Posts Tagged ‘Windows Server 2008’

Are you running Windows Server 2008 SP2 yet?

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Straight up question – no matter if you are on SBS 2008 or not, if you are not yet running Service Pack 2 on your Windows Server 2008 installation you should get moving and upgrade to it. 

Why?  Because it fixes so many issues that affect other third party products and the stability of your server.  Take the biggest example is the TDI Driver fix here.  Without this fix, your SBS 2008 server that has AV installed such as Trend Micro WFBS 6.0 or other AV solutions, will randomly “lock up” every 7 days or so due to a bug in the Microsoft TDI driver.  I’ve heard Microsoft blame Trend for this, and then later Trend blame Microsoft – end result is our clients being caught in the middle.

Long story short – upgrade your Windows Server 2008 to Service Pack 2 ASAP to avoid the issues.

I believe that vendors such as Trend Micro who can be greatly affected by NOT having things such as Service Pack 2 installed, should make this SP a mandatory item for their product installations.

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Server goes offline without warning

Friday, February 5th, 2010

I’ve recently helped investigate a number of SBS 2008 and Windows 2008 servers that have gone offline and have things like DHCP not working, unable to access network drives and the like.  Two common threads on these servers were that they both had TrendMicro WFBS 6.0 installed as well as IT Control Suite for the resellers to manage them.

After much investigation I found the issue was related to the Windows Firewall which seemed to go crazy and prevented proper communication to the server.  I checked with my buddies in CSS at Microsoft (thanks Damian) and they suggested I look at the firewall rules in the registry at the location below. 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\FirewallRules

).

"{DDC8B132-3BFA-4588-8F88-575668C5C025}"="v2.0|Action=Allow|Active=TRUE|Dir=In|App=c:\\windows\\itcvnc\\itcvnc.exe|Name=VNC APP|Edge=FALSE|"

"{DC0E3700-04D7-4001-A8DB-D306D99CB33B}"="v2.0|Action=Allow|Active=TRUE|Dir=In|App=C:\\Program Files (x86)\\itControl Connector\\daemon.exe|Name=itcs FileServer|Edge=FALSE|"

When I did – on one server I found it took over 35 minutes to expand and list that registry key. It then showed me over 98,000 rules that were duplicates.  All of them created by the IT Control Suite application.  Deleting 98,000 rules is painful to be sure, but can be done and once gone the problem was fixed… for a while.  It appears that the IT Control Suite application was creating them for some reason without checking if they first existed. 

I’ve spoken to IT Control Suite and they’ve found a fix, but are only deploying it to customers who report the problem to them… I’m sorry but that’s not good enough.  I find it inexcusable for a vendor who KNOWS of a problem, has a way to DETECT the problem and yet will not AUTOMATICALLY push out a fix to their clients… instead waiting for them to call.  Honestly – I’m not happy with that arrangement and would hope for their customers sake they think long and hard about that.. it will lose them customers…

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Server goes offline without warning

Friday, February 5th, 2010

I’ve recently helped investigate a number of SBS 2008 and Windows 2008 servers that have gone offline and have things like DHCP not working, unable to access network drives and the like.  Two common threads on these servers were that they both had TrendMicro WFBS 6.0 installed as well as IT Control Suite for the resellers to manage them.

After much investigation I found the issue was related to the Windows Firewall which seemed to go crazy and prevented proper communication to the server.  I checked with my buddies in CSS at Microsoft (thanks Damian) and they suggested I look at the firewall rules in the registry at the location below. 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\FirewallRules

).

"{DDC8B132-3BFA-4588-8F88-575668C5C025}"="v2.0|Action=Allow|Active=TRUE|Dir=In|App=c:\\windows\\itcvnc\\itcvnc.exe|Name=VNC APP|Edge=FALSE|"

"{DC0E3700-04D7-4001-A8DB-D306D99CB33B}"="v2.0|Action=Allow|Active=TRUE|Dir=In|App=C:\\Program Files (x86)\\itControl Connector\\daemon.exe|Name=itcs FileServer|Edge=FALSE|"

When I did – on one server I found it took over 35 minutes to expand and list that registry key. It then showed me over 98,000 rules that were duplicates.  All of them created by the IT Control Suite application.  Deleting 98,000 rules is painful to be sure, but can be done and once gone the problem was fixed… for a while.  It appears that the IT Control Suite application was creating them for some reason without checking if they first existed. 

