Category Archives: IT Pro

Heading To TechEd North America 2014

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Good times ahead as today I’m making my way over to the USA (Houston Texas) or TechEd 2014 North America. I’m in good company of a few of my colleagues and I have a great number of my buddies & industry relations inbound as well.

Time for some serious education, networking & passionate discussions on the state of the industry with people form all over the globe.  I’ll also make good use of my time over there to meet up with the people in my network that are US based.

I’ll be spending time in cloud/hybrid/virtualization tracks and focus on networking and identity. That’s starts off very well with a pre conference track hybrid identity on Sunday by john Craddock, a true scholar!

Network!

No need to bring SFP+ or RJ45, don’t worry. Next to sessions & labs don’t forget to connect with others. The ability to network with peers and industry experts is a great benefit of this conference so make the best of it. There are few events with this concentration of expertise & talent, tap into that resource.

To help all you shy people out there Aidan Finn has launched the The TechEd North America 2014 Hyper-V Amigo Selfie Game. You can read all about it over here and if you play, best of luck!

On Route

But first we need to get there. As I learned during visit of the Boeing factory in Seattle “If it’s not Boeing, I ‘m not going” Winking smile. No worries it appears they’re using a 777?

british_airways-777-300er

So I’m getting out of the village, into the world so tunnel visions and blinders can be avoided. See you all there.

FREE WHITE PAPER: Configuring a VEEAM Off Host Backup Proxy Server for backing up a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V cluster with a DELL Compellent SAN (Fiber Channel)

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Whilst I’m attending TechEd North America 2014, being able to learn and network again with the community at large I think this is a good moment to share. So here’s a little contribution to that community: it’s a white paper on How to configure a VEEAM Off Host Backup Proxy server for backing up a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V cluster with a DELL Compellent SAN (Fiber Channel).

VEEAM Back & Replication is currently under and extensive test before we make the decision. So far it is going (very) well. And no, VEEAM or DELL did not sponsor this. It’s sharing with the community. A prosperous, successful community makes my professional live better to!

I have to applaud VEEAM for allowing such easy access to their software for trials, to their engineers for assistance and to their support forum and resources even without yet being a paying customer. This is how it should be: vendors having faith in their products both in quality and ease of use. It’s a refreshing experience as some vendors don’t want you to get your hands on new versions of their products even as a existing paying customer “because due to its complexity we might get the wrong impression”. It’s even near impossible with some to get a test license for the lab of the version you currently use with some of them. Not so with VEEAM and that’s great.

I hope you enjoy it. As you might realize I don’t have this kind of infrastructure in my home lab so some of the screenshots have been edited / blurred. I’m sure you can live with that. Otherwise feel free to provide me with the gear in a paid for data center.

The Hyper V Amigos Showcast Episode 3: Live Migration

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Here’s the 3rd episode of the Hyper-V Amigos show cast. As Carsten was overwhelmed with work (running your own business is very hard work) and had some issues with his storage spaces lab due to testing we’re discussing live migration optimizations in this installment.

 Carsten Rachfahl and I had a lot of fun again, even during the second take, yes we needed one. Apparently these software thingies require me to click on “record” Smile as there is no intelligent agent yet to act on my intention.

Carsten & I discussing & showing some live migration optimizations

 

I have written many blog posts on this subject already and I’m sure I’ll write more. Optimizing the use of the hypervisor (Hyper-V) across the entire storage, compute/memory & networking stack is one of my specialties and I enjoy this part of my job very much. I also like to share this information as real.

I’m sure you’ll agree that Hyper-V has come a long way in short period of time and I’m pretty sure we’re going to see Microsoft continue this pace for quite a while.

I have a blog post coming out (it’s in the queue) on my 4 top recommendations for optimal live migrations but here’s a search of relevant blog posts on this topic, and we referred to some of them during our show cast:

https://blog.workinghardinit.work/?s=Live+Migration&submit=Search

When you’re done reading al these posts on live migration you’ll have earned a nice refreshing beverage of your choice Mug.

One more thing, if you like these show casts let us know! Last but not least, I’m doing a demo heavy (only) session at ITProceed on June 12th 2014. Many local experts, community members  and I will be around afterwards to discuss these technologies.

Windows XP Clients Cannot Execute Logon Scripts against a Windows Server 2012 R2 Domain Controller – Workaround

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The issue

The real issue is that you are still running Windows XP. The secondary issue is that you have Windows XP clients that cannot connect to a file share (NETLOGON) on a Windows Server 2012 R2 Domain Controller. If you try manually via \domaincontrollerNetlogon it will throw an error like  "The specified network name is no longer available".  Security wise & moral pressure wise I kind of think this drives home the message you need to get off Windows XP. But I realize you’re in a pickle so here’s the workaround/fix.

Root Cause & Fix

Windows XP talks SMB 1.0 and that’s it. If this is not offered by the server (file server or domain controller) we have a problem. Now if you installed new Windows Server 2012 R2 servers they do not deploy the SMB 1.0 feature by default. If you upgraded from Windows 2008 R2 (perhaps even over Windows 2012) to get to Windows 2008 (R2) this feature kept in place. Other wise you’ll need to make sure SMB 1.0 is installed, it often (always?) is. Just check.

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However there is a big change between Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 2012. The LanmanServer service has a dependency set to SMB 2.0 and no longer to SMB 1.0

This is what it looks like on a Windows Server 2012 (or lower) domain controller:

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This is what it look like on a Windows Server 2012 domain controller

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So we need to change that on Windows 2012 R2 to support Windows XP. We can do this in the registry. Navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesLanmanServerDependOnService

  1. Change SamSS Srv2 to SamSS Srvimage
  2. Restart the Server (Lanmanserver) service (it will restart the dependent services like netlogon, DFS Namespace, .. as well)

You’re XP clients should be able to authenticate again. You can test this by navigating to \domaincontrollerNetlogon on a XP client. This should succeed again.

If you have issues with Windows Server 2012 R2 file servers … this is also valid. When you do get rid of Windows XP. Go back to the original settings please Smile.

If you want to read more on SMB read this blog Windows Server 2012 R2: Which version of the SMB protocol (SMB 1.0, SMB 2.0, SMB 2.1, SMB 3.0 or SMB 3.02) are you using? by Jose Barreto (File Server team at Microsoft)

Finally, get off XP!

I think I said it enough on twitter and my blog Legacy Apps Preventing Your Move From Windows XP to Windows 8.1? Are you worried about HeartBleed? Good! Are you worried about still being on XP? No? Well dump SSL and use clear text authentication as XP is a free fire zone  anyway (as of April 8th 2014) and it’s just a matter of time before you’re road kill. Any company who has CIO/CTO/IT managers and other well paid functions and have let their organization be held hostage on XP (I’m not talking about a few PCs or VMs left and right) by legacy apps & ISV should realize they are the one who let this happen. Your watch. Your responsibility. No excuses.