HP Insight Control Environment – Windows 2008 SP2 iSCSI Driver Incompatibility

June 15, 2009 Stephen Leuthold

I decided to ensure all my firmware, drivers and Windows updates including Windows 2008 SP2 were installed before installing HP Insight Control Environment 5.10. It turns out they have this nifty prerequisite checker before the installation to ensure all your stuff is compatible. After installing SP2 the iSCSI msiscsi.sys driver will be updated to 6.0.6002.18005. The expected driver by the “Insight Software Advisor” is 6.0.6001.18000 if you are running Windows 2008. I did not want to roll back the SP2 installation so here is what I have done:
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LDAP Query to find all Windows Servers in a Domain

November 24, 2008 Stephen Leuthold

Here a quick tutorial on how to grab all the Windows Servers out of your domain:

1 ) Open Active Directory Users and Computers MMC.
2 ) Expand AD Users and Computers.
3 ) Expand the domain you want to create the query in.
4 ) Right click on Saved Queries, Select New->Query.
5 ) Name the query “Windows Servers”.
6 ) Click Define Query button.
7 ) From the Find drop down menu select Custom Search.
8 ) Click on the Advanced tab.
9 ) Paste the following into the “Enter LDAP query:” text box (without the quotes), “(&(objectCategory=computer)(|(operatingSystem=Windows Server*)(operatingSystem=Windows 2000 Server))))))”
10 ) Click OK.
11 ) Click OK.
12 ) Press F5 to refresh query and it will show all the windows servers in your domain, everything from Windows 2000 through 2008.

You can find other examples of queries at: http://www.petri.co.il/software/saved_queries_samples_xml.zip

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Because of an error in data encryption, this session will end

October 30, 2008 Stephen Leuthold

Because of an error in data encryption, this session will end

An aggravating situation with a simple solution. I have a brand new out-of-the-box Windows 2008 server that will not maintain a terminal services RDP session for a lousy two minutes without a “Because of an error in data encryption, this session will end.” error. Rather annoying however I did find a solution to the problem so follow along:
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Script to fix duplicate SMS/SCCM GUID’s

October 3, 2008 Stephen Leuthold

I recently had an interesting issue come about with a bunch of old school legacy machines scattered around several offices that contained identical disk images and SMS/SCCM agent GUID’s. The unintended consequences of this situation are computers improperly referenced in a collection plan. In addition machines were improperly re-imaged and applications inadvertently deployed. Our in-house solution was to create a script to parse a CSV (comma delimited) file including all machine names with duplicate GUID’s and run the following tasks:
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Disaster recovery restore with Archive IQ

August 26, 2008 Stephen Leuthold

Of course you have all of your valuable data safely backed up just in case the inevitable happens, that’s just good practice. When disaster does indeed strike you are faced with having to restore this vital data and get things back up and running asap. You can try booting your dead-in-the-water system with a handy BartPE CD and then run the (Archive IQ) \\\AIQRemote$\aiqRemote.exe utility.
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Migrate your desktops with Archive IQ

August 21, 2008 Stephen Leuthold

We are in the process of consolidating three active directory forests into one and a large part of this tedious task is migrating desktops into the new domain as well. To lower the risk of data loss we were sure to backup ALL client machines before migrating them. I was concerned about the enormous amount of valuable disk space on our SAN that was being consumed by the myriad of ghost images and NTBackups. Naturally I’m thinking that there must be a more efficient and less time consuming method to accomplish this effort.
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Managing the mail queue for forums and blogs

August 21, 2008 Stephen Leuthold

I administrate several forum and blog sites and was in need of a quick and reliable method to monitor and manage the mail queue. My desire was to implement a system that would keep me up to date on the status of my server’s mail queue via a daily cron job. This is something that can easily be forgotten about if one is as busy as I am and this very simple script lets me know if I have any e-mails jammed up in the local mail queue.

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GPO Template for Read Write SNMP community

August 21, 2008 Stephen Leuthold

I’m am in the process of deploying Dell’s OpenManage System Management solution to manage the hardware, firmware and drivers on all of our Dell servers and SNMP read/write communities are required. In addition my plan calls for rolling out HP’s System Insight Manager (SIM) which also requires the SNMP communities. Since I would rather not have to configure these SNMP communities on each individual server I have utilized Windows Server Group Policy to “push” these SNMP communities out to these servers. Unfortunately the default system.adm group policy does not support read/write communities, it is limited to ‘read only’ communities and I suspect this might be for security reasons. That leaves me with one solution, at least that I can think of, and that is to create a custom GPO template. Thinking that I cannot be the only administrator in this predicament I decided to search some websites to see if I might be able to dig up some helpful information. Fortunately I came across a forum discussion that touched on exactly what I was looking for.

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Archive IQ Backup System First Impressions

August 7, 2008 Stephen Leuthold

Large companies merging together and having various data backup system utilizations can equal one major headache for those tasked with weaving the mess into
something viable. Some how I knew I had just stepped in it when the deal was finalized. Literally. Virtually overnight our company nearly doubled in size and I was staring right into the face of one heck of a screwed up data protection/recovery and backup quagmire. Since the merger I have been struggling with several different backup systems, namely NetBackup, BackupExec and NetVault across several different tape libraries and backup-to-disk fiber channel/iSCSI SANs/NAS systems. As you might imagine it is incredibly difficult to not only manage all of these different environments but we also have had to consolidate and clean up and out about five years worth of bits and pieces. usually when you have this much junk to throw out you can just call Waste Management and have them roll a dumpster off into the driveway. No such luck with this mess! Did I mention all of the outdated servers that have been dropping like a rock of late? I’ll save that for another post.
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Phpbb3 Sitemap code update for Google Sitemap 0.9

July 22, 2008 Stephen Leuthold

I changed some code for google-sitemap.php to work with one of my phpbb3 sites that doesn’t put phpbb3 in the root of the website, although this will work universally if you properly define $domain_root and $phpbb_root_path variables, respectively. This php script was originally done by Tobi Schäfer at http://code.google.com/u/tobi.schaefer/…

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