Tales from the IT side

Facebook Twitter Gplus RSS
magnify
formats

Server 2003 to Server 2008 Upgrade: PowerShell compatibility error

Published on 09/02/2013 by in Featured, I.T.

Easy fix for PowerShell compatibility error on 2003 to 2008 Server upgrade.

Upgrading my 2003 R2 Physical and Virtual Machines to 2008 Server was prevented by PowerShell compatibility issues stating that the upgrade could not continue until the old version of PowerShell (V1.0) was uninstalled.

Easier said than done – researching the problem revealed that removal of earlier versions of PowerShell was not possible if Service Packs had been applied and recommended removing various updates from Server 2003 via Control Panel. I could find none of these PowerShell updates on any of my machines and was beginning to get just a tad concerned, not to mention slightly miffed… The Microsoft forums were not particularly helpful either.

After the best part of 10 hours I came across a simple technique that has worked for me with no further issues presented:

Solution
Rename the existing PowerShell folder located at:

Server 2003 32 bit: %windir%\System32\WindowsPowerShell
Server 2003 64 bit: %windir%\Syswow64\WindowsPowerShell

to something else (I used XXXWindowsPowerShell) and rerun your 2003 Server – 2008 Server upgrade… Upgrades the OS and installs current PowerShell.

Huzzah Microsoft – much as I love my Servers, surely you guys could have made this process easier..?

 
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn
3 Comments  comments 
formats

Triumph Sprint 955i ST – Upgraded Beastie

Published on 17/12/2012 by in Featured, General Observations

My old and trusted Triumph Sprint 900 has now made way for its bigger brother – the 955i ST. Oh that sexy single-sided swing arm & sweet exhaust swayed me.. I’m just so shallow.

Triumph Sprint 955i

After I’d heard it running it would have been rude not to buy it, so here we are early morning two days later, parked up outside my IT building (hence all the bars) – only about 12 feet from my desk, can see her through the window whilst I work.

Handling and performance are in a different league from my old Sprint and it looks & sounds soooo beautiful…

Triumph Sprint 955i first day at work

…especially running on my new SP Engineering street-legal exhaust system. Now when riding I find myself smiling so hard that my face hurts.

Triumph Sprint 955i with SP Engineering exhaust

There is also a (rather poor) video on YouTube here: Sprint ST 955i with SP Engineering exhaust

 
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn
No Comments  comments 
formats

Movember Motorcycle Mo-Bros

Published on 11/11/2012 by in Featured, General Observations

Knowledge is power, Moustache is King

Surprisingly slow progress on the charity face slug balancing front… in fact, so depressingly slow that Wing Commander ‘Timmy’ Triumph-Sprint is lending moral support by joining the fight and drawing attention away from my rather poor effort (see photo below). Fortunately my shoulders are broad enough to accept my upper lip limitations with good grace and rumours of my slipping hair removal cream into tubs of moustache wax are wild exaggeration and probably completely unfounded.

Movember Madness – the process of growing or attempting to grow a ridiculous moustache for raising awareness of men’s health issues (particularly to support Testicular and Prostate Cancer initiatives).

Visit the iQor Preston MoBros Team page for more photos and information, or even my own personal MoBro space..! To all those reading this, I beseech you, make a small donation – aid a worthy cause and ease my embarassment and indignity ;)

Wing Commander 'Timmy' Triumph-Sprint

Wing Commander ‘Timmy’ assures me that although some of the team have obviously developed either time travel abilities or genetic modification therapy based on Great Apes DNA (the only possible explanations for their ludicrously hirsute upper lips) at least one member of the team has even less upper lip growth than myself – Hi Mike.

18 days in – something happening..?

William Faulkner - MoBro day 18

 
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn
No Comments  comments 
formats

iPad 3 – coolest gadget in the world vs Blackberry Playbook?

Published on 23/07/2012 by in Gadgets

Somewhere on this site I once described the iPhone as a designer gadget for people who thought the Porsche Cayenne was a good car… Just shows how opinion can change over time ;)

I now wouldn’t be without my iPhone 4S (with Union Jack case), and am typing this post on my gorgeous new iPad 3 – demand has been high for these so unfortunately had to take the only one I could find – 32 Gig in White.

