Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

One of my clients’ Dell PowerEdge Servers is getting towards the end of its 5 year warranty and was starting to generate disk errors on Drive 0, a hot swap SCSI hard drive.

The drive was part of a Windows 2000 Server software RAID 1 (mirror) set and it needed to be replaced.

Here is the procedure I used that did not cost any downtime of the server.

1. Make sure all backups and disaster recovery plan are up to date.
2. Remove the failing hard drive (Windows Server now shows it as “missing” with failed redundancy on the remaining drive.
3. In Disk Management, right click each partition on the remaining Drive 1 of the mirror set and select “remove mirror”. A popup window asks which disk to remove from the set, I selected the “Drive 0 (missing)” option. Windows displayed the “missing” status making this easy to get correct.
4. Once all mirrors were removed (3 partitions), I was able to right click the missing disk itself and select “remove disk”.
5. Inserted new disk as Drive 0, waited a moment and refreshed the screen to show it.
6. Right clicked the new drive and selected “write signature”.
7. Right clicked the new drive and selected “upgrade to dynamic disk”. (I’m not sure if it really is an upgrade, but it’s the only way to software mirror.)
8. Right clicked each partition that I wanted to mirror on Drive 1 and selected “add mirror” and then selected (the only choice) Drive 0 as the drive to use for the mirroring operation.

After that, the drives synchronized and the mirror became functional.

Step 9: breathe….

For some time now I have had issues where a Windows XP workstation will lose the “F:” drive on a Windows SBS 2003 server. Wait a couple of seconds, curse under your breath and it comes back.

Thanks to the Windows Small Business Server 2003 Best Practices Analyzer, I think I may have found the solution:

On the SBS 2003 Server:

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

To work around this problem, turn off checksum offloading on the network adapter. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
3. In the right pane, make sure that the DisableTaskOffload registry entry exists. If this entry does not exist, follow these steps to add the entry:
   1. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
   2. Type DisableTaskOffload, and then press ENTER.
4. Click DisableTaskOffload.
5. On the Edit menu, click Modify.
6. Type 1 in the Value data box, and then press ENTER.
7. Exit Registry Editor.

I hope this works. Description fits perfectly for the intermittent connection problem we have experienced.

When you install a server you have to make some decisions on partition sizes for the different drives. The wise individual will buy as big of disk as he/she can afford and double every estimate for size.

Just a couple of years ago it seemed perfectly logical to allocate 12GB to a Windows Small Business Server C drive partition, especially when many of the features would be installed to a partition other than C (ie, any application that would grow in size – especially SQL).

But everyone underestimates the disk space required by those darn Windows updates, if nothing else. You actually can go into the Windows subdirectory and delete the compressed directories of old, proven updates and reclaim a lot of space.

Sooner or later, though, you start getting those emails from the server “low on disk space”.

What do you do?

The fix for a server partition that is too small

This happened on a server I am responsible for this past week. First, 1.2GB free wasn’t enough space to even run a Windows Update Services update. Then, once some other updates ran, it was all of sudden less than 100mb free.

Since the D: drive partition could easily spare 10GB, the obvious answer for me was

With Acronis® Disk Director® Server 10.0 I was able to easily steal some space off of the front of the D partition, then expand the C partition to use that space.

Upon reboot, Acronis Disk Director moved the data out of the way, then reallocated the space.
Windows Small Business Server 2003 then booted up and all was happy. I defragged the C drive with a very comfortable 47% free space.

This was a pretty nasty bind with what turned out to be a very simple solution.

Acronis Disk Director actually does more than just reallocate hard drive partitions. It includes

• Partition Manager
• Partition Recovery
• Disk Editor
• Data Destruction

I highly recommend Acronis products in general, but I was really happy with Acronis® Disk Director® today.

Where on the above graphic, created by right clicking the “My Computer” equivalent icon in Windows Server 2008, does it tell you the version of this Windows computer? Windows Server Standard, copyright 2007. I’m sure in 7 or 8 years we’ll just remember that this is Windows Server 2008.

Come on Microsoft, this is even SP1 for pete’s sake. Was it that hard to print 2008?

I have long been involved with Microsoft’s Small Business Server, installing and maintaining many such networks for my clients.

Initially I bit on the ISA Server bandwagon,  bought and read the 800 page “bible” and tried to make it work. Yes, it works, but as I have said before, security and Microsoft in the same sentence is a bit of an oxymoron. I decided to dump ISA Server years ago when, for no good reason, HTTP or HTTPS would stop passing through the server and users called to complain that the internet was down.

Turns out, stopping and restarting 4 or 5 services fixed it every time. But why? ISA Server was way too tough and provided nothing we needed that wasn’t being provided by a good hardware firewall. I started doing away with ISA Server and installing Fortinet Fortigate 60’s (or above) on all of my networks.

I never looked back. That was one of the best decisions I ever made for securing my clients’ networks and I picked up secure IPSec VPNs and Anti-Virus/Intrusion detection at the hardware perimeter level besides.

Some of my peers who have Microsoft’s PR line running through their veins would fight me on this every time. But guess what? Microsoft SBS 2008 is shipping without ISA Server. And now I see Harry Brelsford is hurriedly hawking Untangle as the replacement.

Guess what, Harry, I’m way ahead of you. Half a decade at least.

But here’s another point. Why so anxious to upgrade to Small Business Server 2008 if SBS 2003 is doing everything you need?

Only two reasons I can think of are 1) keep putting money in Microsoft’s pocket and 2) keep putting money in consultant’s pockets. I’ve have enough work thankfully, I don’t like milking clients.

And you know what? Clients don’t like being milked either (or being guinea pigs for the latest software, I might add).

If you have a Windows Server running Active Directory, typically in a business environment or maybe Small Business Server in a small company, you may someday have to boot into Directory Services Restore Mode.

Just in case you might have to, I suggest a trial run when nothing is wrong.

BACKUP FIRST!

If you need to reset Directory Services Restore Mode Administrator Account Password because you don’t know what it is, then check out this short how-to article from our friends at Microsoft here.

The next tip is in case you have renamed the Administrator account for the Domain for security purposes to something other than Administrator, keep in mind that in Directory Services Restore Mode the user name is still “Administrator”.

Take notes and have them available in case you ever need it.

With Windows operating systems it is common practice to have to reboot the server or workstation from time to time just to straighten things out. Add to that the times you reboot because you installed or updated a program and you can be rebooting quite often.

Don’t Touch That Dial!

I think the narrator in the TV version of Batman used to yell that out, but I could be wrong. What I mean is this: Don’t reboot without considering that the computer may not come up after the reboot.

When was your last backup?

Before you reboot, make a quick backup of at least the work you know has changed since your last good backup. Also think about your contingency plan in case the server or workstation chooses not to come alive again.

It’s just a fact with computer hardware that any time it’s running, it might be the last time. Does this happen frequently? Thankfully, no. But over the last couple of decades I have received enough frantic calls when it hasn’t to warrant mentioning it here.

Then there is the Windows operating system.

Just last week a client called me to say that their Windows 2000 server had a BSOD (blue screen of death) with 0×0000007B “Inaccessible Boot Device” on the screen. Not good.

Everything was working just fine except that a vendor support person couldn’t get in with pcAnywhere (an old as the hills remote control program). Why they haven’t joined the 21st century by using a product like GoToMyPC for tech support access is beyond me. So, without thinking about the last 3 nights backups that did NOT complete successfully, they rebooted.

After spending about 3 hours following all of Microsoft’s suggestions and Googling for any other hints, I punted. With a Windows Server 2003 CD at arms reach I couldn’t justify spending any more time trying to fix Windows 2000.

Fortunately, Windows 2000 Server was all that was corrupt; the data was all good (sigh of relief here). This is a client that does NOT hire me to monitor their server and such items as backup – that may change. A new Dell PowerEdge Server has also been ordered.

So before you click on Start | Shutdown | Restart – ask yourself what you will do if it doesn’t restart; and do a quick backup first.

One rather effective way of keeping your computer clean and uninfected is to block access to known bad sites via the hosts file.

Since this is very well described on MVPS.org I won’t repeat it here.

With a little ingenuity, sysadmins can even automate the collecting of the updated file daily and distribute it to all client computers via the login script.

Here is a warning though: If you use a large hosts file on your servers, don’t use DCPromo without temporarily renaming the file.

DCPromo will CRASH and reboot your server 30 seconds later if a large hosts file exists! I found this out the hard way some time ago. It took a $295 phone call to Microsoft Tech Support where I had to try to understand India’s version of English for about 10 hours over a 5 day period.

I had to download numerous utilities, zip several dump files and send to Microsoft, and basically ruin a week of my time. Finally, I got the problem escalated to a supervisor (still from India) and she figured it out in about 20 minutes; seemingly without the help of all the work that had been done beforehand.

Running a hosts file that large can be a benefit for security purposes, but be forewarned that DCPromo can’t handle it.

Windows Home Server is advancing on track and due out sometime this fall.

My prediction: It won’t be just for the home.

I can see this product ending up in small offices where maybe an attorney or two and a secretary or two might finally get serious about sharing files and backing up data.

These offices probably could afford me to come in with Microsoft Small Business Server, it would offer them a lot of advantages. But many of these professionals are just too cheap for that. I’m sorry, stingy; I mean frugal. You get the idea. (They use Yahoo! email accounts, now that’s professiona!)

Where Small Business Server is designed to be easy to manage, Windows Home Server is designed to require practically no management at all.

Will it deliver on this goal? I think it has a good chance. Doesn’t mean they won’t call someone like me every few months to check on it or answer a question, but it will probably run unattended in a closet quite nicely.

It will probably be the first time these offices have had anything close to a proper storage of their data.

Note: This applies to servers that are domain controllers, but if you get this error on a workstation, try the fix anyway.

I have written about the value of a system state backup, but what do you do when it fails with some arcane error message?

From what I found, this error comes from a bug in Server 2003 SP1. If you are trying JUST a system state backup, try including 1 small file from each drive on the system. Usually occurs if you have taken the prudent step of placing the NTFS log files on a different drive than the database.