Archive for August, 2012
How to upgrade StorageCraft ShadowProtect to the most current version
Wednesday, August 29th, 2012
StorageCraft have this week released 4.2.7.19756 of ShadowProtect. Now I’m in the task of testing it on a few of our test and production systems before we launch into an upgrade across all of our client sites. Here’s how I do it.
First up – review the release notes. It looks like they are putting them here now. You want to verify what is being fixed to know if this is something you want to apply to your systems. It also gives you ideas on areas that you will want to specifically test after the upgrade.
Also – note that you can only do an in place upgrade from version 4.1.5 onwards. If you have a version prior to 4.0.5, then you uninstall and reinstall and reconfigure the product to get to the latest version.
Now disable any backup jobs you have on the system you are going to upgrade as below.
Next, Disable any antivirus software you have on your system – this ensures that nothing prevents the installer from replacing the critical files it needs to replace.
After that it’s a simple matter of running the installer and clicking your way through it as you can see with the screenshots below.
You might wonder what the difference is between English and English (Australia, New Zealand) – long story short, the Aussie StorageCraft guys have a cool utility called SPDiagnostics that is installed with the Aussie/NZ edition – I highly recommend it.
The screen above is an additional license agreement for the SPDiagnostic as it comes from a different team within StorageCraft.
After the reboot – verify the version as below
Then enable the job and do an incremental backup to make sure it’s all good.
Tags: ShadowProtect, StorageCraft, Upgrades
Posted in Blog | 2 Comments »
Troubleshooting ShadowProtect Backups–Continuous Incremental Backups
Tuesday, August 28th, 2012
Here’s a few tips for troubleshooting backup failures when using StorageCraft ShadowProtect that I’ve developed.
Clarify the exact error message – you can get this from the backup job itself, if you select the backup job and then select the Details button.
Verify the existing backup image – when doing continuous incremental backups, the next backup you do relies on not only the base image being accurate, but the entire image chain being accurate and verifiable. You should run a Verify Image job from the Tools menu in ShadowProtect console. When you do this, ensure that you verify the entire image chain from the newest to oldest image. It can take a while to run, but once it’s run it’s verified not only the image, but also the access to that entire image chain. If it fails verification of this image then you either have a corrupt image or the access to the image is not what is needed for ShadowProtect to work correctly.
Collect Log files – if you can’t resolve the issue then you need to collect the relevant log files. They are located in the C:\Program Files (x86)\StorageCraft\ShadowProtect\Logs folder – zip this up and provide it to support so that they can assist you further.
Spdiagnostics – this is a tool located in the C:\Program Files (x86)\StorageCraft\ShadowProtect\SupportOnly folder. You can run the runsupportmode.cmd file and it will package up the log files as well as give you a review of your system for known issues.
Tags: ShadowProtect
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »
No–I don’t want Chrome with my Flash Player Upgrade
Monday, August 27th, 2012
One of my pet peeves is software such as Adobe’s various IE addins, that try to force upon me other browsers such as Chrome / Firefox. This mornings latest thing is that Adobe Flash Player has released an update. When I attempt to install the update, as you can see below they have decided that the default is that “Yes – I want Chrome and not only that, I must want Google Toolbar for IE”.
This type of thing is really not appropriate. For a starter, if I wanted Chrome, why would I ALSO want them to put in the Google Toolbar for IE? I use one browser only – Internet Explorer – like it or not that’s what I use. I do that because I KNOW that any patches for it will come down via my patch management systems (be it WSUS on SBS or my Kaseya system), and I’ll be patched. Why would I want to put in a third party browser that is not tied into that system for patch management? That would leave me exposed for potential backdoor security vulnerabilities which is not good practices.
Secondly, I worry about my Mum. Yup – my Mum and all the semi literate computer users out there like her. She would have no idea what this means and she’d do as instructed and install the things that she does not need. Not only that, changing her default browser to Chrome would really confuse the heck out of her and it would lead her to wonder what happened. Sorry Adobe – that’s just not right.
I wish that there was some way I could say “I’m happy with what I’ve got – just give me the updates for Flash Player that relate to IE and NEVER bother trying to force anything else onto me”… but there’s not. Maybe software vendors will get a clue and give us what we want, not what THEY think we need.
What pet peeves do you have?
Tags: Adobe, Rants
Posted in Blog | 3 Comments »
Help – My Exchange Services are Disabled!
Friday, August 24th, 2012
Ok – so this has been seen a few times now. Long story short though is that when Exchange applies a Service Pack or Update Rollup, it sets a number of services to Disabled so that it can replace the exes involved. I’ve seen it where for whatever reason however the installation fails without notice. You think everything is ok till you reboot it and then you find out nothing works. For the record – here’s a list of services that Exchange Disables and their normal state. If you are faced with this issue, best advice is to set the services to the correct state, reboot and then try the Service Pack or Update Rollup again
Below are list of the services that will get disabled during the application of Exchange Service Packs and Update Rollups. You can now see which state they should be in should you have this problem.
