On my current project they deploy PSExec to all machines. The downside? It is a version from 2004. Yes, that is right from over 5 years ago. Needless to say, there has been nothing but problems with it. Granted, PSExec is probably one of the easiest things to upgrade as you just need to upgrade the version that you are calling PSExec from. It then copies itself out to the machine and does it’s job. However, if the old version was ever tried against a machine, you may be in some weird state like we were where PSExec wouldn’t start, or it would and wouldn’t close, etc.
Stumbling along the internet I found someone else who had this issue. However, his processes doesn’t always work because there may be something hanging onto the PSExecsvc.exe file still. Instead I recommend using the following batch file.
sc \\%1 stop psexesvc
sc \\%1 delete psexesvc
del \\%1\admin$\psexesvc.exe
del \\%1\admin$\system32\psexesvc.exe
It just deletes the service before it tries to delete the files. Works like a charm.
Been a long time again, but I have a few updates to put up here. They may not help a lot of people, but they are good things that I want to remember :)
Commerce Server uses a pretty antiquated system for doing content and code promotions. It is called Commerce Server Staging (CSS). We have set it up, but want to better automate the deployment of all the CSS projects (jobs). For the life of me, I could not figure out how to add in the destination authentication account programmatically. Thankfully it wasn’t something short sighted I was missing. After discussing with Microsoft for awhile, there is apparently some undocumented switches on CSS.exe. After you add the project (css.exe addproj), you then need to edit the project with the following syntax:
css.exe editproj [project] Destination=[server];[username];[password]
Yay to automation!
Update:
Turns out you can do this with the Addproj also doing the same way with the semicolon separated items for the destination.
Netflix streaming straight to the Xbox 360 has got to be the coolest thing ever. Last weekend we watched two movies that way. I just wish they would get more movies on the streaming feature. Screw DVDs moving forward. It’s all about the streaming media.
The team that I’m currently working on is focused on performance testing. None of us on the current team are really SQL experts though and we’re running into an issue that appears to be SQL related. Well, it turns out in SQL 2005, there’s these great new things: Database Management Views. What makes them even cooler is that you can pool them all together. And the hottest thing about this whole thing, is a script we found to do most of the work on our own. This things is awesome for SQL performance testing, and will definitely get a lot of reuse, that’s for sure.
Having issues accessing Commerce Server 2007 performance counters remotely? We were too. It seemed like only specific ones were able to be remotely accessed. Well, it turns out that is “by design” (bullet point #2). However, you can get around this by allowing the Remote Registry service run as an account that has access to the database. Down side to that is I’m not exactly sure what permissions are actually required for the Remote Registry service (something above a normal user), and who knows what that breaks.
On my current project, I’m doing a lot with performance testing using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Test Load Agent. Now, there’s not a whole lot of things on Microsoft’s site about it, and blog postings are fairly sparse too. Hopefully some small nuggets listed here will be beneficial.
The first thing to note is that there is some documentation for 2005, but very little about the 2008 version. Do not use the 2005 version if possible. It has many blocking issues you probably will encounter. Use 2008 as many have been fixed. Many of the guides below are for 2005, but work just as well for 2008.
Installation:
Configuration:
How-To’s and Walkthroughs:
FAQs and Indexes:
Hopefully those links will help people. This is usually the set of links I send people who are knew to the whole Visual Studio Load Test Agent stuff.
I’ve been playing with getting DPM running on Windows 2008 (SQL) for awhile now. Mostly on and off, just when I have time to think about it. Well, today I finally got around to getting it installed, successfully.
First of all my setup:
Things I found out while trying to install:
Now I just need to start backing up my Exchange 2007 server, since it has log files dating back to March the 3rd (ouch).
*Update*
Well, it looks like the DPM team has finally released the Rollup package to allow for Win2k8 system state backups (among other things). Check out the news.