John Howard - Senior Program Manager in the Hyper-V team at Microsoft : Windows Server 2003

Windows Desktop Search - Index network shares for faster searching

jhoward — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 19:51:00 GMT

Can't wait to get home tonight..... just saw a pointer to this download on microsoft.com which is an addin for Windows Desktop Search, supported on Windows Vista which provides indexing capability for network shares. Given I've got hundreds of GB of data sitting on network shares which I'm regularly searching (slowly), this will make life far easier for me. Hopefully for you too.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f7e981d9-5a3b-4872-a07e-220761e27283&displayLang=en

Cheers,
John.

How to remove a failed server from DFS in Windows Server 2003 R2

jhoward — Sat, 20 May 2006 18:12:00 GMT

This week has been a little strained, hence quiet on the blogging front. Apart from a hectic week at work (more to follow on that shortly), the reason was a "disaster" which happened late last Sunday evening - everything was working at home one moment, and dead the next.

Since the move over from the UK, I'm still in temporary accomodation. To save space, although my servers were couriered over, I didn't bring a monitor as all the monitors I owned only ran on 240v. The servers arrived a little shaken, but not too stirred - a few cards were loose, but no failed disks. Just a little prodding into place and they came back perfectly. Humming away for 6 weeks or so without fault.

If you've ever tried to figure out why a machine won't boot without a monitor attached, I know where you're coming from. Short answer is, it's next to impossible. It also happened that this machine was not just any machine, but a Domain Controller. And not just any domain controller, the domain controller holding all the FSMO roles for my home domain. Of course, it will probably come as no surprise to you it's also running a further 5 virtual machines including my website hosting, ISA and Exchange. So yes, it was somewhat of a disaster.

On Monday morning, I took the machine into the office and with a monitor attached, it was obvious it was continually rebooting (off both plexes in the boot mirror) before the GUI portion of the boot came up. Safe mode, last known good gave same symptoms. Similarly, boot logging didn't help as the boot log doesn't get written to disk until the GUI part of the boot comes up.

I borrowed another disk from Ben, plugged it in and installed XP SP2 (only 32 bit OS immediately to hand). However, during the first boot, it blue-screened. Sure enough, there was a problem with the hardware - either motherboard or memory.

Running a memory tester showed something wrong with one or more of the (expensive!) ECC memory slots. I saw a big bill coming :(. It was a tedious process of elimination by swapping DIMMs around until the failed chip or chips was identified. That at least got to the point of XP booting. Attempting to boot back with the failed DIMM removed (actually a pair as the system needs matched pairs), same symptoms as before. At this point, going back to XP, I discovered XP didn't have drivers for the RAID SCSI Controller for the system boot disk and worse, none were available. Onto plan B for recovery.

I re-installed a Windows Server 2003 on the loan disk with the recovery console enabled to attempt to see what was going on. Chkdsk showed the SCSI disks being corrupt and the mirror needing repair. Fixing those still wasn't getting past the text mode part of the boot.

Not being one to give up, I took the machine home on Monday night. During the day, my wife had bought a second hand 17" monitor for $20.00 - given it's in next to perfect condition, I thought that was pretty good value.

From the recovery console of Windows Server installed on the loan disk, I spent two very long and tedious evenings going through disabling drivers one-by-one in the hope I'd find the driver failing to load - every time the same 0x0000007b with 0xc000007b in the parameter list - inaccessible_boot_disk.

Well, two days later I did give up. In some ways I'm glad I did - when I took the decision to blow away the machine for real, I discovered the disks were also corrupt in some way - both of them. Blue screens on reinstall. Possibly the RAID controller? Nope, tried a spare one too :( Anyway, I've more disks on order and more memory on order - at least they're much cheaper in the US than in the UK.

In the meantime, with reduced RAM, on the loan disk I at least got the ISA server and the Exchange server back running. Cleaning up AD to seize the FSMO roles which were held by the previous installation is easy enough (http://support.microsoft.com/?id=255504). They're now safely on a Virtual domain controller running on another server.

However, there was one interesting side effect relating to DFS in Windows Server 2003 R2. Yes, the machine also was a file server replicating to another server using RDC using domain based DFS. Some of the DFS roots had the now decommissioned server as the preferred target. What this unfortunately means is that when you go into the DFS console from another machine (either another server or from an XP machine with the console installed), when examining the DFS Root, you get the error below: \\domain.com\share: The namespace cannot be queried. The RPC server is unavailable.

This only happens on roots which were configured to have the failed server as the preferred target. Clients were still OK accessing the still working server as they failed over automatically

So, from the File Server Management Console, you're stuck - you can't remove the failed server. However, you can use the command line utility, dfsutil to forceably remove it.

First, run dfsutil /root:\\domain.com\share /export:share.txt

Share.txt will look something like

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Root Name="\\DOMAIN\Share" State="1" Timeout="300" >
<Target Server="FAILEDSERVER" Folder="Share" State="2"/>
<Target Server="GOODSERVER" Folder="Share" State="2"/>
</Root>

To delete the failedserver, and remember this is a last ditch thing, run (on one line)

dfsutil /unmapftroot /root:\\domain\share
/server:failedserver /share:share

You're now close. To make this work, you must have access to the share on a good server. You must also bounce (at least I had to) the DFS Replication service on the good server AND restart the File Server Management Console. However, once done, everything will be good again. Just need to re-introduce the new server once the new disks arrive.

So now you know one reason why it's been a quiet week of blogging!
Cheers,
John.

Internet Explorer Tip - Open new window

jhoward — Tue, 09 May 2006 16:18:00 GMT

Here's a tip I learnt a couple of months ago and meant to post up before - totally forgot. Maybe it's force of habit, but rather than opening a new instance Internet Explorer, going to the address bar and typing in a web page, it's quicker to do start/run (ie Windows+R) www.microsoft.com instead. No, that's not the tip (but useful if you're doing it the long way now!).

The problem with the start/run way is probably due to my messy desktop - I already have the start bar expanded to allow for two rows of window icons and can't get used to the grouping of icons on the start bar - it's not uncommon to have 18 windows simultaneously (I just counted). Several of them are usually IE instances (and most of those with multiple tabs). Start/run will "hijack" the first started IE instance and lose your current page (which I usually want). Worse, the instance it hijacked may be a "pop-up" style window, either not re-sizeable or without toolbars. Not the end of the world as you can still click Alt-Left and go back, but it then means you have to do things the long way again.

The answer is to rather than start/run www.microsoft.com you do start/run explorer http://www.microsoft.com. OK, so the astute may be thinking here this isn't much of a shortcut - thats 16 extra keystrokes ("explorer http://") - yes, you must include the http:// prefix :(. However, you can get that down to 2 extra characters by creating e.cmd somewhere in your path (eg \windows\system32) containing 2 lines:

explorer http://%1
exit

Then you can do just start/run e www.microsoft.com. Of course, you can take this much further by parsing %1 parameter in the batch file (or using a VBScript). How about looking to see if theres a www prefix missing and adding it - similarly, the .com. Now there's a thought - start/run e microsoft. Only just crossed my mind as I'm typing this. Hmmmm! Definitely on my list of things to do.

Now, if I can only find a way of doing this in a way which finds a suitable IE Windows (ie resizeable with toolbars and address bar), adds a tab to it and navigates that tab to the URL, I'll be even happier...

Hope that helps someone.
Cheers,
John.

DHCP Client service required for Dynamic DNS Registration

jhoward — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 18:43:00 GMT

One of those oddities I discovered a couple of days ago after trying to tune down my IIS box which is configured with a static IP address. I stopped the DHCP Client service as I figured (incorrectly) that it wouldn't be needed due to not using DHCP for that server. I didn't notice a problem until I tried accessing the website externally the next day. Once you stop the DHCP Client service, there isn't an immediate problem as the DNS server still had the unexpired registration - however, as soon as that expired, the IIS server effectively fell off the network as it's name could not be resolved internally.

The error I was seeing was when accessing a web-site hosted on that IIS server externally. The network looks a bit like this:

Client -> Internet -> ISA Server -> IIS

When accessing the website, the ISA server returns an error to the client along the lines that it could not locate the upstream server. The ISA Server's web-publishing rule says that to forward requests from www.myexternaldomain.com to iis.myinternaldomain.com (names substituted obviously).

