Tag Archive for 'windows server'

Current Project: Winsitter.com

Published by Bret Fisher on Jan 27, 2012 in Microsoft and Win Admin. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

This blog has seen less action over the last year due to my activities related to a personal obsession of mine: Creating a web startup to help keep Windows Servers up and running on autopilot.

As a consulting engineer for various small and large organizations, I can say it is the norm for users to actually be de facto monitoring solution.  They are the first to know of an outage.  Many small and medium business admins settle for this because they (and management) seem to assume that either:

  1. Good server monitoring is expensive or too hard to even consider.
  2. That it’s possible to prevent some outages with basic monitoring.

All this goes on while server manufactures and the Windows Server OS doesn’t offer the one feature they need: a basic built-in notification service for the 20% of issues that cause 80% of the problems.  Hardware and OS’s tend to log the problems, but those get lost in a sea of log data.  Why doesn’t my Dell server ask me for an email address to notify of hardware errors/warnings on first boot?  Why doesn’t Windows have a one-button option to turn on basic email alerting of service failures, unplanned reboots, or other monitoring 101 stuff?

Well enough wishing.  Time we did something about that for those who don’t have the time, budget, server recourses, or skills to deploy an in-house monitoring solution.

Sign up for my beta invite list and stop guessing if your servers are OK. http://winsitter.com

Quickest Way to install SQL 2008 on Windows Server 2008 R2

Published by Bret Fisher on Apr 27, 2010 in Microsoft and Tech. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

From KB 955392 there’s lot of info there, but the quickest “one time” install method is to follow “Procedure 1: Basic slipstream steps”

  1. Install the .NET Framework 3.5.1 feature
  2. Download the SQL SP1 service pack
  3. Expand the service pack by using 7zip or the command SQLServer2008SP1-KB968369-x64-ENU.exe /x:C:\SP1
  4. Install the SQL Setup Support files from the SP1 download C:\SP1\x64\setup\1033\sqlsupport.msi
  5. Now run the SQL Setup.exe from DVD or network and point setup to where SP1 is Setup.exe /PCUSource=C:\SP1

Note the long term best method is “Procedure 2: create a merged drop” but the above is great for the 1 or 2 installs.

SharePoint Sites Unavailable From Localhost

Published by Bret Fisher on Jul 31, 2009 in Microsoft and Networking and Security. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Also seen as:

  • search is running but no results returned
  • search errors in event log (can’t access content, etc.)
  • you can access sites fine from other boxes but not from the local server
  • only seems to happen for URL’s (http://sitename1, http://sitename2) that are different then the host name (http://servername).

Problem:

Windows Server 2003 SP2 and newer (Windows Server 2008) have a Anti Denial Of Service feature that prevents the server from accessing itself via different names (that’s the simple answer).

Fix (assuming you want to keep your custom URL’s):

  • Set a registry value to turn off this security feature (I still don’t understand the specific type of attack that it’s preventing)
  • Set a registry value to a list of all the cname’s your server goes by.

Further Info:

Rant:

In the KB Microsoft basically says “don’t turn it all off unless your lame”, so your left with “edit the registry every time you add a website”.  This is a cumbersome workaround for something that happens out of the box default.  Most SharePoint boxes will want more then one web site name and best practice says to NOT make production sites the server name. IMO SharePoint should be updating the reg key itself and keep in sync with the host headers created/managed by central admin. Or, the localhost loopback “new feature” should be looking at iis host headers and allowing them.

Who Am I?

Read a little about me.
Subscribe

Twitter Updates