Out, yesterday, “Patch Tuesday.†Lots of email to clean up.
Task focus for today: Storage re-arrangements.
Again, heat’s on and so is the AC. Makes for cold fingers.
Reviewing Greg’s powershell script.
Draft memo; asked for saa-ad@uvm.edu email alias. Shared responsibility.
Confirmed names, affiliations, sent memo.
Some progress on storate re-org, but not as much as I’d hoped. And no progress on scripts. /sigh
Mastering the Maze tomorrow; or maybe more storage work.
Because of my body’s resistance to the artificial manipulation of time zones, I’m running at about ¾-impulse.
Happy Birthday to my little sister.
A friend pointed out to me that Tax Day is also Same Sex Kiss Day, to be held at your friendly neighborhood Starbucks, or wherever you want, really.
On the list for today: storage management, server disk repartitioning, and group management training.
Updating Tools list.
Configuring new SharePoint servers’ backup.
Working with server disk management; accessing system via remote console, mounting ISO as virtual CD across the wire.
Greg showed me WinDirStat. I’ve seen it in several magazines, but never quite grokked the utility of the rectilinear representations of files. Now I understand, and it makes a lot of sense. It would be nice to be able to select alternate color schemes.
Using GPartEd Live to fiddle with partitions. An hour or so later, and the drives have been resized and Windows is up and running, with no problems. Phew!
Sent Marty documentation about backing up MS SQL Server Express Edition using SQLCMD.EXE and Scheduled Tasks.
Investigate account issue for Beth.
Touch base with Daryl on group management issue for CS.
UWinnipeg has ActivePerl 5.10 packages for IO-Socket-SSL. Is it enough?
Storage issues overnight; thanks, Greg, for putting out the fire.
Server storage resize project: IBM RSA access established, trouble getting GNU PartEd.
NERCOMP Campus Agreement LiveMeeting
Planning and design of home directory storage. Did some interesting analysis. Don’t want to break anything before the weekend, though. And I’m back on call.
And I solved a PHP problem for a client of IM; nice way to close the day. Thanks, Laurie.
Goal for today: get auto_provisioning script working.
Feeling cold; AC is blowing strong and winning the HVAC smackdown.
Made lots of progress on provisioning scripts, then hit brick wall: Need IO::Socket::SSL and Net::SSLeay in order to do Net::LDAP->starttls, and the perldap package from UWinnipeg for Perl 5.10 doesn’t have these available.
Do I try to compile myself and build PPMs? Ugh.
Maybe ActivePerl 5.8 x64 would get the job done…
Air conditioning and heat are on in my office. AC is winning. <brrrr>
Found ShellRunAs forum post, blogged it.
Networker troubleshooting; uninstalled 7.4, installed 7.5. Survey says? It works!
Provisioning scripts work: reworking scripts to use icacls instead of xcacls.vbs.
ETS all-staff forum
Work on script adjustments. Made significant headway; no longer using mapped drive, using icacls instead of xcacls.vbs in manual provisioning script prov_user.pl. Need to port changes to automatic provisioning.
Back in the day, I was a good Windows admin and did my administration using the Windows Server admin tools from my workstation, logged in with a non-admin user, using the RunAs shell feature (shift+right-click) to start the admin tool with administrator credentials.
Vista’s “Run as administrator†feature will run a program with elevated (i.e., administrator) rights, but with the credentials of the current user. The runas.exe shell command provides a way to execute a command with different credentials, but they aren’t elevated.
Now, granted that it is rare that I need to run a tool both as a different users and have elevated rights on the local system. It can happen, though.
Sysinternals provides a handy utility called ShellRunAs, which provides the RunAs feature, and I found a forum post suggesting a method for getting “Run elevated as a different user†functionality.
I haven’t tried it, yet, but I wanted to share the solution.
Need to expand storage on WinDB; Kent is working on the FC storage.
Documentation regarding printer installation. Added a How-To wiki library to the AD Sharepoint Site, and added instruction for installing a printer by Finding a printer in the directory.
Disks on WinDB are successfully expanded.
Expanded the printer documentation.
Quite a bit of work confirming the functionality of NTFRS for SYSVOL: correlated GP GUIDs and Names; looked into a couple of orphaned policy folders; looked through deletedObjects container. Couldn’t find any policies pointing to those orphaned GUIDs.
Fixed Samsung printer duplex issue.
Registered for Mastering the Maze. I note that Greg is doing a couple of presentations, and Carol, Ben, and Henrietta are also covering technology topics.
Began review of Certificate Services migration process:
Lots of email cleanup, after being out sick and then on vacation.
Just realized I’m supposed to be working with Center for Cultural Pluralism staff on using SharePoint. Working on some prep, examples.
Met with Sherwood, Mary, and Wes. Went over some broad sharepoint concepts, helped Sherwood and Mary verify their ability to log in. Decided to schedule another session in the future for more detailed discussion.
Worked to create CIT/ETS printers on the new servers. Ran into an issue creating an ETS printer in Colchester. Installed tcping and portqry to check firewall port access. Installed Web JetAdmin on printers3, doesn’t detect printers in part of 184 subnet. Found a list of Canon DIAS ports: http://www.digitalissues.co.uk/html/software/drivers/firewall-ports.html
NTFRS issue; followed instructions in KB 925633 to restore SYSVOL from other DC. Looks like there are a couple policies that got munged. Will have to follow up tomorrow.
Brief consult with Scott about mysql backups and the Dark Crystal.
Service restarts on some hosts.
Looked into automating some periodic restarts. One app vendor suggests using SQL Agent. I don’t really like the idea of using SQL Agent for non-database tasks. Found an interesting exercise in CMD batch file writing in a Microsoft script to restart IIS services. Powershell is another possibility.
Problems with SharePoint search service.
Greg worked on the problem, but emailed me on his day off that the problem continues. Given that the message indicates “access denied,†it seems worthwhile to verify that the gatherer is running with sufficient credentials. But starting with a google search, I found:
I checked SharePoint Central Administration, App Management, and “Manage Search Service,†but I receive an error indicating that the search service isn’t running. I have verified that the “Windows SharePoint Services Search†service is running, and checked the account under which it is running.
Checking logs at C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions12LOGS. Looking at the log file corresponding to the warning event time, SHAREPOINT1-20090225-1002.log. Looks like a search process kicked off at 10:16:38.
There are some errors indicating “No administration site found for SSP SharedServices.†But later, the gather is committing changes to the admin site. Nothing leaps out at me, here. Except a ton of errors like this:
02/25/2009 11:32:55.43    w3wp.exe (0x0E58)                          0x0AF4   Windows SharePoint Services      General                          8e1f   High       Failed to find the XML file at location ’12TemplateFeaturesBatchSiteManagerLinksfeature.xml’
I also see a message about the Search Service being disabled. It now makes sense to me that the normal windows indexing service is disabled, and thus the “Manage Search Service†option is disabled. I found the Microsoft Search Server program group, but when I launch the Administrator app, I see an icon appear briefly on the task bar, and then it vanishes. Checking the command-line, I see it runs a STSADM.EXE command. Perhaps I can run that command from a command prompt.
Z:>”C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions12BINSTSADM.EXE” -o osearch -action showdefaultsspadmin
‘showdefaultsspadmin’ action failed. Additional information: The site with the id [GUI] could not be found.
So maybe there really is a problem with the administration site. I tried stopping and restarting the Windows SharePoint Services Search service, but that didn’t appear to change anything.
However, it is clear that I don’t know much about Microsoft Search Service and the way it has been deployed.
Getting started with Search Server 2008
http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserver/features.aspx
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File locked issue
Examining a reported locked file, I see that it is held open by sa_ss_srchserv. Related to our search problem above?
Problem with Canon Printer Job codes
Printer is installed correctly, and “Get Device Status†successfully returns information, including Job Code setting. Created footprint 43362 from email thread.
Back to restarting services
A one-line powershell script:
restart-servce PncPrintSpooler*
Run as a scheduled task in the early morning. Found some good pointers on starting a powershell script.
LifeHaker reports that an early development release of Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, has been made available. This is alpha software (beware).