/tags/devops/Recent content in devops on Neolisk's Tech BlogHugo -- gohugo.ioenneolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)©2020-2024 Victor Zakharov. All Rights ReservedFri, 14 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000/posts/2020-08-14-configure-hosts-file-asus-rt-ax88u/Fri, 14 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 16 Aug 2020 00:04:57 +0000/posts/2020-08-14-configure-hosts-file-asus-rt-ax88u/Have you ever wondered how to configure local access to an externally accessible resource in your network, via the same domain name? Simple example is a NAS storage. In my case Synology DS918+. After setting up SSL on *.synology.me domain, I realized that I cannot access the NAS locally via the same domain name, only by IP. But accessing by IP gives me SSL related errors. Each part of the solution was not difficult to find.Victor Zakharovdevopssoftware/posts/2013-02-13-hard-disk-sentinel-fix-disk-perf-mon/Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 05 Jun 2021 11:36:56 -0400/posts/2013-02-13-hard-disk-sentinel-fix-disk-perf-mon/Even though this issue has an official FAQ on this page, I decided to include these short instructions on my blog. Symptoms When you click on Disk Performance tab on any disk page, Hard Disk Sentinel says the following: Real time performance monitoring is not supported on this disk Here is how it looks: Solution Works for me most of the time (Windows 7 x64): Start cmd as Administrator. Run lodctr /Q to list available performance counters.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2012-07-12-cannot-compact-vhd/Thu, 12 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 29 Feb 2020 15:00:54 -0500/posts/2012-07-12-cannot-compact-vhd/Very likely, deleting your shadow copies on guest machine will help. I just disabled shadow copy on C: and it worked for me on Windows 2008 R2 + SP1. More information here.Victor Zakharovsoftwaredevops/posts/2012-07-10-clean-up-after-service-pack-install/Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 05 Jun 2021 11:36:56 -0400/posts/2012-07-10-clean-up-after-service-pack-install/Here is the command: dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded In my case I was able to reclaim >10GB of disk space on a system drive.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2012-02-29-cannot-open-sql-file-vs-2010/Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 29 Feb 2020 15:34:59 -0500/posts/2012-02-29-cannot-open-sql-file-vs-2010/Environment hangs, completely at times, or just for several seconds. If it resumes after hanging, you are able to close the tab where this .SQL file would show up. In any case, you cannot see or edit anything in there, seeing this Visual Studio 2010 branded blue background all over the contents area. The solution, which worked for me - get the DVD with Visual Studio installation files and install from WCU\DAC\DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.Victor Zakharovdevopssql/posts/2011-10-27-sql-2005-expr-tools-blocking-inst-denali/Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 01 Mar 2020 15:33:44 -0500/posts/2011-10-27-sql-2005-expr-tools-blocking-inst-denali/It appears some SQL Server 2005 ghosts are still hiding somewhere in your system. To install Denali, you will need to remove the following keys from the registry: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90 HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90 Once removed, just Re-Run the checks, now it should succeed. Note that you do not need to delete corresponding folders on your disk. This article gets a credit for pointing in the right direction.Victor Zakharovdevopssoftware/posts/2011-10-27-wmi-query-incorrect-namespace-win2003r2/Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 01 Mar 2020 15:37:55 -0500/posts/2011-10-27-wmi-query-incorrect-namespace-win2003r2/This article is a sequel to WMI Query - Incorrect Class on Windows 2003 R2?. It solves another common problem with WMI on Windows 2003 called Incorrect Namespace, occurring on most queries. A simple way to diagnose it - go to Computer Management -> WMI Control -> Properties, chances are you will see many errors on the General tab. Also, when you expand Security/Root, you will only see a couple of folders there, and CIMV2 is missing.Victor Zakharovdevopssoftware/posts/2011-10-11-sql-2008-error-log-growing-rapidly/Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 01 Mar 2020 15:41:11 -0500/posts/2011-10-11-sql-2008-error-log-growing-rapidly/MS SQL server 2008 R2 was spamming the error log with the following two messages (got around 50GB of them in 4 days): Message A. An exception occurred while enqueueing a message in the target queue. Error: 15517, State: 1. Cannot execute as the database principal because the principal “dbo” does not exist, this type of principal cannot be impersonated, or you do not have permission. Message B. The activated proc ‘[dbo].Victor Zakharovdevopssoftwaresql/posts/2011-10-04-sql-drop-column-with-default-constraint/Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 