Adam Fowler, Author at AdamFowlerIT.com

System Center 2012 SP1 is now out!

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/

January 3, 2013

Recovery Storage Groups in Exchange 2007

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.

January 2, 2013

Shriking your SQL log file

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:

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!

January 2, 2013

Blogger vs WordPress

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

December 24, 2012

Windows 8 – Easy Admin Access

Hi,
One of the difficulties I’ve had with using Windows 8 is getting access to stuff. Stuff I’m used to accessing easily, like being able to edit a text file under C:\Program Files\. In Windows 8, on a non-domain connected PC and using a Windows Account, you can’t do this. Even if you’re an Administrator, and you’ve turned off User Access Control (UAC):

This gets frustrating very quickly. I was really baffled by this behaviour – why am I, as a local administrator on Windows 8 using a Windows Account, getting ‘Access Denied’ when trying to edit a text file under a Program Files folder??

I posted onto the Microsoft Technet forums here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w8itprogeneral/thread/af7cfb87-769f-4789-b6ac-1894cc9ea581/ where I was advised that this was by design. The upside, was that I was told about a handy little feature on how to run anything as administrator easily. ‘Create New Task’ has a great little tickbox that says ‘Create this task with administrative privilidges’. I’m not sure why this is called ‘Create New Task’ as it looks exactly the same as the ‘Run’ window, even with the same text. To get this, open Task Manager and go to File > Create New Task.

You can run anything here just as you would from the ‘Run’ window, including ‘explorer’ which will bring up Windows Explorer, but with PROPER full Administrator access, finally allowing me to edit that text file I was going on about earlier.

Hopefully once you know this, you’ll also be less frustrated like me!

December 13, 2012

Author: Adam Fowler

System Center 2012 SP1 is now out!

Share this:

Recovery Storage Groups in Exchange 2007

Share this:

Shriking your SQL log file

Share this:

Blogger vs WordPress

Share this:

Windows 8 – Easy Admin Access

Share this: