Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

We’ve just received a new System x3200, to serve as an infrastructure hub for our POS software at a Small Business customer. Unlike all other machines i’ve talked about before (HP DL320 G5, System x3650 vs. HP DL380 G5, System x3250, System x3650), this machine is a tower model. With IT moving more and more towards a professional service subset, tower machines are getting less and less common, but many small businesses do not see the return on investment a rack mounted server will give them. As such, IBM still produces a few decent System x servers in the tower form factor.

The x3200 brother is the rackmounted System x3250. Both of them are IBM’s low end entry systems. The x3200 we sold to our customer was one of more well endowed models, featuring redundant power supplies and hot plug SAS disks.

The disks come in a standard 3.5″ form factor, there are no 2.5″ models available (which makes sense, as towers are not really space constrained, which is clearly visible when looking at the x3200 bulky frame).

The exact configuration ordered:

• System x3250 Xeon 2.13Ghz DC, with 2×512MB Base Memory, 3.5″ HP SAS, redundant PSU
• 2x 72GB 10kRPM SAS

Unpacking and opening

The machine was shipped in a box where you’d have thought it contains a 5 year old desktop PC, meaning it was a bit bigger than the Lenovo ThinkCentre tower shipping boxes. As always, removing the machines from these boxes is not as fun when you’re alone, because the styropor sticks to the machine.

Another thing to note is that the machine shipping without any power cables, which is normally not the case. But this might’ve been a mixup at our distributor.

The machine itself is big and bulky (exactly as it looks on the photos), but the case is very well done, much better than the xSeries 226 had. Everything is tool less, and the opening mechanisms for the front and side cover work nicely, and fit like a glove when putting them back on.

Interiors

Even though this is a budget machine, the interior is done rather well. The cables are packed together nicely, and the system has room for expansion. 4x 3.5″ HP SAS disk trays, 3 PCI slots, 2 PCI-E Slots (1x, 4x). The LSI Logic SAS RAID Controller is mounted directly on the mainboard, saving expansion slots. Again, this machine only accepts 4 DIMMs, which aren’t that accessible. But this isn’t a huge problem, as maintenance on tower models has always been awkward and finicky – that’s what rack servers are for.

The machine isn’t quiet, but it isn’t loud either. I wouldn’t mind having it in my office, the noise is not a high pitched scream like you usually get from a 1U rack server. There is no inline documentation like IBM usually provides with their rack mount servers, and there’s no LightPath diagnostics either. That’s perfectly normal for this price.

What isn’t usual for this price class is the fact that this machine has redundant power supplies. While this is the norm for more expensive servers, it isn’t for entry level servers. The redundant power supplies do not cost a lot more than the normal model, and it’s always nice to have redundant power (as UPSes account for a large number of power failures, at least here in Switzerland).

Installing options

We only got a few disks with the machine, and installing them was a breeze. They are hid behind an easily openable lid, and come in a standard IBM hotplug mounting tray.

The machine we received had horrible outdated firmware, so the first step was to get everything up to speed. This worked fine with an USB floppy drive, as IBMs Update CD’s weren’t current (again). I still think there should be some method that does all this whole box-update thing via the internet. Not sure how this could be implemented without astronomic cost, but i still want it.

The Onboard LSI Logic RAID Controller supports mirroring and striping, and brings it’s own horrible management software – it’s not an IBM ServeRAID family controller. I didn’t even find a way to automatically send mails in case of a disk failure.

Booting the server

We’ve installed Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 on this machine, not using the ServerGuide procedure. Again, the install went through without any problems after supplying the LSI Logic driver on an USB floppy. I’m still waiting for Windows Server 2008 which will make this a lot easier with it’s Windows PE 2.0 based installer.

As far as my first impressions went, the disk performance is very good. It’s quite noticeable if you use 10kRPM SAS disks against 7.2kRPM SATA disks.

Resumee

Even though it’s a budget machine, the build quality and the features of the System x3200 are quite impressive (i really, really liked two PSUs in such a small machine). I still don’t like tower machines, but the System x3200 is worth it’s money if you don’t have a rack at a given location. The system is very well designed, and could even serve as a small business server for a very small business.

Also, the obligatory plug to DATALINE AG which sells this server and other IBM System x or System i servers.

McAfee ProtectionPilot can deploy hotfixes for VirusScan. The error handling for this is rather buggy, though.

If the installation of a hotfix fails, you will not notice that from the management console or from the agent logs. The agent logs will still say that the current hotfix is installed.

Product(s) running latest hotfix 15.