01 Mar 2020 15:43:55 -0500/posts/2011-10-04-sql-drop-column-with-default-constraint/The following MS SQL script will generate MS SQL statements to drop a list of columns with default constraint for a certain table. Need to change table_name and list of columns, as applicable. Statements will be generated only if required. To make things clear: If column does not exist within specified table, no drop will be generated. If column does not have a default constraint, no drop for this constraint will be generated.Victor Zakharovdevopssoftwaresql/posts/2011-09-06-list-all-valid-emails-exchange-2007/Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 01 Mar 2020 15:54:30 -0500/posts/2011-09-06-list-all-valid-emails-exchange-2007/You may need these to configure your 3rd party antispam software/appliance. There were lots of articles on the internet with complicated solutions, which did not work for me. Here a Powershell one-liner for Exchange management shell: 1 Get-Mailbox | foreach { $_.EmailAddresses | foreach { $_.SmtpAddress } } Within regular Powershell, add this line at the very start: 1 Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Admin If you plan to run it as a batch job, the whole script could look like the following:Victor Zakharovdevopssoftwareexchange/posts/2011-08-22-exchange-disable-offline-folders-no-cache/Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 01 Mar 2020 15:59:28 -0500/posts/2011-08-22-exchange-disable-offline-folders-no-cache/Having read some useful topics on the internet, I decided to try non-cached Exchange mode in Outlook. After disabling caching for my account, it still kept the OST file, even after forced deletion. Then I noticed some offline folders were being kept, like Inbox and Sent Items (right click -> Synchronization tab -> Offline folder contains…). When those were emptied, there was still something left in that OST file (<20MB). This is how you can disable offline folders altogether.Victor Zakharovdevopssoftwareexchange/posts/2011-08-10-windows-firewall-auth-failed-to-start/Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 01 Mar 2020 16:02:16 -0500/posts/2011-08-10-windows-firewall-auth-failed-to-start/Alright, I struggled to make it work for a total of 5 hours. The original issue was that Firewall could not start because of error 1068 - some dependency failed to start. The symptoms: outgoing connections work, incoming are blocked. I drilled down to Windows Firewall Authorization Driver malfunction. Tried just about every advice out there on the internet - nothing worked. Having gathered enough frustration, I thought it would not hurt to uninstall this crappy thing from Device Manager.Victor Zakharovdevopswindowsfirewall/posts/2011-08-09-drive-letter-not-available-for-mapping/Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 01 Mar 2020 16:04:40 -0500/posts/2011-08-09-drive-letter-not-available-for-mapping/Somehow my Windows 7 partially remapped a drive letter to another entity. It happened suddenly with some unexpected behavior. I noticed it when it could no longer connect to a network share. I removed the mapping and tried recreating with no success. The drive could not be deleted. Restarted, the drive is not mapped, yet it’s still not available. Started googling and came across this forum discussion. The problem is related to non-active drives still reserving a letter.Victor Zakharovdevopswindows/posts/2011-03-22-wmi-query-incorrect-class-win-2003-r2/Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 29 Mar 2020 19:47:31 -0400/posts/2011-03-22-wmi-query-incorrect-class-win-2003-r2/I got this ‘Invalid class’ error when querying disk performance data: Win32_PerfFormattedData_PerfDisk_LogicalDisk The server was running Windows 2003 R2 Std x64 SP2, so I used this article to ‘detect and repair a corrupted WMI Repository’: rundll32 wbemupgd, RepairWMISetup Well, it did not work for some reason. A little more googling led me to a blog, where Mike (the author) suggested two additional actions: First winmgmt /resyncperf Then winmgmt /clearadap Just executing (1) did not solve the problem for me, while doing (2) after that worked perfectly.Victor Zakharovwmiwindowsdevops/posts/2011-03-09-how-to-update-eset-remote-admin-server/Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 29 Mar 2020 19:44:44 -0400/posts/2011-03-09-how-to-update-eset-remote-admin-server/Solution For those who don’t like to read stories, here’s the extract: Proceed with installation, even despite it appears to be a clean install. In the end you will get a working version, with all configuration preserved. Story Today I got a notice from ESET Remote Administrator Console about new updates being available and a prompt to get them from the website. I downloaded two new executables (Server and Console) for version 4.Victor Zakharovwindowsdevops/posts/2011-03-02-acronis-trueimage-2010-home-not-user-friendly/Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 29 Mar 2020 19:47:31 -0400/posts/2011-03-02-acronis-trueimage-2010-home-not-user-friendly/I recently upgraded to a larger hard drive and went from 1TB -> 2TB. Now the task was to make backup task in Acronis use the new location. I created new destination folder, moved all previous backups there. Then I changed Acronis backup task to do backups to the new place. Quite obvious so far, isn’t it? Not with Acronis. Although it picked the right full backup file to append to (shown on configuration screen), it failed on the next incremental backup:Victor Zakharovwindowsdevops/posts/2011-02-21-ntfs-compression-worth-it/Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 29 Mar 2020 19:20:47 -0400/posts/2011-02-21-ntfs-compression-worth-it/Some time ago I researched compression in various systems, ranging from software archivers (like WinRAR, WinZip etc.) to database solutions (like Oracle data compression). Then I figured there is one more type of compression that I did not touch yet - NTFS compression. People on the net say it’s pretty much useless, still I decided to give it a try. And here is what I came up with: Folder name Uncompressed size, MB Compressed size, MB Space savings, MB Space savings, % Proof/screenshot Victor (Personal) 11820 10130 1690 14.Victor Zakharovwindowsdevops/posts/2010-12-05-windows-7-disable-hibernation/Sun, 05 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 29 Mar 2020 19:47:31 -0400/posts/2010-12-05-windows-7-disable-hibernation/If you are like me, and wonder where all the space on C: went, you might have also stumbled across hiberfil.sys file, which is usually taking a couple of gigs. This is especially important if you are running your system on precious SSD space. Luckily, you can get rid of that file, and the fastest way is to use command prompt. These guys say it should be elevated, but it worked just fine for me, probably due to disabled UAC.Victor Zakharovwindowsdevops/posts/2010-11-13-tortoise-svn-no-overlay-icons-after-upgrade/Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 29 Mar 2020 19:36:02 -0400/posts/2010-11-13-tortoise-svn-no-overlay-icons-after-upgrade/Just updated my TortoiseSVN client at home from 1.6.9 to 1.6.11 and found that I can no longer use overlay icons, either in Explorer or in Total Commander (more used to the latter). It appeared as if Tortoise shell extension was not loaded. I tried a restart - same thing. Googled on it and found their FAQ, which didn’t help either. A little more googling brought me to this page.Victor Zakharovwindowsdevops/posts/2010-10-07-virtualization-cannot-connect-to-server-hyperv/Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sun, 29 Mar 2020 19:42:01 -0400/posts/2010-10-07-virtualization-cannot-connect-to-server-hyperv/You should be reading this article if you are seeing any of the two (or both) screens: Windows Security / Your credentials did not work Your system administrator does not allow the use of default credentials to log on to the remote computer XXXXX because its identity is not fully verified. Please enter new credentials. AND/OR Remote Desktop Connection Your system administrator does not allow you to connect to this remote computer.Victor Zakharovwindowsdevops/posts/2010-08-03-exchange-store-eating-memory/Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 10 Oct 2020 16:39:42 -0400/posts/2010-08-03-exchange-store-eating-memory/Suppose you are small enough not to want multiple servers each doing exactly one role. If you consider Exchange with the above requirement, you probably have the same problem we used to have. Memory consumption! STORE.EXE takes almost all available memory, no matter how much you allocate to the server. This might not seem like a big problem… until you disable page file, to make sure you server runs on memory, and not on a hard drive.Victor Zakharovwindowsdevops/posts/2010-07-04-intel-x25-in-hp-proliant-dl380-g5/Sun, 04 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 24 Oct 2020 12:47:11 -0400/posts/2010-07-04-intel-x25-in-hp-proliant-dl380-g5/Setup Hardware: HP Proliant DL380 G5, two disks, one is Intel SSD and another one is HP SCSI 15K drive, each running as RAID0. Software: IOMeter, latest version. File system: default NTFS partitions were setup, with Intel being a system drive. It might sound like a bit of overhead (bringing incorrect measurements), but honestly, I don’t think it would really matter on such speeds and IOps. Controller caching: 25% read/75% write.Victor Zakharovdevopshardwarebenchmark/posts/2010-06-16-disable-root-certificates-update/Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 10 Oct 2020 16:59:15 -0400/posts/2010-06-16-disable-root-certificates-update/You might get an annoying event log error, if you server does not have a direct connection to the internet (no internet at all, or some ports are just blocked). That’s because your computer is trying to get root certificates update from Microsoft. You use those for Internet Explorer browsing. But who cares about browsing on a server? This is how you can disable root certificates update, and get rid of false errors in the event log:Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2010-06-16-manage-dns-suffixes-group-policy/Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 10 Oct 2020 17:01:06 -0400/posts/2010-06-16-manage-dns-suffixes-group-policy/Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Network > DNS Client > DNS Suffix Search List There is also Primary DNS Suffix option under the same tree node, just in case you need it.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2010-06-10-powershell-strip-html-tags-from-string/Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 10 Oct 2020 17:03:04 -0400/posts/2010-06-10-powershell-strip-html-tags-from-string/Here’s a one-liner: 1 $myStr -replace "<.*?>" Explanation With the above line, we are removing every shortest set of symbols within triangle brackets. The word shortest is very important here. Have a look at this wiki page for more information about greedy and lazy matching, under Lazy quantification.Victor Zakharovpowershelldevops/posts/2010-05-31-term-srv-config-win-2008-r2/Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 10 Oct 2020 17:06:43 -0400/posts/2010-05-31-term-srv-config-win-2008-r2/An article for guys like myself, those trying to adopt renamed options of Windows 2008 R2… Well, I spent some time looking for this one. It used to be Terminal Services Configuration. At least, in 2003 and 2008 it was named exactly like this. In 2008 R2, however, Microsoft decided to change the name to (obviously) improve usability, especially for experienced admins. And here’s how it goes now: Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2010-05-27-razer-abyssus-quest-for-mouse-pad/Thu, 27 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 10 Oct 2020 17:13:07 -0400/posts/2010-05-27-razer-abyssus-quest-for-mouse-pad/Here’s my story. When the cursor on my cheap Kingwin mouse (KW-02, 800 dpi) started shivering for no reason, I decided to take the old one back (Logitech LX3, 1000 dpi). Then I noticed it’s not so good on my hardwood desk, so having researched on good mouse pads, I bought OCZ Behemoth Regulator. Exactly as promised, the look and feel of it was very nice, mouse movements smooth and everything was just fine until… I bought Razer Abyssus (3500 dpi) to get rid of that heavy clicking sound of LX3.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2010-04-06-cannot-add-hp-4100-printer/Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 10 Oct 2020 17:14:51 -0400/posts/2010-04-06-cannot-add-hp-4100-printer/It happened after the power outage, so our print server randomly turned off. When brought online, the first thing I noticed is that I couldn’t print under my Windows 7 Ent x86 workstation. Then, after I removed the printer I could not add it back. Got the error 0x00000002. Log off didn’t help. Neither did any of the configuration changes. So I did this magic thing - rebooted the workstation. Well, it did the trick.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2010-04-01-outlook-error-downloading-offline-addr-book/Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 10 Oct 2020 17:17:12 -0400/posts/2010-04-01-outlook-error-downloading-offline-addr-book/It originally started as a minor problem. One of our employees did not get updates for the offline address book (OAB) from the Exchange server. One person was missing from there and it was just one PC that had this issue. Naturally, we tried updating OAB. Got the error 0x8004010F (The operation failed. An object could not be found). Strangely enough, we then tried to update OAB from other PCs and got the same error.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2010-03-02-sync-time-with-external-source/Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Mon, 12 Oct 2020 11:40:01 -0400/posts/2010-03-02-sync-time-with-external-source/Here’s how you can do it: w32tm /config /syncfromflags:manual /manualpeerlist:<peerlist> Official definition for <peer> follows: manualpeerlist:<peers> - sets the manual peer list to , which is a space-delimited list of DNS and/or IP addresses. When specifying multiple peers, this switch must be enclosed in quotes. So it should be very much like the following: w32tm /config /syncfromflags:manual "/manualpeerlist:64.90.182.55 129.6.15.28 129.6.15.29 64.236.96.53 206.246.122.250" If you are wondering where I took all those IPs, here’s the link.