Windows

Archived Posts from this Category

2010-09-19

Windows 2008 Server Core ESX Guest Virtual Hardware Upgrade – BSOD on boot

Posted by Robert Auch under Domain Controllers, HowTo, VMWare, Windows
[4] Comments 

I recently upgraded the totalnetsolutions.net internal network from ESX 3.5 to ESXi 4.1. The ESX Host upgrade itself is simple, and not worth mentioning. When complete, however, you have an option to upgrade the Guest OS Virtual Hardware from v4 to v7. Support for USB devices, thin-provisioned disks, and supposed speed improvements come with the upgrade.

The process should always be:

1. Upgrade VMware Tools to the latest available version. This pre-stages the drivers for the newest hardware, even though it’s not “installed” yet.
2. Reboot the guest and make sure it boots and runs properly after all upgrades (host and guest) have been completed.
3. Back up the entire guest VM, including the VMX and VMDK files.
4. Upgrade the virtual hardware through vSphere
5. Boot the VM and verify all settings are working properly.

I started the upgrades in the Unix lab. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (4 and 5) and Ubuntu (10) systems went without a hitch. VMware Tools automatic upgrade went properly, systems rebooted fine, and after upgrading the virtual hardware, I didn’t have to change a thing in the guests. The Solaris 10 x86 guest, had some issues, however. I believe a rescan was all that was required to fix it, but we were planning on rebuilding the box anyways, so used the issues as the final “nail in the coffin” to the old hardware.

On the Windows side, we have 2 pools in our ESX environment: one for test machines, and one running our production environment. We have Domain Controllers (and separate forests) in both environments, but all file and Exchange operations only live in production.

The Windows 2003 DC / Exchange 2003 server came up fine, although it lost its network configuration (adapter MAC changed), so that had to be reset, but is a simple fix.

All Windows 2008 DCs in the test lab, including the RODC, came up fine, but with the same “lost network configuration” hiccup. These systems all have the NTDS data and logs on the C: drive.

The Windows 2008 Server Core DC / File server, however, was a different story. Upon reboot, the server kept giving a BSOD and rebooting, so I couldn’t read the error. As this system is the primary (200GB) file server, primary DNS server (including conditional forwarding to the test lab), and the DC that handles the most load (DNS weight on the Windows 2003 is slightly lower), fixing the Blue Screen was of major importance. This is how it’s been fixed:

1. Safe Mode and “Last known Config” didn’t work, so hit F8 on the boot process to choose “Do not restart on system failure”. This allows you to read the BSOD message. In our case, it was simply “File Not Found”. Which means, no minidump, and you might be sunk.
2. On a whim, since it is a DC, I tried to boot into Directory Services Restore Mode, hoping the “not found” file was AD related… and was right.
3. This leads us down the path of this support article.
4. Immediately upon booting, I ran: ntdsutil files integrity which gave this error:
Could not initialize the Jet engine: Jet Error -566.
Failed to open DIT for AD DS/LDS instance NTDS. Error -2147418113
5. Searching shows there’s not much useful here, but we know it’s a failure to read the DIT. This could be security, or horrid corruption.
6. I quit ntdsutil to try to check the files on the E: drive, where they lived, only to find there was no E: drive. With no MMC, it’s diskpart to the rescue.
7. diskpart
DISKPART> list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ---------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 24 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Offline 100 GB 0 B
Disk 2 Offline 100 GB 0 B
8. I ran:
select disk 1
online
select disk 2
online
exit
9. Now I can read the E: drive, so try ntdsutil files integrity again… and get the same error message. Checking the disk, everything looked fine. In Linux, I’d check permissions with a quick “touch filename”, but notepad needed to be used here, only to discover the entire disk was marked read-only. Back to diskpart!
diskpart
select disk 1
attributes disk clear readonly
select disk 2
attributes disk clear readonly
10. Now ntdsutil runs properly, reboot into normal mode, and the system is fixed!

I haven’t seen posts of other people having disks get marked offline and unreadable on their VMs after an upgrade, but this only happened on the Windows 2008 system, and it’s non-system disks.

 

2010-07-10

K9Mail Hosted Exchange ActiveSync Errors Solved

Posted by Robert Auch under Exchange, Open Source Software, Phones
Leave a Comment 

I’ve been fighting K9Mail for weeks now, trying to get it to sync with MailStreet who hosts “exchange.ms”) hosted Exchange. If you’ve already followed the instructions at the K9Mail Wiki with no success, read on.

Thanks to the k9mail wiki on debugging connection issues and the fact that I already had the Android SDK installed, I was able to solve the 2 related errors I was getting. I would either get an “HTTP 404 not found” or an “HTTP 501 Not Implemented” depending on the settings I chose. With no additional settings other than suggested in the Wiki, I’d get a “501 not implemented”. If I tried to set a mailbox path, or a WebDAV path, I’d get the HTTP 404 Not Found.

In the debugging log, I saw that the system was calling “http://mail.$domain.exchange.ms/”$webDAVpath/Inbox – if I set it to a full URL, the full URL was getting appended. When I attempted to hit those same paths in a full browser, I’d always get an HTTP 404. So, digging in my history in Firefox, I found the following (cleaned) path:
http://mail.$domain.exchange.ms/exchange/$emailaddress/
In this case $emailaddress was my Exchange mail address with the “@” stripped out. Appending “Inbox” to the end of this path resulted in a valid load of my OWA inbox.

Plugging then: /exchange/$emailaddress/ into the WebDAV box in K9Mail, and my email immediately loaded up.

Now I have Android syncing my calendars and contacts, and k9mail is handling my massive inbox!

 

2009-03-05

Samba on Likewise Open – errors with machine accounts

Posted by Robert Auch under HowTo, Open Source Software, Windows
[2] Comments 

We’ve had a few customers and Open users posting about problems with machine accounts trying to access Samba shares and getting denied with:
smbd/sesssetup.c:reply_spnego_kerberos(439) Username DOM\COMPUTER1$ is invalid on this system
The “$” at the end of the account name means it’s a computer account, not a user. We’re seeing this for Citrix MetaFrame application servers on shared storage, startup scripts not stored on a DC, and several other cases.

On a Samba server joined to AD with winbind, this is easy to deal with because Samba’s winbind can treat the computer accounts just like user accounts, and assign them access to the unix filesystem with whatever backend has been configured. When a Samba server is joined with Likewise, however, the machine accounts are not visible, and the “username is invalid” message comes up.

Fortunately, Samba gives us a method to handle this, in form of the “username map” directive in /etc/samba/smb.conf.  There are two ways to use this, the first is with the username map file.
In smb.conf, to simply add:
[global ]
username map = /etc/samba/smbusers
then create a file named /etc/samba/smbusers and populate it with localuser=aduser pairs, like:
COMPUTER1$ = compacct
COMPUTER2$ = compacct
CITRIXFARM1$ = citrxact
and so on. Lastly, you’ll have to add the local accounts from the pairs above:
useradd -c "Account for AD Computers to use Samba" compacct -G users -u 998
useradd -c "Account for AD Citrix Servers to use Samba" citrxact -G users -u 999
Then, whenever one of the AD computers in the list attempts to access the Samba share, it’ll be mapped to the local account.

The problem with this is when you have a lot of servers, like a Citrix MetaFrame farm, or a Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services farm, that may be changing frequently, because managing that file could get hard. In this case there is the username map script directive, which is added to smb.conf as:
[global ]
username map script = /usr/lib/samba/auth/machine-acct-map.pl
Then download this script and save it in /usr/lib/samba/auth/ and make it executable (chmod +x /usr/lib/samba/auth/machine-acct-map.pl). Then run:
useradd -c "Account for AD Computers to use Samba" compacct -G users -u 998
Now, all computers which access the share will be remapped to the “compacct” user, and you won’t have to manage a file for every time the server farm changes.

Get the file here.

 

2008-03-20

DCPromo Windows Server 2008 Server Core

Posted by Robert Auch under Domain Controllers, Windows | Tags: , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

I built a Windows Server 2008 Server Core DC last week. It’s an interesting exercise because you have to use an unattend.txt file. I found quite a few places online that listed RODC unattend.txt files, but not full read-write DC unattend.txt files. So, attached to this post you’ll find the unattend.txt I used, but also, of more interest, I’m attaching the full help file directly from the server, which I used to create the file.

FIrst, you have to install the server and set an IP address – my previous posts on IP changes on DCs all used netsh commands as well, so if you followed thouse, you should be somewhat prepared for Server Core. I already had a WIndows Server 2003 DC in the environment, so that will be my primary DNS server for the install, untill DCPromo edits the settings.
netsh interface ipv4 set address local static 10.1.1.6 255.255.255.0 10.1.1.1 10
netsh interface ipv4 set dns local static 10.1.1.5
netsh interface ipv4 set wins local static 10.1.1.5

Now networking is set up, we can rename the computer: netdom renamecomputer %computername% /NewName:dc02 and join the domain with etdom join dc02 /domain:foo.local /UserD:FOO\Administrator /reboot:5 /PasswordD:*. The “5″ after the reboot flag says to reboot 5 seconds after completion, and the “*” at the end says to prompt you for your password. I join the system to the domain manually first, because then I can WSUS patch it (if WSUS is in the network), or open up the firewall for any other patching software I have.

Once the server is back from reboot, activate, update the firewall to allow remote MMC connections (if you’re not doing that through GPO already), and install new roles.
slmgr.vbs -ato
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Remote Administration" new enable=yes

The following roles are optional, depending on the service of the server. Mine has DNS and the File Server roles, but not DHCP. None of these are required to install AD Domain Services!
start /w ocsetup DNS-Server-Core-Role
start /w ocsetup DHCPServerCore
start /w ocsetup FRS-Infrastructure
start /w ocsetup DFSN-Server
start /w ocsetup DFSR-Infrastructure-ServerEdition

If this is the first Windows Server 2008 DC in your environment, you’ll need to take the Windows Server 2008 DVD to the DC with the Infrastructure Master role (required for /gpprep only) and run the following (E: assumed as DVD-ROM drive):
e:\sources\adprep\adprep.exe /forestprep
e:\sources\adprep\adprep.exe /domainprep
e:\sources\adprep\adprep.exe /domainprep /gpprep (Also run adprep /rodcPrep if you plan on building RODCs.)

Now you’re ready to do the DCPromo itself. Create an unattend.txt file. To add a DC to an existing domain, you can use:
[DCInstall]
AutoConfigDNS=Yes
ConfirmGc=Yes
DatabasePath=E:\Windows\NTDS
LogPath=c:\windows\NTDS
RebootOnSuccess=Yes
ReplicaDomainDNSName=foo.local
ReplicaOrNewDomain=Replica
ReplicationSourceDC=dc01.foo.local
SafeModeAdminPassword=passwordhere
SysVolPath=e:\windows\SysVol
UserDomain=foo.local
/Password:passwordhere

DCPromo will wipe out the passwords when it starts, or you can fill in “*” instead of the password, to be prompted. When it’s done, the server will reboot and be a new Global Catalog / DC in your domain. DCPromo will install neccessary binaries and configure the firewall for DC Services for you. It’s quite slick.

And as promised, here are the DCPromo Unattend Options for reference for creating your own unattend.txt.

 

2008-02-15

Windows Server 2008 Disk Problem

Posted by Robert Auch under VMWare, Windows
Leave a Comment 

Just as a quick note – Windows Server 2008 RC0 seems to have the same setup issue as Windows Vista, or at least the x64 RC0 does – I spent most of the evening last night editing settings, rebooting, plugging in the product key, and reading “This computer’s hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk’s controller is enabled in the BIOS.” The problem is detailed at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925481 for Vista. Windows Server 2008 RC1 fixes this issue.

I was having the problem on a Virtual system in VMWare ESX 3.5, so it was easy to disconnect a disk to get past the error, but downloading and installing the updated RC seemed like the better fix for the first DC in a new test lab.

What apparently is going on is if you have 2 hard drives that have never been partitioned or initialized, then the Setup.exe program gets confused. You can remove one of the disks temporarily, format them with another boot medium (BartPE, anyone?), or just not use Win2k8 RC0. According to the support note, the only fix for Vista is to format the drives.  I bet you can remove one of them and Vista will work, too, but haven’t tested.

 

« Previous Page — Next Page »