the web and came up pretty dry other than the list of error codes from Technet. I decided to change gears and approach it from the other direction and went off in search of the windows update error code 80072EE2 which led me to this blog post:

http://msmvps.com/blogs/thenakedmvp/archive/2009/11/08/windows-update-error-80072ee2-hyper-v-guest-issues.aspx

And then it all clicked together. The offload settings weren't working right on the sub-standard hyper-v server I was using and the effect I was seeing on the firewall was incorrect packet lengths. As soon as I turned off the offload settings on the host server for that network card the windows update problems on the guest OS all went away.

My new favorite spare parts vendor for old Dell Poweredge Servers

(Yes, this post is going to be a vendor plug as you should deduce from the title.)

We all have them lurking in our data centers, those old servers that you just can't seem to kick the users off of and retire gracefully. Inevitably, that server will suffer a hardware failure and if it's a Dell and more than 3 years old the chances are that after a half hour on the phone bouncing around they'll finally just admit that they don't have the part and have no idea when it'll ever be in stock again. Oh, but if it ever did magically appear it'll cost $800.

While digging through the forums I noticed another user had recommended Velocity TechSolutions http://www.velocitytechsolutions.com/ I'm always a little skeptical of new sites but being in a pinch I wasn't going to be picky. After a quick search through the site I found the parts kit that I needed for $99. I went ahead and ordered it with overnight shipping and had a fedex tracking confirmation within a few hours and the parts were here the next morning. Overall I've got a good first impression of them.

The Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture Feature 1.0 that wouldn't die

So merely a day after the marathon weekend of getting my MSSX 2008 (wss 3.0 sp2) instance up to Sharepoint 2010 Server, an old add-on came back to haunt me. The Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture Feature 1.0 (MS.IT.SiteDeleteCapture) whose installation was long ago lost in a fiery server crash and whose features had long been disabled. Additionally, the install files for it have long disappeared from the face of the earth as all the links to it are dead. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc706867%28office.12%29.aspx (Thanks codeplex for ditching the old junk! LOL). What really makes it great is that it never came up as an issue in the preupgradecheck report.

Anyway I had a user report that they couldn't delete a subsite. Lo and behold the user was right. I used the trusty ULS viewer to decode the wonderfully cryptic Microsoft Correlation ID and discovered the culprit.



It is experiences like these that have converted me over to the philosophy of NEVER installing any third party addons to a sharepoint/wss/mssx install that didn't come out of the DVD or from the Microsoft update site. Or at the very least, plan on leaving there long before the next major upgrade.

So I ran my old favorite utility: http://featureadmin.codeplex.com/ (awesome utility btw). But it didn't show up there. I tried a few more tools and came to the conclusion that as far as sharepoint was concerned, it wasn't installed which meant that I had some phantom Event Hook of some type lingering around. At this point my two remaining choices were A) Open up a Microsoft PSS ticket or B) Roll the dice and try something crafty and stupid.

My plan B was to just plop on the newer version of the IT site capture following the age old wisdom of the best way to cure a hangover (more alcohol btw if you missed the reference). I found it at the redirected link for the old product under the new auspicious title of Sharepoint Governance. My theory was that it was the successor to the old product, and it would probably Event hook in a similar way, that it was worth a shot. Worst case scenario it would just be one more thing for them to fix for me if I wound up with PSS.

Cue the drum roll....



And we're back in business. And yes, as a sanity check I did check and see to make sure the site was gone and I also created a new site and deleted it as well. So far so good!

2008 multi-homed dns server failing simple query but otherwise works fine

So my dns server was working fine, resolved queries, updated records, etc. But for some reason it kept failing the built in "Simple Query" and "Recursive Query" tests. After much messing around I discovered that it was trying to query the first interface it found. In this case it was the interface that I had manually excluded from the list because I didn't want DNS listening on it. I wound up changing the binding order for the network interfaces to fix the problem. After swapping them around I restarted DNS and voila the built in Monitoring started showing 'Pass" instead of "Fail".

List of interfaces, notice the non-listening one shows up first.

Under Network and Sharing, Advanced Properties, change the bind order.
Restart DNS and try again.

SEP 11.0.6 disabled windows 7 firewall even though NTP was never installed

So I had to help another admin out with a fun issue this week. He had just upgraded his management server to Symantec Endpoint 11.0.6 MR1 and pushed out new clients. He created separate groups for laptops, desktops, etc and separated off the machines he didn't want to install Network Threat Protection on into their own group. The problem was that even though NTP wasn't being installed, it was still disabling the windows firewall (windows 7 in this case) and of course the new security center locked out the ability to reactivate it.

The solution in this case was to turn Inheritence OFF for that group and then withdraw the Firewall policy from that group. After the policy updates it should release the old on Windows Firewall. I didn't have time to stick around for that so we forced the policy update from the client and rebooted the machines for good measure.

1. Uncheck "Inherit policies and settings from parent Group xyz"

2. Click Tasks to the right of "Firewall policy" and Withdraw the policy.

Everything seems to work right afterward. Aside from the inconvenience of having a non-inherited policy to deal with later on when you want to make changes.

In most cases I've found that NTP works a lot better than the older versions like 10.x had so you most likely won't ever need the contents of this post but just in case, have fun.

Installing Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 without it failing

Okay, this was irritating. I started with a brand new fresh Windows 2008 x64 R2 install with all windows updates and the IIS and Application Roles installed. I popped in the DVD for SCE 2010 and rolled along and then it failed. Tried a few more times to no avail. After digging through the forums I found the answer. I had to uncheck the Microsoft Update checkbox! WTF MS? That of all things slipped through QC testing? Afterward it installed fine...



Thanks go out to:
Melissa Poole - http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/systemcenteressentials/thread/8c21bd9d-22d5-474a-92a2-f4e51fa2dd44

and Kieranbarnes
http://bloke.org/windows/problems-installing-system-center-essentials-2010/

How to empty a hidden outbox in owa full of junk when outlook doesn't show anything

I have no idea why this happened and I have even less of a clue why they decided to Hide the Outbox folder in OWA 2010. Anyway I had a user whose outbox showed zero items and when we checked the server properties it said that they had 90MB of junk on there. Well, in the old days I'd go into OWA 2k7 and kill them that way. No such luck in OWA 2010.
So my workaround was to turn off the "Cached Mode" and then closed and reopened Outlook.


Now this will force it to look directly at the server and it'll show you the problem Outbox. Delete all the junk from there and wait about 1/2 hour for your server to catch up. Then empty out Deleted Items, kill the OST file, wait a few minutes and then close outlook. Turn Cached Mode back on and you should be back to normal now.