Dell Powerconnect 6224 slow vlan routing problem

So I noticed that intra-vlan network performance had decreased significantly recently but the effects were sporadic. Wireshark traces showed a lot of traffic bleeding over from multiple vlans and file copy performance between vlans was a staggeringly low. I ran the a cable qualification device on all the links and tested the speed between each switch. Everything was fine as long as I didn't do an inter-vlan activity. So I knew then that the problem was in the 6224 which I use for my layer 3 switching between vlans. While trolling through forums, I noticed someone had recommended STP as a place to start in troubleshooting. I set my 'root' switches priority 8192 (lower is higher in priority) and all the issues disappeared within a few seconds.



As far as I can tell the Multiple STP operation mode was running into problems when a load was applied. Since all the other switches are by default set to 32768 by default, now I shouldn't have this problem again.

Shrew VPN replacement for Juniper/Watchguard on Windows 7 x64

So I'd been waiting to see if anyone had managed to get the Juniper netscreen vpn client to work on windows 7 x64 and then I just gave up and decided to look for an alternate solution. I really didn't want to keep an XP box around just for the purpose of connecting to this one partner's site. So after digging around I found Shrew (http://www.shrew.net/home) which supports XP/Vista/7 in both 32 and 64 bit. And as an added bonus they have tutorial/howtos for setting it up to work with over a dozen vpn endpoint devices. So I sent the info for the Juniper SSG setup to our partner site and they generated a new client file for us.


Installation of the client went smoothly and it imported the client file with no problems.

How to disable SoftAP (aka Windows 7 Wireless Hosted Networks) via Group Policy

Windows 7 comes with a nifty feature that allows it to function as a wireless hotspot. For home users and technical enthusiasts, it's a cool feature. For paranoid network admins like me that feature is a problem. You don't want users opening up wireless APs inside your building or if they're remote, functioning as conduits for outsiders to piggyback into your networks.

To disable this function via group policy, create a new group policy or modify and existing one and go to Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Wireless Network (IEEE 802.11) Policies. right click on there and Create a new policy.



Now be careful what you select in here or else you'll wind up causing havoc for your wireless users.

Name your Wireless policy whatever you want, then go to the "Network Permissions" tab. Select the checkbox for "Don't allow hosted networks" and that will block the SoftAP feature.


Do not check the other boxes that I've marked in blue unless you want to lock down your users to only using your wireless APs (which will also block APs at airports, starbucks, etc). That "Only use group policy..." setting is bad news for your traveling employees.

Once these settings go into effect, the windows 7 clients may require a reboot or two before the changes kick in. These changes also will only work if they are using the default built in wlan client that comes with windows 7. (See checkbox setting on first tab of that policy window).

For more details on what these settings are:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd815243(VS.85).aspx

TFSWarehouse Event 3000 Failed to load adapter with SQL 2008 data tier

So I had my nice, mostly stable TFS implementation consisting of a SQL 2005 SP3 data tier and a TFS 2008 SP1 (9.0.30729.1) Application tier. I decided to upgrade the Data Tier to SQL 2008 since I'll need it to be there when we upgrade this year to TFS 2010. I followed Bill Wang's blog post http://billwg.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-to-upgrade-tfs-data-tier-to-sql.html

Everything went fine except the warehouse stopped refreshing. In the Event Log on the Application Tier I had this error:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: TFS Warehouse
Event Category: None
Event ID: 3000
Date: 2/3/2010
Time: 1:13:47 PM
User: N/A
Computer: TFS1
Description:
TF53010: The following error has occurred in a Team Foundation component or extension:
Date (UTC): 2/3/2010 6:13:47 PM
Machine: TFS1
Application Domain: /LM/W3SVC/3/Root/Warehouse-3-129096944229185149
Assembly: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Warehouse, Version=9.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a; v2.0.50727
Process Details:
Process Name: w3wp
Process Id: 5444
Thread Id: 5576
Account name: PS_NT\TFSSERVICE

Detailed Message: Failed to load adapter Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Warehouse.CommonStructureAdapter. Exception Info: \n System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.AnalysisServices, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

After much head-banging I realized that I hadn't upgraded the SQL Client Connectivity on the App Tier to 2008 to match. D'oh. After installing the SQL 2008 Connectivity and Management tools and rebooting, I went to the http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx and hit 'Run', then invoke to force the update. Then used the 'GetWarehouseStatus' to watch the Adapter running. Fixed.