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2010-02-09-powershell-get-mac-of-remote-ip/Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Mon, 12 Oct 2020 14:40:56 -0400/posts/2010-02-09-powershell-get-mac-of-remote-ip/Here is a PowerShell one-liner: 1 2 #change/assign $hostIp to a valid IP address (gwmi -Class Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration | where { $_.IpAddress -eq $hostIp }).MACAddress If you need to dynamically resolve a host IP from its name: 1 2 #change/assign $Computer to a valid host identifier $hostIp = [System.Net.Dns]::GetHostByName($Computer).AddressList[0].IpAddressToString The whole script may look like the following: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 param ( $Computer , $Credential ) #to make it work without parameters if($Computer -eq $null) { $Computer = $env:COMPUTERNAME } #program logic $hostIp = [System.Victor Zakharovpowershelldevopsalgorithm/posts/2010-02-03-powershell-get-current-user/Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Mon, 12 Oct 2020 14:33:05 -0400/posts/2010-02-03-powershell-get-current-user/Actually, there are many ways to get name of the user, which is currently logged on, including built-in .NET commands. But let’s keep our code clean and stick with native PowerShell. To get just the user name: 1 "$env:username" You might also need the domain: 1 "$env:userdomain" Or both of them: 1 "$env:userdomain\$env:username"Victor Zakharovpowershelldevops/posts/2010-01-07-powershell-check-if-remote-port-open/Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Mon, 12 Oct 2020 16:17:47 -0400/posts/2010-01-07-powershell-check-if-remote-port-open/There are tons of ways to check if the port is open on a remote server. I think I found the fastest one, which is a Powershell one-liner: 1 (new-object Net.Sockets.TcpClient).Connect($host, $port) For testing purposes you can use the following command: 1 (new-object Net.Sockets.TcpClient).Connect("google.com", 80) It should give you no results. This means connection succeeded. In real life you may encounter the following two outputs in red: (1) Exception calling “Connect” with “2” argument(s): “A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond xxx.Victor Zakharovpowershelldevops/posts/2010-01-07-prep-win2003-ad-upgrade-to-win2008r2/Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Mon, 12 Oct 2020 16:10:31 -0400/posts/2010-01-07-prep-win2003-ad-upgrade-to-win2008r2/That’s actually pretty simple, you just need to run this utility: D:\support\adprep\adprep.exe /forestprep and D:\support\adprep\adprep.exe /domainprep Where D: is your CD/DVD drive with Windows 2008 R2. In our case it was a virtual drive mounted in Hyper-V, but I think it does not really matter. I did preparation for both forest and domain, because in our situation they are identical. Yours might be different. What is important is that this procedure should be run from the infrastructure owner.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2009-12-20-wsus-3-sp2-update-cloned-vm/Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Mon, 12 Oct 2020 16:20:03 -0400/posts/2009-12-20-wsus-3-sp2-update-cloned-vm/Introduction After some point we had too many virtual machines to keep track of updates locally. So we decided to try Microsoft’s solution called WSUS. It took some time to install, the whole process could have been easier, cause I had to google every part of it. When we finally had it working, there was a problem with detection of our virtual machines. Technical So we had 3 virtual machines, all with different IPs and MACs, being detected as one.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2009-12-13-zone-not-loaded-by-dns-win2003r2-sp2/Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Mon, 12 Oct 2020 16:22:46 -0400/posts/2009-12-13-zone-not-loaded-by-dns-win2003r2-sp2/Introduction So we switched to a new provider and I had to change primary DNS to another server. Yes, we decided to have another server for this purpose, just to have a backup in case anything goes wrong. And we actually made use of that old server, because some of our domain records took longer to update, than it was expected. Anyway, let’s skip unneeded details and roll down to the topic of this post.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2009-10-25-dl380-g6-unexpected-reboot/Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Mon, 12 Oct 2020 16:47:55 -0400/posts/2009-10-25-dl380-g6-unexpected-reboot/I noticed many people on the net are looking for this review, or at least for anything that could prove they are not alone. Well, guys, here’s what you wanted to hear: yes, our 9 x G6 DL380 servers kept rebooting unexpectedly for quite a while. Not all at once, but still annoying. It all happened at random until we contacted HP and their tech told us to update firmware.Victor Zakharovdevopshardware/posts/2009-10-14-run-legacy-internet-explorer-version-win7/Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Mon, 12 Oct 2020 16:50:32 -0400/posts/2009-10-14-run-legacy-internet-explorer-version-win7/Introduction There is no catch about that. You don’t need powerful software to support 3 virtual XPs to run XP mode in Windows Virtual PC, or anything like that. When I heard this being possible on an old PC with no real prerequisites, and for free, I was amazed. Solution In short, there is a French guy who developed a piece of software to handle all these versions under one title: IETester.