Author: Adam Fowler

Safe Mode from Windows To Go USB

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,
I’ve been having an issue where my Windows To Go USB (running Windows 8 of course) logs onto a black screen. Since I can’t do anything apart from wave the cursor. Want to get into Safe Mode? It’s not obvious on how to do this, so here’s how to get there:

You should have BitLocker enabled, so at startup it willl say “Bitlocker – Enter the password to unlock this drive”. Below this, you have two options. “Press Enter to continue” and “Press Esc for BitLocker Recovery’.
Both don’t sound helpful, but press Esc. From the BitLocker Recovery screen, you get another option down the bottom that says ‘Press Esc for more recovery options”.
Doing this gets you to a third screen that says ‘Recovery – There are no more BitLocker recovery options on your PC”.
From here, there is a final option of “Press F8 for Startup Settings”. Pressing F8 takes you back to the BitLocker password entry screen, but this time after entering your password you’ll finally see all the Startup Settings, including Safe Mode.

System Center 2012 SP1 is now out!

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,
System Center 2012 SP1 has now been released on Microsoft’s Volume Licensing Service Center at https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter/home.aspx.  There is a huge amount of new stuff, and most importantly the products now support Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Here’s the list of the different applications and sizes:

  • System Center 2012 with SP1 – Operations Manager Server English
  • 32/64 bit
  • 1059 MB
  • System Center 2012 with SP1 – Orchestrator Server Multi-Language
  • 32/64 bit
  • 157 MB
  • System Center 2012 with SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager Server Multilanguage
  • 32/64 bit
  • 1320 MB
  • System Center 2012 with SP1 – Service Manager Server Multilanguage
  • 32/64 bit
  • 403 MB
  • System Center 2012 with SP1 – ConfigMgr and EndpointProtection Multilanguage
  • 32/64 bit
  • 904 MB
  • System Center 2012 with SP1 – DataProtection Mgr Server and Toolkit Multilanguage
  • 32/64 bit
  • 4720 MB
  • System Center 2012 with SP1 – Endpoint Protection for Linux OS and Macintosh OS Multilanguage
  • 32/64 bit
  • 1151 MB
  • System Center 2012 with SP1 – App Controller Multilanguage
  • 32/64 bit
  • 76 MB

Update: As MyITForum pointed out, there’s a few differences. They’re not seperate Service Pack 1 updates, it’s an inbuilt smart installer that can either update to SP1, or do a fresh install. I like that they’ve gone this way, keeps your source files much cleaner. More details here http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/2013/01/02/faq-wheres-my-system-center-2012-sp1-upgrade-bits/

Recovery Storage Groups in Exchange 2007

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

Over the Christmas break, I had the pleasure of dealing with email loss on Exchange 2007. A database had gone offline, and in the process of it being re-seeded to the other mailbox server in the CCR (Continuous Cluster Replication), it didn’t really reseed correctly and 4 days of email was lost.

What most people do (including me) in this scenario is restore the database, swap the databases around and replay the logs. This wasn’t possible in my scenario due to limited disk space. I started reading up on Recovery Storage Groups which have been around since the Exchange 2003 days. You can mount a restored database, then replay the contents into live mailboxes and merge the contents together. This sounded perfect for my issue, because I could just merge the missing days with no downtime.

First, you need to create a Recovery Storage Group. I followed the first two steps from here: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH51555 which is just these two Powershell commands:

new-storagegroup -Server <Sever_Name> -LogFolderPath <path_to_Logfiles> -Name <RSG_Name> -SystemFolderPath  <Database_Path> -Recovery

new-mailboxdatabase -mailboxdatabasetorecover <Database_Name> -storagegroup <Server_Name>\<RSG_Name> -EDBFilePath <Database_Path>

The first command is creating the storage group, while the second one is creating a new blank database. You can swap over your restored database with the one you created, as long as the database is offline.

You can either use more Powershell commands to do your merging, or use the Exchange Management Console. There’s a great article here on how to do this: http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Working-Recovery-Storage-Groups-Exchange-2007.html

Because you’ve already created a Recovery Storage Group, you just need to use the ‘Merge or Copy Mailbox Contents’ option from ‘Database Recovery Management’ option in the ‘Exchange Management Console – Toolbox’ area. It’s a fairly straight forward wizard, you can choose emails with a particular subject, or in my case just a certain time period. You can also choose whatever mailboxes you’d like to merge, which is great for testing and proving it will work. There’s a brief article here for more details: http://www.petri.co.il/restoring_exchange_mailbox_recovery_storage_group_part2.htm

It’s worth considering using Recovery Storage Groups in a disaster situation, even if it’s just for one mailbox or a few emails. There’s no outage involved which makes it a much nicer method than having to bring your whole database offline.

Shriking your SQL log file

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I ran into this issue today on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 server. A new server I’d built hadn’t had the SQL backups set yet, so the SQL log file had blown out in size (100gb in less than a month). It had used up all the disk space allocated, so doing a normal backup wasn’t shrinking the log file. The solution was to run the following query. To do this, in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, select the culprit database and then the ‘New Query’ button. This will bring up an area to type your query:

ALTER DATABASE dbname SET RECOVERY SIMPLE

DBCC SHRINKFILE(‘dbname_log’, 0, TRUNCATEONLY)

 Replace ‘dbname’ with your database name, and click ‘! Execute’ to run. It should look like this:

reportserver

Once successfully run, your log file size should be much more reasonable.

To stop this occurring in the first place, make sure you’ve set up regular backups to your databases. Just running a backup won’t truncate the logs though, and here’s a great article on Technet explaining it:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/beatrice/archive/2008/07/24/full-backups-transaction-logs-backup.aspx

 

Good luck!

Blogger vs WordPress

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

If you’re reading this, you’re reading it on my revamped site. The old site was http://adamfowlerit.blogspot.com – hosted by Google’s Blogger application. I’ve now moved to a hosted service on Bluehost with WordPress, and my own domain http://adamfowlerit.com.

Part of the reason for doing this was that on Blogger, I couldn’t do something I consider basic – add a twitter feed panel on the side. They used to have an addon that did this, but it has been broken for a long time. To it’s credit, Blogger is incredibly easy to set up – if you’re looking at just starting out and getting some content up, it’s a great platform for the basics and served me well. Once you want to start playing around a bit more, you’ll find Blogger limiting.

With my jump to WordPress, I was rather spoilt from the ease of use on the Blogger side. Not to say that WordPress is difficult, but it does take a lot more time and effort in comparison. There’s a lot more support for WordPress out there, with so many sites using it now. You can customise so much, and there’s different levels of customisation. A lot of the basics are quite easy to do with the web based GUI (in which I’m typing this post now), but if you want you can break out the CSS code and change anything.

There’s a huge amount of themes you can choose from as a starting platform, as well as plugins to add extra functionality (such as a twitter feed!). Someone’s even written an importer so it’ll grab all the content from your Blogger page (including comments) and put it into WordPress.

I’m still learning with it, so please feed back any suggestions.

So, for a lot of people, Blogger will do the basic job, and do it really easily. For advanced stuff, WordPress is the go. It’s ‘free’, but you’ll need to host it somewhere. I’m paying a few dollars a month for it to be hosted at Bluehost with a bunch of other features included.

Details available here:
BlueHost or if you want to give me a referral,copy and paste this: http://www.bluehost.com/track/adamfowl