rebelpeon.com

Friday, December 18, 2009

Windows Home Server

With the release of Power Pack 3 for Windows Home Server, I have been thinking about trying it out.  Having an MSDN subscription and a virtual machine host made this quite a bit easier, as I didn’t need to purchase any additional hardware to use it. 

Prior to installing WHS, I had a Windows 2008 virtual machine that I installed all my stuff on and had shares.  It definitely worked, but some of the cool features of WHS kept me wanting to move in that direction.  Things like automated backups of client machines, a console, better managed and accessible shares, and Media Center tie-ins (I have a Win7 virtual machine as a Media Center and an Xbox 360 as the extender).  All in all, I think it is definitely going to be a move in the right direction, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t issues getting there.  I am going to outline a bunch of them here in the hopes that others can find comfort in the work I have done to resolve them.

  1. Installation - As I mentioned before, I was installing it to a virtual machine.  No big deal right?  Wrong.  My virtual machine host does not have a keyboard, monitor, or mouse hooked up to it normally.  I just have it sitting in the closet chugging a long.  The downside to that is when I am building a new virtual machine, it had better not need the mouse until I can directly connect to the machine or install the integration drivers.  This is because in Hyper-V when you are using Remote Desktop to manage the host, until you are able to install the drivers, you have no mouse.  Well, sadly, with the MSDN version (not sure about pressed CDs), the tabs are not correct with the EULA Accept page.  There is no way for you to accept the EULA to progress through the installation.  Boo.  That means I had to drag a monitor, keyboard, and mouse into the closet to get things working.  It just seems silly that this is an issue for something that is meant to run headless anyways (obviously not during the installation, but still).
  2. Domain Membership - Do not add the WHS machine to a domain.  I know you want to if you are running a domain at home, but don’t, just don’t.  I really wanted to run it as a domain member too, but there are just too many issues, and tricks MS has done to make it not worth your while.  Things such as the machine powering down every 48 hours when it is a member (annoying at best), to the console crashing after adding domain members to the local windows home group manually.  While I know you can work around most of these things (except for the console crashing), what benefit are you really getting?  Just leave it as a member of a workgroup.
  3. Firewall Rules - Much like domain membership, the best answer here is just to turn off the Windows Firewall on the box.  I am not sure if it was because it updated to Windows 2003 SP2 which enabled it by default after the base install or what, but there was nothing but headaches with the Windows Firewall enabled.  Some of the more quality examples were:
    • The website you are supposed to access resides on ports 55000/56000.  That was not allowed in the rules by default.
    • When setting up the Media Center connector, it uses DCOM to connect.  DCOM typically uses a random list of high ports (1024-65535) to do its bidding.  Granted, you can change the ports to only use a few, neither of which is added into the firewall rules.

    Just silly stuff like that, which take awhile to troubleshoot, when they don’t need to.  Turn it off.

  4. Carbonite Online Backup - This is the current beast I am dealing with and it is a fun one.  Carbonite works exactly how I want it to, and I have been using it on my Windows 2008 machine to do online backups for over a year now.  It works.  It isn’t fast, but it works.  Moving it to WHS has been a fun test of intelligence.  In my setup I had 2 drives, one was 80GB (the minimum to get it setup because I just wanted to play at first) and one 800GB.  Everything works great, except for Carbonite.  For the time being, I just wanted to backup the data in some of the shares.  No problem, right?  Just point it to where the share is located on disk (D:\shares\sharename) and we are good to go.  Wrong!  WHS has a special drive configuration that allows you to simply add drives whenever and whatever size and it will automatically add that space to your shares.  It does this via junctions, tombstone files, and a service that manages where all the files are stored.  I won’t delve into it here, but you can read all about it yourself.  Basically the files in your share are elaborate shortcuts to the actual files, which are spread across all your drives, and then the files are managed by the service, and then could move every hour.  So, when you point Carbonite to D:\shares\sharename, you are effectively backing up the shortcuts.  Instead you need to point it to the junction point and all the files there (these are hidden system files) at C:\fs\\DE.  As I mentioned, these files are always moving around though based on the service.  Therefore, the only way for Carbonite to work correctly on a WHS is if you have a single large drive, which is exactly what I am going to do.  As soon as you add another one, files could get moved, and your backups will not be complete.
  5. Protocol Mismatch - For the longest time I was receiving the following error whenever I was trying to install the connector on a client machine (Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Win 7)

