Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

So you’ve bought a new rack server, like the IBM System x3250. But your Boss or your customer was to cheap to buy an RSA II card. And now you need to install Windows Server 2003.

This is usually the part where the fun begins. Newer servers do not have a floppy drive, but the only way to load drivers into Windows Server 2003, besides RIS or remastering CDs are floppy drives.

Getting an USB floppy drive is no big deal, you connect it to the machine, it boots, you press F6, select the storage adapter driver, format your hard disks, and then setup asks for the floppy again and again. Bummer.

The problem is that the first part of setup (loading the Mass Storage driver) is not handled by Windows, but instead by the BIOS’s floppy emulation. But the latter part, after formatting the hard drive is handled by Windows. And some of them are not recognized by the builtin USB storage drivers.

In my case, i had an iomega USB floppy with a built in card reader (don’t ask). I used device manager to find out the vendor and product id of this USB floppy.

I opened the txtsetup.oem supplied with my mass storage driver, and modified the section that my mass storage driver had.

I added the following line, directly to after the SCSI adapter itself:
id = "USB\VID_08BD&PID_1100", "usbstor"

I had no idea if this would work at all, but it did.

For your reference, i’ve included my txtsetup.oem, which works with iomega usb floppy dirves.

After updating all the new firmware on a newly delivered IBM System x3650, i installed the operating system Windows Server 2003 R2. The machine worked fine, but crashed mysteriously after about 3 hours into operation, logging a RAID failure into the RSA.

When looking further through the RSA error logs, i’ve found this error occuring multiple times:

Unknown SERR/PERR detected on PCI bus Chassis#=NA Slot#=0 Bus#=0 Dev.ID=0x25e3 Vend.ID=0x8086 Status=0x0 DevFun#=0xff

I’ve called IBM support, and they told me that i should power cycle the machine after a firmware update. I did that and then continued to setup the machine. It’s been working flawlessly under heavy load for the past 3 months.

I’m going to remark this for the feature - after a firmware upgrade on a server, do a power cycle.

How to Cheat at Configuring Exchange Server 2007 is the book i’m reading right now, preparing myself for the first Exchange 2007 deployment that is going to come.

So far i’m through the first three chapters, and i think it’s pretty good so far. I’ve setup a few Exchange 2007 testing environments before, but i never did anything serious with it.

Have you ever wanted to connect to the “Windows Internal” database that WSUS V3 uses?

While “Windows Internal Database” is Microsoft SQL Server 2005 in a limited edition (just like MSDE, WMSDE before it), the familiar access tools to the DB went missing, and connecting using standard ways doesn’t work either.

It doesn’t work right out of the box. First, you need SQL Management Studio Express.

Install and start it. Specify the following connection string:

\\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query

Please note that, as implied by the connection string, this connection only works locally.

If you already know where i’m going with this after reading the subject, you can stop reading now.

As hard disks get bigger and bigger, servers in the Small Business environments are usually setup with too few disk arms to satisfy performance needs.

The problem is quite simple - a standard 36GB 2.5″ SAS Hard Drive can read data at factor x, and can do y IOPs per second.

A standard 72GB 2.5″ SAS Hard Drive can read data at factor x.1 (or similar), and can do y IOPs per second.

As you can see, disks get bigger, but they do not really get faster. If you need more IOPs per second, you need more disks.

If you have a legacy systems, with a considerable number of disk arms (more than 10), each at 4 or 8GB capacity, and migrate this setup two a new system with a RAID1 over two 147GB disks, you will get _WORSE_ performance than the old system.

And if we look at consumer hard drives, with 750GB, 1TB per disk, the performance gets even worse.

This is usually not a problem in more professional environments where systems are purchased by requirements, but in Small Businesses systems are usually purchased by the amount of money that is around for them.

Never forget about the need for disk arms.

The new 9407-515 is out, and it has some problems from the beginning. The message CPI9E64 is displayed every hour in the QSYSOPR *MSGQ.

Nachrichten-ID . . . . : CPI9E64
Sendedatum . . . . . . : 08.05.07 Sendezeit . . . . . . : 01:20:26

Nachricht . . . : Lizenzberechtigungsinformationen für 5722SS1 installiert.

Ursache . . . . : Es wurden Lizenzberechtigungsinformationen für Produkt
5722SS1 Lizenzlaufzeit V5 Feature 5051 installiert.

When googling for the message id, Google doesn’t return any results (yet).

So i opened a support case, and a fix already exists. Just order PTF SI27389 using SNDPTFORD (will download the PTF using the Internet automatically), and install it using GO PTF, 8, *SERVICE. After that, the issue is resolved. Simple as that.

Now if IBM would make it websites Google-friendly, and the APAR Pages would’ve been indexed, there would’ve been no need to make a support call.

When you upgrade Active Directory from Windows 2000 to Windows Server 2003, the configuration is not exactly identical to creating a new domain under Windows Server 2003.

The most important part that in new Windows Server 2003 installations, the DNS domain _msdcs.domain.tld is a seperate zone from domain.tld, with a different replication scope.

When upgrading a domain from 2000 to 2003, the DNS configuration is not changed. If you need the functionality of Windows Server 2003 replication scopes for your Domain, you will need to follow KB817470.

However, this is not an issue for Small Businesses. This feature only has an advantage when you’re using multiple domains in your forest, and DNS replication traffic is an issue. KB817470 is relatively cumbersome to follow, so my advise would be to leave it alone unless you really need to features offered.

Another pitfall (was) the tombstone lifetime. In Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 RTM, the default tombstone lifetime was 60 days. In Windows Server 2003 SP1, this was upped to 180 days, but only for newly created domains.

KB924890 tells us that installing SP2 will apply this fix automatically. Before, you had to do it manually, using adsiedit.msc.

You just got a new 520/515/525, and the first thing you’re seeing after turning the machine on is

1100 7611 or
1100 7621 or
1100 7631

Of course, this SRC is listed in the Hardware SRC list:

Fan missing error

A problem was detected with a Fan which can be caused by a Fan not being installed. Install Fan if missing, replace if already installed.

But when you open the lid, the fan is spinning, and only the green light is lit. Cycling the power on the machine does not resolve this problem.

So there’s only one thing left to do. Turn the machine off, remove the front cover, remove the tape/cd tray, remove the fan tray, remove and replace all fans, place all the stuff back into the machine, and then boot it.

You will see the attention light being lit, so you will need to reset the error flag in the Service Action Log in SST, and also close all problems in WRKPRB.

Money is always an issue, so in some circumstances you might not want to buy a 3rd party backup suite (I usually use Veritas Symantec BackupExec, which works reasonably well and can be configured easily).

So, there’s ntbackup which is integrated into all Windows versions, starting with NT. It even supports Shadow Copies on 2003 and also SQL 2000, Exchange backups. It works reasonably well when used with a NAS device for D2D backup, but automating it for use with a tape drives looked like it would be quite a hassle.

However, there’s a solution:

NTBackupScript

NTBackupScript is a GPL’d script which does all the nasty storage and tape management stuff for you, it even implements E-Mail notifications. This is a great tool if you’re working under serious budget constraints.

There is a drawback, however. NTBackupScript was written with only English versions of Windows 2003 in mind. Usually this is fine, because you should only be using English versions ofWwindows anyway, but as always “best practice” isn’t reality. You will need to adjust the script a bit to work with German versions of windows. Pay attention to the date handling and the error handling. I don’t publish my version yet, because i’m not really sure i made the right changes.

Sidenote: SBS 2003 already includes a pre-scripted version of ntbackup, which does roughly the same thing as NTBackupScript - i don’t understand why Microsoft didn’t make this available for free for the normal Windows Server versions.

If you’re running Outlook 2007 against an Exchange 2003 server, and have alerts generated by Sharepoint Services 3.0, you will notice very strange effects within Outlook, namely MAPI Error messages, mails that are not openable, etc.

The problem is a bug in Exchange 2003 - there is even a hotfix available in KB930807. However, this Hotfix is not publicly downloadable. You will need to contact Microsoft PSS, in order to get the Hotfix.

And here is where it gets interesting. If you’re running a native language version of your Microsoft Software, Support is only available by phone, for the small sum of 450 US$ - this fee is usually waived though if you just request a hotfix. For original US-English language software, support is also available by E-Mail, for much more reasonable 150 US$.

I’ve tried requesting the Hotfix by E-Mail, and it worked fine (though they referred me to the Phone Support option). It worked fine, and Microsoft provided me with the appropriate Hotfix.

The good thing is, that these problems will be mostly over because both Vista and Longhorn Server are true multilanguage Operating Systems.