Now – also for good measure here are my Trend WFBS Services
Tags: Exchange Server, Troubleshooting
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Windows Server 2012 Essentials Release Candidate available for download now
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012
Windows Server 2012 Essentials aka the next generation of what was SBS, is now available for download from Microsoft. They announced the RC release here overnight.
I’ve been doing quite some testing with this and it shows some real promise as a product for what could be something wonderful. The biggest concern I have now with the product is the pricing for those that wish to grow above 25 users or those that wish to have an onpremise Exchange server rather than use a cloud hosted solution.
Check it out and see whats new and changed in this. It’s going to be the Microsoft product if you wish to support SMB clients moving forward.
Tags: Beta Product, Future Products, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 Essentials
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Free collection of eBooks from Microsoft
Tuesday, August 21st, 2012
This came across my desk a few weeks back, but I thought I’d post about it after I had a chance to look over it. It’s good value – i.e. free and you can’t knock that. Now a number of these books are developer focused, but there’s still some great content in there for non developers too.
Here’s the two posts where you can get your free Microsoft eBooks from
Tags: Free Stuff
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
How to troubleshoot slow Internet surfing.
Monday, August 20th, 2012
There’s a lot of things that go on under the covers of a domain joined computer that you just don’t realise most of the time. One of the recent things I was involved in today was the investigation of a client network that had slow internet. Here’s how the problem was investigated.
- From the users desktop – see exactly how the problem manifests itself. For example, if it’s surfing to certain sites, note down exactly what sites the problem occurs with and what pages. You need to do this so you’ve got a very clear understanding of the issue before you start to investigate. Always do your tests from a clean reboot with no other programs open – that way you get more consistent results.
- Now run an Internet Speed test – I use www.speedtest.net for the most part is it gives some reasonably consistent results all round. Note the results.
- Once you’ve got your baseline for the problem – look at the basics. DNS is one of the most common things – so check to see if DNS name resolution is fast or slow. That’s easier said than done, so we’ll cheat for a moment. Change the TCP/IP DNS settings on this machine to point to an external DNS server – say Googles DNS servers 8.8.8.8 but don’t reboot the machine. Do your tests – that you did in Step 1 – is there an improvement? If so all you’ve proved at this point is that the DNS server that this machine was pointing to is not responding fast enough or not responding at all. If there is an improvement DO NOT leave the DNS pointing to the external DNS server. That’s going to then break your computers membership of the Active Directory domain over time.
- Given you found that changing the client computers DNS to point to the ISP or Google fixed it, you need to focus on the DNS server on that the client was pointing to originally – most likely it’s your domain controller in a small business or small business server environment. Check to see that the DNS server service is running correctly. Review the configuration of the DNS server itself. The DNS server itself will have one of three ways to resolve DNS records for any client requesting DNS resolution.
- Method one of DNS is via direct lookup in the DNS zones stored on the DNS server itself. This is typically limited to the internal AD zones that have been built as part of AD, but it might also extend to any other zones that have been created in the DNS Server itself.
- Method two of DNS resolution is where the DNS server will forward all requests it can’t answer itself to a 2nd DNS server. This is known as DNS forwarding and you can see this on the DNS forwarders tab of the DNS servers properties in the DNS MMC. If there is a server listed there, then you need to consider if that server is working correctly. The easiest way to do this is to remove it and substitute a known good server as we did before – why not use the ISP’s DNS or the Google DNS server 8.8.8.8. If that works then you’ve nailed the problem to being linked to that server.
- Method three of DNS resolution is where any of the above fail, there is the option (depending on the DNS servers configuration) for the DNS server to use Root Hints. Root Hints is a list of DNS servers that are the root of the Internets DNS fabric. This list is stored on the DNS server and you can see it on the Root Hints tab. Make sure that it’s populated of course as I have seen it be empty before which means nothing works at all.
Ok – hope that’s been helpful to you – let me know if there are more things like this that can help you investigate and troubleshoot better.
Tags: Troubleshooting
Posted in FAQs | No Comments »
Performance Testing Windows Servers as a NAS
Friday, August 17th, 2012
Over the last two nights, I’ve shown you performance testing I’ve done on non Windows based NAS devices, Windows based NAS devices and now tonight, on pure Windows Servers.
In my test environment I’ve got a couple of servers configured as just Windows Servers, ie – no Domain Controller roles or anything else.
- HP ML110G6 – this has 2 x 250GB SATA drives in a RAID 1 configuration with a P212 controller and 256MB cache. The cache is configured as 25% Read / 75% Write. It’s running Windows Server 2008 R2.