    Protocol mismatch. This computer uses protocol version 6.0.2030.2, but partner computer [server] uses protocol version 6.0.2030.0. A connection cannot be established

    This was because the http://server:55000/enrollid/id.aspx webservice that the connector uses on the WHS machine was returning the incorrect version.  The only way to fix it that I found was by installing the final build of Power Pack 3.  The beta didn’t work, nor did downgrading to a previous PP.

Hopefully this little guide helps someone else out there.  As I tinker with it some more, I will probably add additional articles, but it is amazing how long it has taken me to get this silly machine up and running, especially when this is supposed to be an appliance.  I know that MS is learning a lot from this, but the polish is still a bit missing, and this is after 3 Service Packs (Power Packs).

posted by aaron at 10:06 AM
posted in computersvirtualization • (4) commentspermalink

Monday, April 07, 2008

WCF Extensions and .NET 3.0 SP1

Having issues installing the WCF Extensions on Visual Studio 2005 when you have .NET 3.0 SP1 installed?  Getting an error message the looks something like the following? 

Setup has detected that a prerequisite is missing. To use Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP you must have the .NET Framework 3.0 runtime installed. Please install the .NET Framework 3.0 runtime and restart setup.

Well, instead of just installing the application by double clicking on the MSI, run it the following way.  This ends up bypassing the prereq checks and it installs successfully.  Yay to broken installers!

msiexec /i vsextwfx.msi WRC_INSTALLED_OVERRIDE=1

posted by aaron at 11:17 AM
posted in workcomputers • (0) commentspermalink

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Windows 2008 Role Services for MOSS 2007 Part 2

Make sure your Database Access account is an admin on the central administration server, otherwise you’ll get access denied errors when trying to create new web applications.  This is because the db access account won’t have the ability to edit the metabase.  Oh, and this bubble up by MOSS saying that you, the logged in user doesn’t have access, which is completely inaccurate, especially since I was a Farm Administrator.  In addition you’ll see the error message listed below in the Application event logs.

Log Name:    Application
Source:      ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0
Date:      3/18/2008 10:58:42 AM
Event ID:    1309
Task Category: Web Event
Level:      Warning
Keywords:    Classic
User:      N/A
Computer:   

Description:
Event code: 3005
Event message: An unhandled exception has occurred.
Event time: 3/18/2008 10:58:42 AM
Event time (UTC): 3/18/2008 3:58:42 PM
Event ID: c59d97a1bbf8405cba1d837292259be4
Event sequence: 4767
Event occurrence: 8
Event detail code: 0
Application information:
  Application domain: /LM/W3SVC/236168797/ROOT-1-128503227503346172
  Trust level: WSS_Minimal
  Application Virtual Path: /
  Application Path: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\37466\
  Machine name:


Process information:
  Process ID: 3720
  Process name: w3wp.exe
  Account name:

\


Exception information:
  Exception type: COMException
  Exception message: Access is denied.

Request information:
  Request URL: http://

:24055/_admin/extendvs.aspx
  Request path: /_admin/extendvs.aspx
  User host address: fe80::e48a:75aa:9034:9106WSS_Minimal
  User:

\


  Is authenticated: True
  Authentication Type: NTLM
  Thread account name:

\


Thread information:
  Thread ID: 9
  Thread account name:

\


  Is impersonating: False
  Stack trace:  at Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility.HandleAccessDenied(Exception ex)
  at Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationRuntime.SPRequestModule.HandleAccessDenied(Exception ex)
  at Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationRuntime.BaseApplication.Application_Error(HttpApplication app)
  at Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationRuntime.SPRequestModule.ErrorAppHandler(Object oSender, EventArgs ea)
  at System.Web.HttpApplication.RaiseOnError()

I hate having service accounts admins on boxes.