When trying to diagnose why the problem was happening, it's worth mentioning I have three DNS servers internally, all replicating among them. Unfortunately, what I didn't realise (bad Admin, slap wrists again) that one of them wasn't replicating fully. Hence, from the ISA firewall, an nslookup to find iis.myinternaldomain.com worked. I didn't point nslookup at the other two servers, or run a netdiag as it appeared to be OK. I could also ping the machine from the firewall so it involved a bit of headscratching.

What was even stranger from a diagnosis point of view was that from a client, I could point Internet Explorer at iis.myinternaldomain.com and the site appeared. It was only when I went to the IIS box itself which happened to be pointing at a different DNS server, I realised on an nslookup that there was a DNS problem - the record wasn't present on that DNS Server. Now why the firewall default DNS server thought the record was present, yet when accessing it through the ISA Server, it failed to find it, I've no idea.

Anyway, the moral of this story is, don't stop the DHCP client on a server if you want to be able to find your server through DNS at a later time. There's a related KB article I found here.

Hope this helps someone.
Cheers,
John.

Hands-on Windows OS Internals and Advanced Troubleshooting

jhoward — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 18:26:00 GMT

I received an email from David Solomon - author of Windows Internals this morning. By amazing coincidence, I happened to have a copy of it open and reading it just as the email came in. David & his colleage, Mark Russinovich regularly give courses to folks in the Windows Core OS Division here in Redmond as part of a standard "getting up to speed" induction.

David just let me know that on 26th-30th June there will be a course running in London. Registration for that can be found here. From the people on campus I've spoken to who've been on this course, they highly recommend it.

Here's the full details:

Hands-on Windows OS Internals & Advanced Troubleshooting w/Russinovich and Solomon

If you like Sysinternals or the book Windows Internals, then you'll want to attend a hands-on (bring your own laptop) Windows internals & advanced troubleshooting class, taught by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon. Topics include: crash dump analysis, advanced process and thread troubleshooting, memory management internals, security internals, boot process and troubleshooting, I/O system. Now updated to cover (Windows) Vista!

Cheers
John.

SMS 2003 R2 Public Beta

jhoward — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 17:12:00 GMT

Just thought it was worth mentioning this - another "R2" joins the fold, hot on the heals of Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Windows Server 2003 R2. This time it's SMS which gets a refresh. SMS isn't really a product I can hold my hand up and say I know well, but I'm installing the R2 beta in a virtual machine as I type. Lots of information is available here where the instructions for beta-programme participation and download links can also be found.

Shadow Copy Client Download

jhoward — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 11:11:00 GMT

I was on the train a few days ago and ended up chatting to some guy (apologies, I'm terrible with names) about stuff which inevitably deviated into technology - of course we got to the bit when I mentioned I worked for Microsoft. His relatively small company continues to run Windows Professional 2000 on the client side, with Windows Server 2003 for servers. However, one thing he did want was the ability to be able to use shadow-copies on those clients. As it ships, Windows 2000 Professional did not have the client side capabilities to be able view those previous versions generated through shadow copies. I said to him I'd dig out the link and here it is: If you have Windows 2000 SP3 or later, this download will add the capability, but there are other downloads on that page for earlier versions of Windows too.

Good talking to you!
Cheers,

John.

Clear Read-Only Attributes in bulk

jhoward — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 15:49:00 GMT

There's often those situations where you need to clear read-only attributes from a directory tree in bulk. In the past, having been a command line junkie and developer, I've used the attrib command with the /S parameter to include sub-directories as I've invariably had three or four command prompts open simultaneously. Those days have moved on, and the therapy has made me cut down to a maximum of two prompts at a time :) (It's obviously working as there's only one open at the moment!)

While command prompts work for many people, I came across a utility a few years ago which extends the context menu for the Explorer shell which does the same thing. It shows how my mindset has changed - the machine I needed to change the attributes from didn't have the utility installed. It didn't even cross my mind until posting this about opening a command prompt - a quick Internet search to find the utility was my immediate thought and solution I used. Useful also as it works right across the board - from Windows 95 to Windows Server 2003.

Here's the download link: http://davidcrowell.com/Croa.aspx

Windows Server 2003 R2 Availability

jhoward — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 13:14:00 GMT

I thought this was a good time to remind you - if you've been waiting for Windows Server 2003 R2, there really isn't much longer to wait. From February, Windows Server 2003 R2 will be on the Volume Licence price list, in Select and MSDN disk shipments and also available through OEM/Retail/Channel Partners. For completeness, the "R2" product names are below.

   Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 R2, Standard Edition
   Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 R2, Enterprise Edition
   Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 R2, Datacenter Edition
   Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 R2, Standard x64 Edition
   Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 R2, Enterprise x64 Edition
   Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 R2, Datacenter x64 Edition

IT Forum Highlights in Reading

jhoward — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 17:58:00 GMT

For those of you who were unable to attend IT Forum 2005 in November, a quick reminder that there are two full-day events re-running some of the most popular content. This will be held on the Microsoft Campus in Reading. The registration links are below - I know they are close to filling up, but if you want to go, please add your name to the waiting list. Similarly, if you are already booked but know you won't be able to make the day, please make sure you cancel your place to allow someone else to attend instead.

31st January: Topics include SQL Server 2005, ISA Server, Windows Server 2003 R2, MOM Management Packs & Virtual Server 2005 R2

9th February: Topics include Exchange 12, Security Configuration Wizard, Monad, Mobility and Windows Vista

Shadow Copies to the rescue - DFS-R killed my data

jhoward — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 12:27:00 GMT

Yesterday, I finally got round to plugging the new disks I bought back from Seattle into one of my servers which is destined to become a main file server at home. I have one share containing around 60GB of data and used the new DFS-N and DFS-R capability in Windows Server 2003 R2 to copy the data from the existing server to the new server. Simply a case of using DFS-N to add a second namespace server, and then use DFS-R to create an exact mirror, ACLs and all. Yes, takes a while to wait while 60GB of data is replicated, but come back a couple of hours later and it was all done. Therein probably also lies the "problem" (as in PEBCAK).

The next thing I did was to delete all the data from the share on the old server - don't need that anymore now it's migrated and shared from the new disks on the other server, do I? Well, yes, actually I do. Having DFS-R doing (by default) two-way replication between the servers means that any deleted data from one server is - yes, you guessed - also deleted from the other server. Also, the DFS Conflict/Deleted bucket threshold is nowhere near big enough to hold all 60GB of data. At this point, I was worried - very worried really. I have some older backups of this particular data, but it isn't "critical" - almost all of it was music ripped from my CDs and vinal, plus a few movies, painstakingly cataloged over a few years. Easy enough to restore if I had the energy and by not backing up it saves a huge amount of DVDs and time - it's on hardware RAID after all. (BTW - all critical data I do backup up!).

This morning, I was thinking about how to recover the data using one of those NTFS file recovery programs for example, but realised the trump card. I had enabled shadow copies enabled on the volume holding the data - albeit I had set the threshold to 50GB of data (default is 14GB iirc), so although I will have lost a small amount of data, it's better than nothing. Time to turn the threshold limit off, I think and dig out the old vinal....

FSRM (File Server Resource Manager) in Windows Server 2003 R2 FAQ

jhoward — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 18:34:00 GMT

Thought this was worth sharing as it came up on an internal discussion a few days ago. To find out more about FSRM in Windows Server 2003 R2, take a look here. Questions were being asked like, if a user kicked of a robocopy, for example, copying thousands of files all of which fail screening/quotas etc. FSRM can be configured to send emails on failures, but what would happen in these cirumstances - would an admin receive thousands of emails, on for each failure? Would the emails be concatenated into a single email? What would happen if the SMTP server were out?

Well it turns out that FSRM throttles all notification types, whether it be email, event log or anything else. The default throttling is 1 hour and is throttled per folder which has quota or screening settings. Therefore, if a file-copy were to violates the same screening rule, only one email per hour would be sent, and similarly logged to the event viewer. You can control the throttling per folder through the command-line interface utilities for FSRM, such as filescrn for screening. FSRM does not however retry if the SMTP server is out when a notification email needs to go out. Last interesting point, FSRM also sends WMI events - these are not throttled.

I haven't come across official documentation which goes into depth about throttling (I'm sure it does exist somewhere though), so hopefully this will help someone.

Backing up Windows Sharepoint Services

jhoward — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 16:55:00 GMT

Although I have a fair few ideas as to mini-projects to complete over the Christmas & New Year holiday, it will probably come as no surprise to many of you that there is always the possibility that family will get in the way ;) On the assumption that I can find enough excuses, one thing I've prepped over the past few days is a base VM of Windows Server 2003 R2. One instance is, as of this morning, running Windows Sharepoint Services. WSS isn't a product I've really looked at a great deal before, and before I start putting anything important on it, the first consideration is how can I back it up if disaster strikes. Fortunately, I found a good answer here which I'll try out.

Funny that WSS stands for so many things now: First it was the Web Storage System as implemented in Exchange 2000 and just after, in the original Sharepoint Portal Server. Then it was (and is still) Windows Server System. And now a third. I think there must be a world-shortage of TLA's...

And here's just some of the other projects on my to-do list this Christmas:

Complete my SQL 2000 -> SQL 2005 migration
Implement IPSec
Complete the VPN quarantine project which fell by the wayside a little
Try out Exchange 12 Beta
Implement SMS
Read new WMI Scripting book

And on Santa's wish list:

XBox 360
Another 4GB of RAM and a second Xeon processor :)
Bunch of SATAII drives with RAID card. 10x250GB should last a few months :)

And on Santa's actual list (probably)

Socks, Aftershave :(

Have a great Christmas & New Years celebration everyone. I'm back online on 3rd Jan next year.
Cheers,
John.

Part 25: Infrastructure essentials Blogcast - RPC/HTTP for Outlook & Exchange - Integrated Auth

jhoward — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 11:45:00 GMT

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials.

The final part to the RPC/HTTPS series shows you how to alter the configuration we have such that Outlook 2003 can move seamlessly between external and internal connectivity through the use of integrated authentication. To do this, we need to change both the ISA server and the Exchange server. The overall end user experience, as you will see, is far better.

So over the Christmas break, I'll get round to recording a few more parts to the series, including VPN connectivity.
Click here to view.

Series Index:

0. Network configuration and series background.
1. Getting started
2. ISA Server configuration to allow basic web browsing capability
3. ISA Firewall Client basic configuration
4. ISA Firewall Client auto-detection through WPAD configuration
5. Configuring an Exchange mailbox and Outlook profile
6. Fixing 0x8004010F on Outlook send/receive
7. Installing our first Certificate Authority
8. Publishing OWA through ISA using Forms Based Authentication
9. OWA /exchange redirection
10. OWA nearly goes SSL - we have a certificate
11. OWA is available over SSL/HTTPS
12. Sending external email - Configuring outbound SMTP
13. Mail retrieval through POP3 polling
14. Preparations for Email retrieval through SMTP Transfer
15. Completing Email retrieval through SMTP Transfer
16. RPC/HTTP: Overview and installing RPC Proxy component
17. RPC/HTTP: IIS Config and a bit on certificates
18. RPC/HTTP: Exchange IIS Config completion
19. RPC/HTTP: Working from internal network
20. RPC/HTTP: Revisiting our ISA rules
21. RPC/HTTP: Outlook working externally. OWA still requires more work
22. RPC/HTTP: Bounce OWA through localhost
23. RPC/HTTP: OWA Back to HTTPS
24. RPC/HTTP: RPC Publication

Windows Server 2003 R2 Print Management Console - what can it manage?

jhoward — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 11:35:00 GMT

A few other queries have been filtering through since Windows Server 2003 R2 went "RTM" last week. One such query relates to whether the Print Management Console in Windows Server 2003 R2 can only manage printers which are on print servers running Windows Server 2003 R2. This is not the case. Only the server(s) running the Print Management Console need to be running Windows Server 2003 R2.