- HP ML 330G6 – this has 4 x 1.5TB SATA drives in a RAID 5 configuration on a P410I with 512MB BBWC. The cache is configured as 25% Read / 75% Write. It’s running Windows Server 2012 Standard.
Here’s the results.
|
Device |
Time |
Speed |
| HP ML110 G6 | 31m 16s | 66.35MB/s |
| HP ML330 G6 | 30m 52s | 67.02MB/s |
I also have an ML350G5 with 6 x 1.5TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration running Windows Server 2008 R2. I ran the same tests as above, and got a speed of 73.56MB/s. I didn’t however include them in the tables as I had removed a large amount of data from the C: drive of my test system before backing it up which would make the time taken to be inaccurate in that format. It does however show that more spindles does get a “little” more performance in this scenario. I’ll be replacing the C: drive in my desktop with an SSD soon and I’ll see if these test results vary much.
Tags: HP, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Performance testing Windows based NAS devices
Thursday, August 16th, 2012
Following on from last nights article about Performance Testing of non Windows based NAS devices, tonight, I’ll give you some results of some of the NAS devices that are based on Windows. As I said last night, this is all about getting a general feel for the performance of these devices vs categorical winners and losers and it’s based on what I happen to have in my lab / production network right now.
Currently I’ve got the following devices in my environment.
- Buffalo TerraStation Pro WSS – this device has 4 x 1TB drives in a Windows software based RAID 5 configuration. It runs Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Workgroup Edition. I did a review of this device here if you are interested
- HP Microserver – this is a Windows NAS device that I built myself. It has 4 x 2TB drives in it, but I’ve not configured it with any kind of RAID, therefore the testing is based on a single 2TB drive.
- Western Digital Sentinel DX4000 – I’ve got two of these here, one has 4 x 3TB drives in a RAID 5, and the other has 4 x 2TB drives. My testing is done on the 4 x 3TB unit. This runs Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. There’s a review of this device here.
Here’s the results of my testing
|
Device |
Time |
Speed |
|
Buffalo TerraStation Pro WSS |
36m 10s |
60.63MB/s |
|
HP Microserver |
29m 56s |
69.10 MB/s |
|
WD Sentinel DX 4000 |
33m 16s |
59.72MB.s |
Not sure what I can draw from these results other than they are all pretty similar all in all.
I’m busy testing Windows Servers right now for the next post 
Tags: Buffalo, HP, Microserver, Western Digital
Posted in Blog | No Comments »
Performance Testing non Windows based NAS devices
Wednesday, August 15th, 2012
I decided to do some very basic performance testing of non Windows based NAS devices that I’ve got here at in my lab / production network. The aim of this is not to come up with a winner or loser, but to understand what levels of performance I might expect from these NAS devices. I’ll break this testing up into two categories, and tonight’s blog post will feature the non Windows based NAS devices I have. A future blog post will focus on Windows based NAS devices as well as Windows based Servers.
Currently I’ve got the following devices in my environment.
- Western Digital MyBookLive 2TB – this has a single 2TB drive with no redundancy at all. Very basic, and just what you can get on a real budget. There’s a lot more features to this device than just an SMB target, but I’ll go into those in a full review of it later.
- QNAP TS 410 – this has 4 x 2TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration. It can do a whole lot more than just be an SMB target, but for now that’s all I need from it.
- Buffalo Link Station – this has 3 x 1.5TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration. I bought this some time back as it was on special from Harris Technology, and I wanted to see what you could do with a 4 bay unit but only have 3 drives spare to put into it for the moment. This is one of the first tests I’ve done.
Now I’m going to start of by saying that these tests are NOT equal. Aside from the source machine being my desktop PC, and using ShadowProtect to backup the C: drive, there are many other variations to the configuration. The intention on this is NOT to give categorical winner/loser, but to get a feel for performance. I configured an SMB share on each of the devices and then used ShadowProtect to backup my desktop to it. My desktop has around 121GB data on it’s C: drive, so it’s a good candidate for an average desktop.
Ok – so the results of the test are as follows
|
Device |
Time |
Speed |
|
WD MyBookLive |
45m 1s |
45.68MB/s |
|
QNAP TS410 |
55m 19s |
37.36MB/s |
|
Buffalo Link Station |
48m 48s |
45.26MB/s |
What does this tell me? Well in all likelihood if you want the fastest backup, then a single drive is probably the way to go. Any form of RAID seems to lessen the performance a little, but interestingly the Buffalo did well with a 3 drive RAID5 array – that surprised me.
So – there you have it – some idea of how fast you can expect from some of these devices when used as a ShadowProtect target. There’s quite a few other tests that I plan to do with this such as using them as FTP targets for ImageManager, but that will come later.
If any vendor out there wants to loan me a device for testing, I’m more than happy to put it through it’s paces 
Tags: Buffalo, NAS, Performance, QNAP, ShadowProtect, Storage, StorageCraft, Western Digital
Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »