Month: November 2009

A standard part of my server build I do everywhere is installing WireShark. WireShark of course requires WinPcap. While you can install WireShark silently, it conveniently doesn’t install WinPcap, rendering it useless. I used to work around this by installing NMap as part of the build since NMap does include WinPcap in its’ silent install. Unfortunately this seems to have broken under Windows Server 2008 R2. The good news is you can work around this with the hackish but effective AutoIt. Below is my AutoIt script for installing WinPcap 4.1.1. ; ========================================================================== ; NAME: WinPcap AutoIt Installer ; ; AUTHOR: … Continue reading Installing WinPcap Silently

Despite the release notes in the PE2950 2.6.1 BIOS, “Added support for the Microsoft(R) Windows Server(R) 2008 R2 operating system”, the install package doesn’t actually work properly. It has a prompt telling you that it’s running on an unsupported OS. This completely invalidates the silent install capability. This problem seems to extend to all the other install packages. Fortunately, this is pretty easy to work around with the built in Application Compatibility settings in Windows. You just need to set the executable to the Windows Server 2008 (Service Pack 1) compatibility mode: Since I’m running all these packages as part … Continue reading Installing Dell Update Packages on Windows Server 2008 R2

The two scripts below are a quick solution to pushing out an identical (except for IP and hostname) configuration to a large number of Dell DRAC boards. They’re not the most efficient and they were written for a specific scenario, but, they should be easy enough to customize. There are two scripts: RemoteDracConfig.vbs – This one will take a config template, customize it for a host, and apply it via psexec RemoteDracConfigLoop.vbs – This one will read an input CSV and call RemoteDracConfig.vbs for each line I seperated the scripts specifically so that the first one could easily be used … Continue reading Remotely Configuring DRAC Cards

Pretty much every IT organization I’ve worked in of any significance has people who do the network side of things (switches, routers, firewalls, etc), and people who do the systems side (servers, applications, etc). The level of interaction and friendliness between these two teams tends to vary quite a bit. I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum (love each other and hate each other) and pretty much everything in between. The average is somewhere on the not so great side of the spectrum, unfortunately. The net result of this problem is that both teams do things that are detrimental to … Continue reading Redundant Servers and the Network

Data Protection Manager (DPM) will happily fail to backup Exchange if at any point it detects a consistency issue with the log stream. Your choices at this point are basically either dropping the entire protected storage group out of DPM and re-protecting it, or, not having backups. Neither of these are really desirable. DPM verifies consistency of Exchange backups by running eseutil against the log stream. This is why you have to manually copy eseutil.exe and ese.dll over from an Exchange server after installing DPM. If you use something like Process Explorer, you’ll see eseutil.exe as a child process of … Continue reading Working around DPM Consistency Check Failures

The Technet topic on Running Antivirus Software on the DPM Server recommends that you exclude two processes: csc.exe dpmra.exe In McAfee you accomplish this by adding the processes to the low risk list. I discovered today that at least with McAfee, this isn’t really enough. You also need to add eseutil.exe to the exclusion list. For good measure I would also specifically exclude scanning of: *.edb *.chk *.log I haven’t discovered a way to exclude all of the paths DPM uses in McAfee given that they aren’t accessible (e.g. no drive letter) in a fashion that you can provide to … Continue reading DPM and Anti-Virus Exclusions

The October rollup for Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 came out recently. It’s available in KB 976542.