I’ve spoken to IT Control Suite and they’ve found a fix, but are only deploying it to customers who report the problem to them… I’m sorry but that’s not good enough.  I find it inexcusable for a vendor who KNOWS of a problem, has a way to DETECT the problem and yet will not AUTOMATICALLY push out a fix to their clients… instead waiting for them to call.  Honestly – I’m not happy with that arrangement and would hope for their customers sake they think long and hard about that.. it will lose them customers…

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Windows Server 2008 – Virtualisation Licensing

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

At the Heroes Happen Launch here in Sydney today, Microsoft have clarified their licensing of Virtualisation. My particular interest is with the licensing surrounding the Standard edition of Windows Server 2008. The information on this so far has been that Microsoft will allow you to run one physical instance of Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition and within that you can run one virtual instance of the Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition as well. Well today in Sydney they are saying that yes you can do this, BUT that the physical installation can only be used as a host for the virtual installation. I might be wrong here, but that seems to be pretty pointless for the most point.

Strangely however, the Microsoft website FAQ on licensing for virtualisation does not seem to be as clear. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/licensing-faq.aspx#virt

I’d really like clarification on this and if you know where to they say on their website what they have said here in Sydney, please let me know!

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Heroes Happen 2008 Launch – the pitch

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

So the pitch here is to the IT Pro’s where they are saying that the real Heroes in the industry are us the IT Pro. They want to change the current 80/20 Maintenance/Innovation ratio to enable us as Pros to be able to spend 80% of our time on innovation and only 20% of our time for maintenance. Finally – I think Microsoft get it. We as IT Pros should NOT be spending our time looking after the systems – we should be spending our time trying hard to make the infrastructure a strategic asset for our customers. Heck – it’s only something I’ve been trying to do for over 10 years now!

Interesting – Bob Kelly – Senior VP of Microsoft is saying that Vista SP1 is intended for the IT professional and not the consumer. He’s saying that now it’s here, we can start to deploy Vista… I could look at this two ways, one being that Microsoft themselves did not REALLY feel that Vista was ready for deployment now, or the other way is that they recognise that WE IT Pros’ are not deploying their products en masse until they have a Service Pack 1. If it’s the later then I can only hope that they don’t decide for marketing purposes to pus Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1 out next month – just to convince us that it’s ready for mass deployment :-)

Secure out of the box – Server Core is being touted as having higher security because it does not have lots of the same attack surface as the full Server 2008 product. Lower patching requirements too as most things are turned off by default. They claim that Server core gives a 60% reduction of the need to patch the server due to this. I guess that will also translate into reduced reboots too which contributes to higher uptimes.

Virtualisation – aka HyperV technology. apparently only 10% of the server hardware out there is being used for Virtualisation – that means that 90% of the servers are running a single copy of Windows Server. With the licensing changes to Windows Server of late, such that a Windows Server Standard edition can run a single virtual instance for no additional cost, this gives us the capabilities to segregate applications into a virtual environment far more easily and cost effectively than before.

Terminal Server Remote Apps – another great feature that exists only with Windows Server 2008. This cool feature will allow you to deploy applications on a Terminal server and have them run on an end users machine virtually. The application will run on a Terminal Server, but the users experience will be that of a local application.

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Heroes Happen 2008 Launch – Sydney

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

You know – I’ve been watching the marketing for this launch just like everyone else. Microsoft are using cartoon characters as the prime “face” of this launch, and I’m not really sure just how well that is being taken in a business world for a serious business product. Sure it’s different, but in realist how much of the marketing hype affects our decision to purchase a product vs the product features itself?

Ok – so let’s look at the line up, we have TJ which represents Windows Server 2008, Cor – SQL Server 2008 and RAIN – Visual Studio 2008 – Cartoon characters used to present serious products. Is this the way of the future with marketing? Will we suddenly see a cartoon character called Vlad being used to promote the next version of Exchange? Maybe one called Duggie to promote the Hyper V extensions for Server 2008? Hmm – maybe I can get my daughter into this and she can make some money from it :-)

So the show’s about to start here in Sydney, people have been walking in to the tune of the Star Wars theme – I guess that represents the Heroes aspect of it. More on this later today.

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