Poor little Sony laptop is now relegated to secondary and the iPad goes everywhere I do; Holidays, trips, hotels, meetings, even the jacuzzi and swimming pool on holiday (not recommended though). If I need to access a Flash site, work email or perform any support I VPN in and do it remotely (99% of the time I’m in range of wi-fi).

The range of useful applications that you had no idea you needed before you saw them is astounding – it really has replaced pen, paper and laptop in my life… and of course I’ve had to append all my email signatures to say ‘Sent from my iPad 3′ so that everyone knows I have been seduced by the Dark Side.

Guess I’d better be careful – or next thing you know I’ll be buying an iBook and driving a Porsche Cayenne too… Somebody shoot me ;)

By far the sexiest gadget that I’ve never really needed… Here’s hoping I don’t drop it ;)

Blackberry Playbook
Also now have a Blackberry Playbook in my gadget repository (provided through work) – links into my Bold 9700 BES for corporate email access, much easier use for the larger thumbed.

Advantages over iPad: integrates with Blackberry, plays Flash, not dependant on wi-fi access.

Disadvantages: it’s not an iPad, not as responsive, screen prone to finger-prints and smears.

If you’re looking for a discreet corporate communication gadget, you’re using Blackberries on BES and Flash is important to you – Playbook is a useful gadget. Otherwise the iPad leaves it in the dust.

iPad 2 white

 
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn
No Comments  comments 
formats

Timer events not firing in Windows Service – VB.Net 2008

Published on 07/05/2012 by in Featured, I.T.

This article does not concern the bug ‘The Elapsed event of the System.Timers.Timer class is not raised in a Windows service’ which is dealt with seperately on the Microsoft website – occurs when a system.timers.timer is stopped and then started again.

VB.Net Timer ElapsedBackground
Some time ago I wrote an application to process auto-generated .TSC (tab delimited text) files and send batches of emails based on the contents – worked very well but I had to remember to run it every day.

Decided to make it a service to avoid delays in sending the mails but some trouble getting the processing routines to fire on a timer.

Forms Timer does not work with Windows Services.

Timer1_Tick not working
A bit of research on the web led me to http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/820639, which advised to be sure to drag the timer component from the Components tab instead of the Windows Forms tab. Followed these instructions but the component still created a system.windows.forms.timer object, just like it does from the windows forms tab. This will not process timer events in a Windows Service, so the code never executes.

In a Windows Service it’s necessary to use the Timer_Elapsed event, not the Timer_Tick event – Elapsed isn’t available on the Windows Forms timer, only the tick event is.

Resolution: System.Timers.Timer Timer_Elapsed
Surprisingly, you have to add the System.Timers Timer from the ‘.Net Framework Components’ tab by right-clicking the Components Tab in the toolbox and selecting ‘Choose Components’ – this is the one to use for a Service, either by dragging onto the designer in the IDE or in code (see end of article).

Once the correct timer component was in place, the Timer_Elapsed event worked perfectly:

Private Sub Timer1_Elapsed(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs) Handles Timer1.Elapsed
ProcessFiles()
End Sub

Service Timer

Prologue
The rest of the code loops through .TSC files in a specified location.

It reads each file line-by-line, builds an email on the fly from the contents and relays this through Exchange using System.Net.Mail, finally deleting each.TSC on successful completion and emailing the relevant team a status report.

Now with no manual intervention…

More information on Timer1_Elapsed may be found on Microsofts Website

Example of System.Timer in code
Private Sub CreateTimer()
Dim Timer1 As New System.Timers.Timer()
Timer1.Interval = 5000
Timer1.Enabled = True
AddHandler Timer1.Elapsed, _
New System.Timers.ElapsedEventHandler(AddressOf Me.Timer1_Elapsed)
End Sub

Private Sub Timer1_Elapsed(ByVal sender As System.Object, _
ByVal e As System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs)
System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(“Elapsed!”, “Timer Event Raised!”)
End Sub

Update: Thought occurs… if you just want to delay processing for a period you could always just loop using System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(delay in milliseconds)…?

 
Tags: ,
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn
4 Comments  comments 
formats

VMware vConverter and Hyper-V or P2V conversions

Published on 03/04/2012 by in Featured, I.T.