Symantec Backup Exec 2010 first impressions

Now it may be too early to say, but so far I'm actually impressed with BE 2010 (Trial edition of course). Normally I'm pretty skeptical about new releases but after a colleague of mine told me that it fixed his backup issues with a 2008 x64 R2 Hyper-V machine I decided to give it a look over. He had that dreaded "Snapshot provider error (0xE000FED1): A failure occurred querying the Writer status." error. I set up a couple of test x64 servers in the lab with copies of the real VMs and loaded up BE 2010 and set it for some Disk to Disk tests. While I did get some GRT related errors even though I wasn't using GRT at the time, it still backed up the server images themselves.
As far as installation goes, the UI continues to improve with each release and it's pretty straightforward. Upgrading an existing BE 12.5 install was a breeze. The remote installation process has undergone a major makeover and now makes it easier to roll out multiple agents with different options selected. And to boot, it lists all the previously rolled out agents in the console. The management console is a bit more refined looking and they've integrated a lot of new little icons into the selection windows.

They've also added a few new agents that will be interesting to try (as soon as I get the budget). The DeDuplication agent could be useful for reducing backup sizes and the new Exchange archiving agent has potential as well.

As always, I recommend fully testing out any new software product in a test environment prior to rolling it out into production...

backup exec 12.5 stall - e0008821

So every once in a while one of my policy based disk to disk to tape backup jobs will just hang or stall forever. It's really nifty since it will go well beyond the auto-cancellation period - you know the ' stop job if it takes longer than x hours' checkbox. The first few times it happened I wound up having to restart the whole backup server to get the job to cancel since no amount of effort on the front end GUI would fix it. After reboot it would show the failed job with a generic error code of e0008821. I even tried restarting the server that the job status claimed it was working on at the time of the hang. After a few more tries it occurred to me that the job status was lying to me and that it may actually be trying to communicate with the next server on the backup list. So to the command prompt I went. The results of netstat -aon | more

show that the server is currently communicating with port 10000 on another server. The catch is that while the job status said it was working on server A, the netstat showed it was only talking to server B at the time. So I went to server B and restarted the backup Agent and my stalled job suddenly started proceeding again. Of course, this isn't a great long term fix but it's not unusual for backup agents to need a good kick start from time to time. It would be nice if it was better at auto-recovery...

Step by step creating a Shared Scope in Search Server 2008 and making it show up in the dropdown

So you've got your Search Server 2008 installed and working but you now want to get creative and add scopes to limit results. Seems reasonable enough. If you just try creating a scope from one of your site collections you may find that it doesn't give you any results when you try to use it and you get a nifty error message as well like "scope in your query does not exist".

So instead, you need to create a Shared scope and then make a copy of that scope in your site collection for it to work.

1. First create the shared scope from the Central Admin. Note the mode=ssp at the end!
http://YourServerName:yourportnumber/_layouts/viewscopesssp.aspx?mode=ssp
Click on New Scope, fill in the options and OK out of it.


2. You'll now see a that says Empty - Add Rules. Click on that. Here's where you'll set the limit on what sources you want results returned for. In my case, I chose content and limited my scope to only the sites my sharepoint server.

The finished Shared Scope should look like this:

3. You may or may not see a message saying that it will update in X minutes. If you see that, wait X minutes before continuing.

4. Now that you have your Shared Scope, go into one of your sites that you want to add this drop down to. (Yes, this will need to be done for every site that you want to add this to). Click Site Actions, Site Settings and under Site Collection Administration you should see "Search Scopes". If you don't, then log in as someone with more rights. Once you get into it, you should see a screen that by default has "Search Dropdown", "Advanced", and "Unused". At this point you'd love to be able to just drag it over and be done but alas, we're not there yet.
5. Click on the drop down arrow next to your Shared Scope and choose "Make copy"

6. Then click on the drop down arrow next to your new copy and click on Edit Properties and Rules.


7. You'll notice that unlike the Shared Scope, you can actually check the boxes for "Search Dropdown" and "Advanced Search". Rename the scope to what you want to display, check the boxes, and then click OK.


8. Now you should see your new copied scope show up in the right categories. You may or may not see a message saying that it will update in X minutes. If you see that, wait X minutes before continuing.

9. Now if you go into your site and refresh the page, you should see your new drop down option in the search box. (If you've created a "SearchCenter" page, remember to edit the WebPart first to actually show the drop down box.) Test it out to make sure it's working.

10. Now rinse, lather, and repeat the same for all the sites that you want this scope added to.

Credit where credit's due:
Aboo Bolaky's page - http://www.bolaky.net/?tag=/msse Good clue for finding the mode=ssp starting point.

And a thanks to the countless blogs out there that I used to set up search server 2008 in the first place! (It only took me 5 tries, thank heaven for virtual machines and rollback!)

Search Server 2008, ISA 2006, AAM, and why All Sites wasn't showing up externally

So I've had my WSS 3.0 SP2 site running for quite some time now and had all the publishing in place for ISA Server 2006 so my guys could get access to it remotely. I finally decided to try out Search Server 2008 Express which took a few tries to get installed correctly. (Thank heaven for virtual machines and snapshot rollback!). So now all my sites have an extra drop down under Search for "All Sites" and I now have a search center site collection for users to hit directly as well. Problem is, that it wasn't showing up externally and the search center site completely barfed for my external users.

At this point I was pretty sure AAM (Alternate Access Mapping) was involved but I just wasn't sure why Search was so special. It took a couple of hours but I figured it out. There's a ton of good websites out there that show you how to set up sharepoint and ISA server so I'm just going to focus on what I missed and skip the basics.

Mistakes:
1. I had never 'Extended' the Web Application. I only had a Default Zone Web Application.
2. My ISA publishing rule was using the Intranet Zone name for the server. Which means that all external users were being seen by the Sharepoint server as using the Intranet Zone even thought they were using the Internet address. (i.e. They typed in sharepoint.yourdomain.com and the ISA server sent on sharepoint.intranet.yourdomain.com). This was never a problem before search but it became one afterwards.


Warning: I am by no means an expert on Sharepoint, I just play one at work. The following comprises the most critical things I had to change to get mine to work. Always back up your systems before making changes to production environments.

So to fix it, I first went into Central Administration, Application Management and then "Create or Extend Web Application"



Then "Extend an Existing Web Application"


Then click the drop down for Web Application and make sure the right website is selected. Then fill in the port (in almost all cases its 80) and the Host Header (REQUIRED - since we'll be stacking onto the same Port as other Sites on the same server). I use Kerberos but if you haven't set up your SPNs then choose something else. Make sure to choose the Intranet zone (or whatever yours corresponds to)

Now either Restart IIS manually, or iisreset /noforce, or if you're bored reboot the whole server.
When it comes back you should be done. Test it from an external location.

For reference, here's my AAM settings (modified of course.) And I wouldn't worry if yours don't match exactly, sharepoint is just weird that way.



Note: If you had anything published on the original Default site, you'll need to duplicate it into the new Host Header site. i.e. /images or other static content, etc using the IIS Manager. It is, for all intents and purposes, a completely different site.

Useful References:
Microsoft reference - at the bottom talks about Extending Web Applications
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc268368.aspx

Tutorial on publishing sharepoint through ISA
http://www.isaserver.org/tutorials/How-to-Publish-Microsoft-Sharepoint-Service-ISA-Server-2006.html

AAM
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288609.aspx

More on extending
http://sharepointnotes.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/sharepoint-extranet-solutions-with-isa-server-2006-part-2-creating-the-extranet-web-application/

And more AAM
http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/matthew/archive/2008/05/19/search-results-and-aam.aspx