Pay attention to the information that can be accessed by using a right click on the tray icon – it shows the real version of VirusScan and it’s current hotfix level. I’ve found no why to retrieve the hotfix level using the McAfee ProtectionPilot console, but this information might be contained within the ePO database used by PRP.

Installing hotfixes manually is trivial, but it can fail if the original .msi file is missing (i’ve seen this happening on a few machines, and never found out why). The VSE800.msi should be in %PROGRAMFILES%\Network Associates\VirusScan\RepairCache. If it isn’t, retrieve it from another machine at the same path, or from within the self extracting setup.exe that can be downloaded from mcafee.com with your grant number or is found in your PRP repository.

Today i’ve encountered a very interesting problem that’s very hard to track down exactly.

A small business customer was running an Exchange 2003 server behind a ZyXEL ZyWALL 5 with AntiSpam installed and enabled. The ZyWALL forwarded port 25 to the Exchange server. This worked, for the most, flawlessly. But a few hosts (i’ve found no distinct differences between the source hosts – ADSL, Leased Lines, Colocated, Europe, USA) failed to get an SMTP greeting (220 customer.example.com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 6.0.xx ready at Thu, xx Sep 2007 xx:xx:xx +0200).

When i disabled the Anti-Spam and pressed enter (in a telnet session to port 25), the SMTP greeting appeared. If anti-spam was enabled, it never appeared. But that didn’t help – Postfix still couldn’t send mails:

postfix/smtp[25010]: C65AA88075: conversation with customer.example.com[256.256.256.256] timed out while receiving the initial server greeting

I’ve looked at every setting on both the ZyWALL and the Exchange server, but didn’t find any unusual DNS etc. setting. I even disabled all the DNS lookups done on the Exchange server, but to no avail.

But after upgrading the ZyXEL ZyWALL 5′s firmware to the latest version (V4.02(XD.2)), the problem disappeared. While this wasn’t exactly what i was hoping for, at least the problem was now solved.

If you need to the type and serial number of a Lenovo ThinkPad or ThinkCentre, use these two quick WMI commands:

C:\Windows\system32>wmic /node:"HOST" bios get serialnumber
SerialNumber
L3BXXXXX

C:\Windows\system32>wmic /node:"HOST" baseboard get product
Product
646065G

Replace HOST with the hostname of the machine you want to check on. The ” ” are important, so don’t leave them out.

Some other machines may use:

C:\Windows\system32>wmic /node:"HOST" computersystem get model
Product
646065G

Office is available as a trial version for download, and as a preinstalled trial called Office Ready PC.

Both a trial versions of office, but there is a very, very important difference:

Office Ready preinstallations accept MLK keys.

The downloadable trial version does not accept them.

If you have a new computer and bought an MLK package, you’re out of luck. Consult a local hardware reseller which has an Office Preinstallation Kit (OPK).

Windows Vista has been available for consumers since more than half a year – longer for companies and IT professionals.

Are you using Vista on your Desktop yet? No matter what you think of Windows Vista, you should already be using it right now. If you don’t think you’ll ever migrate to Windows Vista, you should start evaluating your alternatives now – and not when mainstream support for Windows XP ends in a few years.

Windows Vista is the next stop in the Microsoft desktop operating system part. I’ll agree that Vista still has some smaller quirks to be sorted out, but the main problem are 3rd party apps made by lazy idiots based upon technology from before 2000. If you’re working in IT, you should start getting used to Windows Vista now, even if you read and heard bad things.

Vista offers many great improvements – none of them are revolutionary, but they definitely make Windows a better platform. These are not the features advertised on TV, or debated in forums – but instead the deployment process which was just awkward under Windows XP and it’s predecessors, and many management improvements.

I’ve been using ImgBurn for the past few months to burn CD’s. It works well. It doesn’t have many features. But it does it’s job, isn’t complicated to use and free as in beer.

(Sorry, nothing interesting happened today).

Source: MSExchangeSA
Event ID: 9188

Microsoft Exchange System Attendant failed to read the membership of group ‘cn=Exchange Domain Servers,cn=Users,dc=your domain’. Error code ’80072030′.

Please check whether the local computer is a member of the group. If it is not, stop all the Microsoft Exchange services, add the local computer into the group manually and restart all the services.

This error message sounds very serious, but it is entirely possible that the situation is not as grave as it sounds.

If you encountered this error message, you should first read all the hints over at EventID.Net. This shows the most common causes for this problem in bigger environments.

I’ve encountered this error message in smaller environments if specific factors were true: DC and Exchange were on seperate servers, and the Exchange wasn’t a DC (which is correct). However, there is only one DC on the network. In this case, the error message above might appear immediately after you restarted the first DC.

