I recently ran into an issue with a laptop where I could not access it via remote desktop or ping even though I was on the same network as it. It drove me nuts before I figured it out. Here is what I did before I realized what was blocking access:
- Verified windows firewall was not blocking access.
- Verified I could rdp from the machine to the machine, open remote desktop on the machine with the issue simply connect to itself by name, ip or loopback.
- Verified tcp was working, ping loopback…reset the tcp/ip stack, ran winsock fix, lsp fix but found no issues.
- I uninstalled any unneeded programs and also my antivirus just to test. Still had the issue.
- I rolled back from XP SP3 but still had the issue.
And then it dawned on me to check the Cisco vpn client. The built-in firewall was running. To disable I opened the client, right clicked the gold lock icon in the lower right hand corner and deselected Stateful Firewall (Always On). It started working as sooon as I did that. I am not sure if that is a default setting or something I enabled inadvertently. Next time I will think to check for any vpn clients and related issues much earlier in the process. Vpns have been known to cause a variety of network issues since they work so closely with windows networking.
dmw Uncategorized ciso vpn firewall, rdp, rdp connection failure, remote desktop
The Conficker worm has been in the news a lot lately and for good reason. If you want to make sure a machine is not infected BitDefender has setup a great service that can detect and remove the worm. If you can’t get to the site from a computer and you suspect it may be infected go to a known clean machine and download the tool. Then transer the tool to the suspect machine and run. After it has been removed make sure you run Windows Updates to get Microsoft patch 958644 to close the vulnerability.
The BitDefender site is www.bdtools.net
dmw Uncategorized
I got an email from a person with a hotmail address the other day. At the bottom of the email was an advertisement for Windows Live Skydrive with 25GB of free online storage. That struck me as a very good deal as most free online backup and sharing services limit you to 2-5 GB. Everyone should back up their files regularly. Ask yourself what you are willing to lose if your computer is lost, stolen, or the hard drive just craps out. Do you have your pictures, financial files, resume stored on your computer? If so you should have that backed up. Having worked in desktop support and system administration roles I know failed hard drives are a daily occurence. The good news is there are great and free ways to backup your important files like Skydrive and others. Some are strictly for backup and others like Skydrive allow you to share files, link pictures and videos to blogs…Here is a list of solutions to check out with a great comparison chart.
http://lifehacker.com/5064688/online-storage-feature+by+feature-comparison-chart
dmw Uncategorized backups, free backup, online backup
I recently had the task of migrating a company into our current Exchange organization. The company had a different domain name and email hosted on a non-exchange environment. The users were currently mail-enabled contacts in the existing Exchange environment. All clients will access the new Exchange server using either OWA or Outlook Anywhere using Outlook 2003 or 2007. The users are not part of any domain.
- Get the current dns info for the domain. Find out where the domain is registered and where the dns records are hosted. Find out what the process is to transfer the domain to another registrar. It is a simple process and while its not necessary to do this I wanted the domain registered with the same registar as the existing domain. Additionally I will change the name servers responsible for hosting the domain to the same servers that host the existing domain.
- Get list of current users that will need accounts on Exchange as well as any distribution list emails that are needed.
- Configure spam/virus filtering application if necessary. In this case setup Postini to handle email for the new domain.
- Remove any domain addresses from current mail enabled contacts in active directory. Set to not auto update based on email address policy. This is done so when the active directory accounts/mailboxes are added later there is not an issue with the email addresses already being used.
- Add dns records (a and mx) for the domain being transferred to the nameservers that will host them.
- Change name servers on old dns provider to point to the new name servers for the domain.
- Setup Exchange to Accept mail for new domain.
Expand Organization Configuration, select Hub Transport, and then in the work pane, click the Accepted Domains tab.
In the action pane, click New Accepted Domain. The New Accepted Domain wizard appears.
On the New Accepted Domain page, enter the name of the new accepted domain. Use this field to identify the accepted domain in the user interface. You can type any name that you want, but you should select a meaningful name that helps you easily identify the purpose of this accepted domain.
Next, enter the Accepted Domain itself. Use this field to identify the SMTP domain name for which the Exchange organization will accept e-mail messages. You can use a wildcard character to accept messages for a domain and all its sub-domains.
Next, select one of the following options to set the accepted domain type: Authoritative Domain, Internal Relay Domain, or External Relay Domain.
Click New then on the Completion page, click Finish.
- Add the new active directory accounts and mailboxes in Exchange.
- Test mail flow to new addresses from internal and external addresses.
- Send users new information to connect to your Exchange server. Clients were a mix of Outlook 2003 and 2007 clients.
- Setup any mobile devices to connect to the new Exchange server.
dmw Exchange 2007 exchange migration
I am testing Vmware Workstation 6.5 and in particular the Pocket Ace features. This feature allows an entire OS to be installed and run from a usb drive, external drive, and other drives. The idea is you setup the virtual machine in Vmwaare Workstation then deploy it to the desired drive. Give the drive to a user, they plug it in and run it. It installs the Vmware player if needed then is able to run the virtual machine you setup.
I ran into an issue when deploying to a 32 GB usb flash drive. It was taking forever. It wasn’t hung but it was taking more than 24 hours to deploy. Now the day before I had deployed to the same the drive without issues so I knew something had to have changed. The change was I had formatted the drive as FAT32 instead of NTFS. As soon as I used NTFS it took about an hour to deploy to the drive. Not sure why this and don’t have the time to figure it out.
Hopefully this helps someone down the line.
dmw Uncategorized
How to move a Blackberry Professional Server from Vmware Server to Vmware ESX Server 3.5
Current Environment:
- Blackberry Professional 4.1.4.15, 30 users.
- Guest Vmware Server – “The Blackberry Server”: Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 Std, Intel Xeon 2.00 GHz 5130, 2GB RAM, 12 GB drive
- Host – Physical Server: HP Proliant DL385 G2, 2 Intel Xeon 2.00 GHz 5130, 9 GB, Smart Array E200i, 2 mirrored arrays 72GB, Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 Std x64
ESX Environment
- ESX 3.5 Server: HP Proliant DL385 G5, 8 CPU x 2.1 GHz, Quad-Core AMD Opteron CPU 2352, 26 GB RAM, .5 TB disk space.
- From ESX Vmware Virtual Infrastructure client click consolidation, analyze physical computers for consolidation, select “Manually specify the computers to consolidate”, enter the name or IP of the server you wish to migrate, click add to analysis, the computer will be analyzed for a few minutes . You may need t o set up the credentials the consolidation service uses under Administration, Consolidation Settings, Default credentials if the analysis does not run.
- Once the machine has been analyzed and is ready to migrate I shut down all Blackberry services on the current vmware server and also shut down the SQL service. Leave the machine running.
- From the vmi client right click the machine listed under consolidation, analysis and choose convert with recommendations, choose which esx server to migrate to if you have more than one.
- It took about 50 minutes for the conversion to complete.
- Once it was complete I shut down the current Blackberry server and turned on the new server.
- Everything worked!
- One Note: For some reason I lost the “Consolidation” button on the vim client after I did this. I don’t think it was related to this procedure. Anyways I checked the virtual capacity planner service was running and even restarted it but no luck. Once I restarted the machine running the virtual center the button came back.
dmw System Administration Blackberry Server, convert vmware server to esx, virtual blackberry server, vmware server, vmware server to esx server migration