posted by aaron at 12:32 PM
posted in computers • (0) commentspermalink

Monday, March 17, 2008

Windows 2008 Role Services for MOSS 2007

After trying to install MOSS 2007 on a new Windows 2008 box, I almost went completely bonkers.  No place in the installation documentation does it tell you what Role Services need to be installed for MOSS to successfully install and run.  Initially MOSS 2007 wouldn’t even install because I didn’t have the IIS6 metabase compatability installed.  However, just because it’s installed, doesn’t mean it actually runs.  I then started installing additional role services to see if I could get it to work.  Needless to say, even after installing all of services, my MOSS installation didn’t work.  Turns out you need to have the services installed prior to actually installing MOSS.  Otherwise the page will never render, and you’ll get a 5MB binary download instead of the actual application. 

However, after I knew what I was looking at (reinstalling MOSS again after all the services were installed), I decided to start whittle down the actual services I need.  Instead of doing it by hand, I finally found a website that listed what’s needed.  I’d like to give Bill Baer’s site a shoutout as to where I found this information.

Web Server

  • Common HTTP Features

    • Static Content

    • Default Document

    • Directory Browsing

    • HTTP Errors

Application Development

  • ASP.NET

  • .NET Extensibility

  • ISAPI Extensions

  • ISAPI Filters

Health and Diagnostics

  • HTTP Logging

  • Logging Tools

  • Request Monitor

  • Tracing

Security

  • Basic Authentication

  • Windows Authentication

  • Digest Authentication

  • Request Filtering

Performance

  • Static Content Compression

  • Dynamic Content Compression

Management Tools

  • IIS Management Console

IIS 6 Management Compatibility

  • IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility

posted by aaron at 05:44 PM
posted in computers • (0) commentspermalink

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

SQL 2005 and Windows 2008

Having troubles running SQL Server Manager on your shiny new Windows 2008 installation?  Make sure you right click and do a “Run as administrator” on it.  Took me awhile to figure this one out.  Otherwise you’ll just get the error “Login failed for user domain\user.  (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18456)” even if you’re a member of the local administrators on the SQL box.

Yet another instance of where UAC sucks.

posted by aaron at 03:26 PM
posted in workcomputers • (2) commentspermalink

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Windows 2008 How-To Guides

Microsoft released a bunch of how-to guides for various things new to Windows 2008.  You can grab them all from the MS Download page.

Things I would definitely check out are:

  • Deploying SSTP Remote Access Step by Step Guide.doc
  • Server_Core_Installation_Option_of_Windows_Server_2008_Step-By-Step_Guide.doc
  • Windows Server 2008 TS Gateway Server Step-By-Step Setup Guide.doc
posted by aaron at 09:40 AM
posted in computers • (0) commentspermalink

Monday, March 03, 2008

Exchange 2007 after Windows 2008 Upgrade Part 3

After having issues with a potential bug on Feb the 29th, I’ve finally gotten things straightened out. 

Today I attempted to move the mailboxes again, but received the same error message.

Summary: 1 item(s). 0 succeeded, 1 failed.
Elapsed time: 00:00:08


User’s Mailbox
Failed

Error:
The address list service on the server ‘servername.fqdn’ is not running. The Exchange server address list service failed to respond. This could be because of an address list or email address policy configuration error.

The Exchange server address list service failed to respond. This could be because of an address list or email address policy configuration error.

Exchange Management Shell command attempted:
‘fqdn/Managed Users/User’ | move-mailbox -BadItemLimit ‘10’ -TargetDatabase ‘servername\First Storage Group\Mailbox Database’

Elapsed Time: 00:00:08

It turns out that all I needed to do was restart the System Attendant service on the machine I was trying to move the mailboxes to.  After I did that, everything moved successfully.  I then attempted to hit OWA on the new machine and it was successful!  So I finished moving all the mailboxes over, changed ISA to point to the new server name, imported the right certificate and I’m good to go.  Almost 5 days of downtime, but no email lost, yay!

Now I just need to decommission the old Exchange box and give the new one more RAM.  Not a bad few days work.

posted by aaron at 01:21 PM
posted in workcomputers • (0) commentspermalink
Page 1 of 4 pages  1 2 3 >  Last »