www.jayntguru.com » computer geek stuff

Microsoft, you HAVE to do a better job than this

jayntguru — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:54:44 +0000

Here’s an error from SCOM.

Performance data collection process was unable load SQL Server Authentication configuration information. Account for RunAs profile in workflow "Microsoft.SystemCenter.DataWarehouse.CollectPerformanceData", running for instance "INFMGT02.accessgeneral.com" with id:"{81890C12-35B3-7AEA-C0FF-3EFCA7486E97}" is not defined. Workflow will not be loaded. Please associate an account with the profile. Management group "Access"

OK guys WHICH profile? Come on.. how hard is this? I mean I can guess, and I have, and guess what? It has one associated.

.net health monitoring

jayntguru — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:32:33 +0000

This is a little blurb I use almost everywhere for almost everything that will log all sorts of useful info about a .net app in the application log. It will grab unhandled exceptions as well as application lifetime events (app pool or domain restarts, etc.) This is a really good one to use when your devs won’t add this to the code themselves! It will work (or has for me) straight up in any .net code. All you do is place this in the web.config.

SCOM 2007 R2 – workgroup/DMZ server notes

jayntguru — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:55:03 +0000

This is harder than it should be. Here are my notes on doing this.

1. On cert server go here: http://blah/certsrv/

2. request cert. choose type other and paste in the below OID

3. OID = 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.1,1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.2

4. Make sure to check key exportable. Make sure to use FQDN of server for name and common name.

5. Open up server mgt for certificate manager and approve.

6. Go back to website, install the cert.

7. Mmc, certificates for personal. Export the cert. make private key exportable.

8. Copy cert to client server.

9. On server do mmc for client, import cert, mark as exportable.

10. Run momcertimport on client, choose cert.

11. Restart system center manager service on client.

12. Wait a min and go to mom console, administration, pending management. Approve it.

13. Done!

Dear SCOM. You blew it

jayntguru — Sun, 30 May 2010 15:46:10 +0000

In case you weren’t aware, for SCOM to work against a non domain machine, all manner of certificates is required between the RMS and the agents in order for this to work. Not only is it required, but you have to use the fairly archaic tools provided with certificates, oh, and you will need your own certificate authority too. This is such a complete and utter #FAIL that I don’t really know where to start. Mainly my issue is that it doesn’t need to be this hard.. if someone wants to see the CPU time on my webserver, then by all means, hack in, but damn if I care enough to go through this level of work for it. And that brings me to my second issue, the shit just doesn’t work. Sure you could say this is a “rush it out the door” kinda thing, but this happened back in 2007 and there have been plenty of releases including an R2 version, yet still this useless and archaic process is still in place.

So in short, the SCOM guys failed by over-complicating something that isn’t needed, and then making it 10 times more difficult than necessary. FAIL.

Adsiedit.msc – where is it?

jayntguru — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:40:19 +0000

I was trying to use this and did not realize it was not installed. In order to get it you need to install the support tools. They are on the windows server 2003 cd, or can be downloaded here.

highpoint rocketraid and high cpu use

jayntguru — Fri, 14 May 2010 03:47:04 +0000

I have a Highpoint RockerRaid2310 in my server at the house. For some time I have had an issue with the “HighPoint RAID Management Service”, which runs an .exe called “hptsvr.exe”, which then runs “drvinst32.exe”, taking up a lot of cpu time. In my case the server was a quad core and it took 25% of the total CPU. Everything would work just fine, but this bothered me for a lot of reasons, so I would leave the service set to manual unless I needed to run the card’s management software. In that case I would start the service, do the management, then kill the offending .exe. Life went on.

Recently I decided I wanted to use more of the features of this card, so I went looking for a fix. There were several random internet posts about the problem but no one had a fix for it. Contacting HighPoint support seemed like the obvious thing to do, so that’s what I did, and they proved helpful.

In my case I was running the older management software, which was version 3.14.5. This was the latest version of it. I was also already running the latest version of the firmware (2.5) and windows driver (2.3). At the advice of HighPoint’s support, I switched to the web management software which is version 1.5.3. I did have an issue with the new software installing itself in the same directory as the old software, which broke my ability to uninstall the old stuff, so my recommendation if you do this is to uninstall the old version first. This has left an uninstall for the old version in add/remove and for now I’m just going to leave it, but that’s not hard to clean up.

So now life is good, I can schedule verify tasks, get emailed if a disk fails, all that good stuff. Basically, things are working as they should.

scom 2007 r2 cumulative update 2 (cu2) update notes

jayntguru — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:23:24 +0000

Download it here

Microsoft’s KB article on it

Installing it

Applying update to a clustered RMS

If the install fails and you need to run it again, this is where it installs it (on an x64 system)

C:\Program Files (x86)\System Center 2007 R2 Hotfix Utility\

If the install fails and you need to run it again, this is where it installs it (on a 32bit system)

C:\Program Files\System Center 2007 R2 Hotfix Utility\

If the install fails, this is probably why

IIS6 potential gotcha

jayntguru — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:35:58 +0000

If you install .net 2.0 before you install IIS6 then you will not be able to see .net 2 in the allowed extensions list because it needs to register with IIS. Here’s a screenshot where it is missing:

To resolve this, go to the following directory:

c:\windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727

Then run this command:

aspnet_regiis.exe –i

Now you can refresh the MMC and enable .net 2.0!

sysinternals updates + new site

jayntguru — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:06:44 +0000

I previously posted links to Mark Russinovich’s blog because he posts cool stuff about how windows really works and I think it’s interesting stuff. Anyway he has two new posts about GDI objects.

Also while reading these articles I saw a link to the NT Debugging blog. This one looks to be very interesting too in a similar way so I have added it to my rss reader.

windows dns server and EDns – update (added namebench info/link)

jayntguru — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:09:00 +0000

I have had an issue with DNS server in Windows 2003 server previously that’s covered pretty well in this article by my buddy Marcus. The short version is that EDNS is enabled by default on 2003 server, and this doesn’t play well with the rest of the internet, so it’s best to turn it off if you are using windows 2003 for external (internet) DNS.

Right now I’m working on a Windows 2008 R2 server and was having similar problems that made me check for EDNS many moons ago on 2003 server. This link came up in a search and it says that they made EDNS off in 2008 RTM, but it’s back on again in R2. He includes a link to Microsoft’s KB article about EDNS.

Luckily this is pretty easy to turn off. All you do is run this command:

dnscmd /config /enableednsprobes 0

I wanted to update this post with a link to a cool tool I have been using. It’s called name bench and it’s a DNS benchmarking tool. Works good, does exactly what you want, and the price is right.