Although I’ve been a fan of Microsoft’s virtualisation platform (Hyper-V) for some time, running maybe 30 of ~250 UK based Servers on it (as detailed previously), for admin and resilience reasons we made a decision to go VMware ESX globally; managed through vSphere client and vCenter Servers.

vSphere ClientvSphere 4 allows us to aggregate and manage large pools of Infrastructure, Processors, Storage and networking in a dynamic, resilient and flexible environment. I’ve seen massive increase in performance on my legacy kit, even running 12 servers on one DL580 with an average 5-fold increase in performance (at only 30% host CPU) and full-wire speed on a 10Gbps iSCSI SAN.

Using VMware vCenter Converter (P2V and V2V supported) I migrated all my Hyper-V servers over, plus a host of legacy servers, and I love it.

 

Physical to Virtual (P2V)

Selecting the option to migrate a powered on machine allows for the import of Hyper-V virtual machines as well as physical machines, it’s a good idea to uninstall the Hyper-V tools after the migration. I also removed any redundant utilities such as HP Array config and HP Management agents.

Although there is a plugin available for VMware P2V conversions, I opted for the VMware vCenter Converter standalone for mine (primarily because I wasn’t scheduling migrations, preferring to watch them go and make sure all OK); works remarkably well..! I came across a few issues however:

  1. Migrated server not starting and running at 100% CPU – leaving the hard drive type as ‘Preserve source’ caused problems on a couple of machines, setting it to ‘SCSI LSI Bus’ (preferred for Windows) and remigrating resolved these (so far just migrated Windows Servers).
  2. Resizing drives during the migration – runs way slower than leaving drive sizes unchanged (file level conversion rather than block level). If you need to change drive sizes, easier to do so after the migration (change size in VM settings, diskpart to extend if required).
  3. Migrated machines IP address changes – there is no way to keep the IP settings through migration, unfortunately this inevitably results in a little downtime, but easy enough to change the settings back when you’ve brought the virtual server up in the VMware console – you’ll receive a warning that the address is allocated to a hidden device (the old physical network card) but this can be ignored. Migrating a VMware VM to another host or datastore (or even Data Center) post-migration is possible with no disruption or tweaking.
  4. One client (Intranet Server) persistently refused to migrate with ‘unable to clone volume C’ errors – traced to a network card config issue – reported it was 100Meg full duplex but ran like a pig. Nailed to 100M full duplex and flew through the migration in twenty minutes.
  5. ‘Disk Error – Press ‘ctrl-alt-delete’ to restart’ – one old server had IDE drives (yes, I know), VMs don’t like booting from these so change the drive type to SCSI when migrating (not ‘preserve source’).
  6. USB Dongle not detected – although ESX VMs allow the addition of USB controllers, at the time of writing they are not supported and will not function. Thus one of my imported VMs will not run it’s protected software as it can’t see the attached USB device. Fortunately the software provider is capable of providing a software key instead, which I am currently awaiting with baited breath whilst fielding calls from concerned users – unfortunately I was advised post-migration that the VM was OK so it’s too late to readily drop back to the physical box :o(

A number of my current VMs are presently on DAS, my iSCSI filers being pretty much at capacity – I’m waiting on a couple of new 6 TB units which will enable transferring my data stores onto attached storage – much preferable as I’ll be able to snapshot and flit these VMs from host to host quickly in real time (VMotion). In the meantime, most of the servers have LUNs on the current iSCSI, and most of these servers have migrated successfully but I have one which just will not map the iSCSI LUN to the drive – you can see the LUN in drive manager, but it’s not recognised by windows..!? Ah well, it’s only a dev server..!

VMware vSphere Client

What a stunning utility..! Intuitive and informative, easy editing and monitoring of all the VMs and hosts, superb interface. I can’t wait to get the new SAN on line and migrate my remaining DAS datastores – it even monitors the VM and host performance and can move VMs from misbehaving hosts automatically, moving them to a host best suited for the VMs performance.

Much as I’ve loved Hyper-V and believe that it has a place for Server consolidation in smaller environments, for a large network I have to say that VMware vCenter and vSphere kick its arse, definitely worth the investment.

vSphere Performance monitor

 
Tags: , , , ,
 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on LinkedIn
5 Comments  comments 
© William Faulkner - Tales from the IT Side 2001 - 2013
credit