This seems to be a minor problem in Exchange which doesn’t fully recognize that the DC is back up. Restarting the Microsoft Exchange System Attendant service will solve the problem. This is not really a full solution to the problem, as you have to restart the System Attendant service everytime you restart the only domain controller.

The right way to fix this is to install a second domain controller. If you can’t do that, scripting the System Attendant restart makes sense – my approach would be srvany.exe and a plain cmd script. I didn’t write such a script yet, and i don’t really intend to do. Just buy a second DC.

Right after i got my new iPAQ 510 Voice Messenger, our chief sales was looking for a new mobile phone (mostly because there was no longer a sync software for the Sony P910 under Windows Vista). As i’m fine with any mobile phone as long as it is running Windows Mobile 6, as these offer superior synchronization to Exchange using Exchange ActiveSync. Even Push-Email is supported since WM5+MSFP using Microsoft’s DirectPush.

In the end, the choice fell on the HTC TOUCH. It runs Windows Mobile 6 Professional (aka “PDA Phone Edition”), this means it uses the PDA UI, not the SmartPhone UI.

The packaging provided by HTC was very nice, in a sleek black box that comes with everything you need. A USB cable with the usual mini-USB connector (no idea on how this thing is really called), stereo headphones, a 1GB Mini-SD card and a USB charger cable.

Again, setting up the device was a breeze, it automatically configured the necessary GPRS settings. After downloading our self-signed certificate and installing it, the Phone already synced against the Exchange server. No need to plug it into any computer. (Many WM5 modems back in the days required a variety of registry hacks in order to import new trusted certificates – it’s very good to see that this has changed).

I’ve also installed version of Windows Mobile Device Center on the laptop, in order to sync files and notes (You can’t sync Outlook notes over the air, i’d like to see the design decision behind this one). WMDC works fine and integrates completely into the OS. While the ActiveSync desktop software under Windows XP was mostly troublefree when used with Exchange ActiveSync, the WMDC software works even better.

Back to the device itself. The HTC Touch is often touted as an iPhone competitor, but it’s not. They play in whole different areas. The iPhone is a consumer device – it does not offer Enterprise Messaging features like a Blackberry Connectivity Software or Exchange Active Sync. The HTC Touch is meant for professionals which need the ability to synchronize with an enterprise messaging system over-the-air, including contacts, calender, etc.

The HTC Touch has a 2.8″ 320×240 screen. The resolution is acceptable, but i would’ve preferred 640×480 pixels at the same screen size. (I really liked the 2″ 240×320 screen on my HTC MTeoR). The device is much, much smaller than it appears on photos. It’s also much thinner – in fact, it’s the first Windows Mobile device that doesn’t look like a Windows Mobile device (which can usually be described as “bulky”. As such, i think the HTC Touch is very important for the Windows Mobile marketplace.

The Touch has an alternative shell called TouchFLO – it’s a homescreen replacement with support for a few gestures, a program launcher, and a music player. The TouchFLO functionality is nice to use, but it is not a full Windows Mobile touchscreen conversion. As such, the functionality is very, very limited. There’s a standard pen located in the phone’s corner, like with every other PDA. You’ll need this to use much of the functionality. You can place calls with just the touchscreen alone, and the touchscreen seems to implemented very well. It even works beyond the edges of integrated 320×240 screen, which makes using your finger to point at things on the side much, much easier.

There’s an included ZIP-Software and Adobe Reader LE is preinstalled, and there is not much “vendor crap” as i’ve seen on operator branded HTC devices. As such, i see little reason not to recommend this device – the build is very nice, the screen and other hardware components also work as they should. They only points that could be criticized are the screen resolution (which is “normal PDA” resolution instead of “hires PDA”), and the missing UMTS support which only plays a role when surfing the Web or connecting to the Web with a laptop. For EAS purposes, EDGE is enough.

In my opinion, the HTC TOUCH is a very cool Windows Mobile 6 device, thats shows a lot of the progress needed in this sector. Together with the Motorola Q9h (Review from a co-worker), i would vote these two to be the two best available Windows Mobile 6 devices on the market. The TOUCH is better if you want a full fledged PDA with a touchscreen, while the Q9h is a true Smartphone with a full keyboard.

KB307545 explains on how to recover your registry using the builtin “repair” registry first, which is created on System Installation.

It’s important to know that you can also restore directly from the Recovery Point, without going through the hassle of using the “Repair” registry first – you’ll just need Windows PE or the XP Recovery console, and you can follow Step 2 directly.

This allows quick & easy recovery of the registry. I always have a Windows PE handy through PXE booting using WDS, so i don’t need to search for disks, cds or USB sticks.