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2009-10-14-win7-on-vintage-pc/Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 24 Oct 2020 12:47:11 -0400/posts/2009-10-14-win7-on-vintage-pc/Introduction I recently had a chance to try Windows 7 Enterprise x86 on an old PC. Overall, quite impressed with performance. Tech Specs 1 Pentium 4, 1.6 GHz + 512 MB of RAM on AOpen mobo (dated 2001). Some Benchmarks At startup only 300MB out of total 512 are occupied. The system is clean, no antivirus or anything like that. But running smooth, so it’s still pretty good for 7, compared to its predecessor, Vista.Victor Zakharovdevopshardwarebenchmark/posts/2009-10-06-powershell-query-oracle-database/Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Tue, 13 Oct 2020 15:08:19 -0400/posts/2009-10-06-powershell-query-oracle-database/You might have already googled other pages to help you on this. You even probably have found some PowerShell function like the one below: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 function OracleQuery($Instance,$User,$Password,$Query) { $private:tmp = [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Data.OracleClient") $private:con = "Data Source=$instance;User Id=$user;Password=$password" $private:ad = New-Object System.Data.OracleClient.OracleDataAdapter($query,$con) $private:ds = New-Object System.Data.DataSet $private:tmp = $ad.Fill($ds) return $ds.Tables[0] } Still something makes this one different. Here are some tricks used here:Victor Zakharovpowershelloracledevops/posts/2009-10-03-windows-7-activation-problems/Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Tue, 13 Oct 2020 15:14:45 -0400/posts/2009-10-03-windows-7-activation-problems/Introduction It all happened after I already had my Windows activated. Basicly, error 0x8007232B started to appear on each startup saying something about DNS/KMS problems. No big deal, however I felt something was wrong with the system. So I went to My Computer/Properties and found that for some reason my copy had 27 days to activate. Apparently, activation was reset due to installation or updates as I didn’t update any piece of hardware.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2009-08-28-g6-everest-5-0-2-bsod/Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Tue, 13 Oct 2020 15:16:42 -0400/posts/2009-08-28-g6-everest-5-0-2-bsod/Introduction Needless to say, that I have always used Everest to pull system information, perform basic testing and see temperatures from the server’s sensors. Not only servers, by the way. Yes, Everest isn’t quite bad, but it’s not the point of this article. Procedure As you probably remember by previous articles, we have some HP G6 servers to play with. And I was quite surprised to see them fall periodically after Everest is launched.Victor Zakharovdevopssoftware/posts/2009-08-11-outlook-2007-sp2-on-exchange-2007-sp1/Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Tue, 13 Oct 2020 15:23:13 -0400/posts/2009-08-11-outlook-2007-sp2-on-exchange-2007-sp1/Introduction Indeed, yet until now I was never able to make it work with our Exchange. Strange, it does work perfectly with direct on demand connection (common user’s home setup), but fails within Exchange. You are prompted to search for solution; however Microsoft won’t help you with that. A bug? Test specifications Non-Exchange environment – OS: Vista SP1, 7 Ultimate RC (tried on both), gmail account. Outlook 2007 RTM works perfectly, installing SP2 doesn’t break anything.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2009-08-02-hp-g6-dl380-smartstart-dumb-start/Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Tue, 13 Oct 2020 15:25:30 -0400/posts/2009-08-02-hp-g6-dl380-smartstart-dumb-start/Introduction Had a chance to install 9 operating systems on HP G6 Proliant DL380 servers. 4 of them had to be Windows 2003 64bit and 5x32bit. To summarize, 64bit versions didn’t boot after SmartStart initiated installation (NTLDR not found) and 32bit version went okay until we found nothing HP-related in the start menu of Windows 2003. And we had to do a manual install of PSP on each and every server we had.Victor Zakharovdevops/posts/2009-07-15-firefox-3-5-hangs-under-win7-rc/Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Tue, 13 Oct 2020 15:31:41 -0400/posts/2009-07-15-firefox-3-5-hangs-under-win7-rc/Introduction I’m a keen fan of Mozilla Firefox web browser and was very excited when a new version came out. Having installed that on my Vista work PC and found a real speed boost, I rushed to upgrade it at home… only to find it hangs at startup on Windows 7. Procedure This is the most interesting part. By default, your 3.0.11 browser will not upgrade to 3.5. Looks like they know something.Victor Zakharovdevopssoftware/posts/2009-07-02-hp-dl380-g6-benchmarked/Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000neolisk@gmail.com (Victor Zakharov)Sat, 24 Oct 2020 12:47:11 -0400/posts/2009-07-02-hp-dl380-g6-benchmarked/Introduction Our company finally bought a powerful HP DL380 G6 server with 2 x Xeon 5540 (8 cores total). Prior to production, we put 2 x 4 gig memory sticks (8 GB of memory) and 3 SCSI hard drives to make RAID5. As you can imagine, initial testing of this box was up to me. Special attention in this article is given to virtualization performance. For us it was primary reason for buying such a powerful box.Victor Zakharovdevopshardwarebenchmark