I've moved!

I've moved from blogger to Azure and you will find my blog over at www.fjml.se

Over and out!
Joseph

Problems with system state backup - DPM

I ran into a common issue regarding DPM and System State backup today at the office.

When running a system state backup the following event is recorded.

DPM cannot create a backup because Windows Server Backup (WSB) on the protected computer encountered an error (WSB Event ID: 517, WSB Error Code: 0x8078001D). (ID 30229 Details: Internal error code: 0x809909FB)

And it's a common error and the reason this occurs is because there is a illegal character, or a reference to a local disk that no longer is present, for a service in the registry.

There are multiple ways to check the imagepath. One is to use the msinfo32 tool, do a regquery or  use powershell.

Since I'm starting to learn powershell I opted for it. Powershell has the nifty feature of having drives and besides regular drives there are a few other. To see the available drives just issue the command Get-PSDrive. 

So I ended up with a command that looked like this.

get-childitem -Recurse -path HKLM:\system\CurrentControlSet\Services | Get-ItemProperty | Where-Object {$_.imagepath} |Select-Object -ExpandProperty imagepath | out-file C:\temp\registry.txt

That made it easy to check if it was a service with a faulty image path that caused this problem.

And in my case it was a HP SUM Service that was the cause of the problem.

/Joseph

 

Dell VRTX

We are opening a new branch office in Poland soon and we were looking for some hardware that would be fitting for a branch office. We are going to support somewhere around 200-250 users. And the servers that we are going to have in this office includes SCCM, AD and a general fileserver to start with. I hope I don't have to mention a backup solution? I hope it goes without saying?

I found a really cool looking solution in Dell VRTX.  It is a chassie with storage, networking and room for four blades.

Here you see what we got, it consists of three Dell M520 blades and 16 600Gb SAS disks.

So far it looks really good. It has a Chassis Management Controller for the blades, network and for the storage. Aswell individual management for the storage, network and the iDrac.

The soundlevel is on a OK level during idle load, I have not tested it during full load yet.

Over and out!
/Joseph

Long time, no see

I haven't written a blog post in ages! And it's due to the fact to me beeing too focused on one thing at a time. A bit like not beeing able to walk and chew bubblegum at the same time.

But the hurdles have been overcomed and beeing a stand-in dad for a 7 year old girl is going really good. I've settled in to my new work and the new home.

With that I will pick up the blogging again and also, with the support of my girlfriend, focus more on my biggest hobby, IT!

Long time passes..

.. between the blog posts at the moment.

There has been a huge change in my life. I moved in with my girlfriend into her house and I have become a step-dad in the bargain.

And I was not prepared with the changes that came with owning a house and being a step-dad.
Firstly, there are a bazillion things that needs fixing in the house. And so far we have finished one room (almost, we are missing some IKEA furniture). After that we have the living room, kitchen and then the rest of the 6 rooms.

And being a step-dad is a tough job, since I don't really know how harsh I can be when it comes to the discipline. But' its a learning process and I suspect I will never be fully educated.

On the work front it has been like entering a 90's film, it looks good on the surface but when you start to scratch it you find a lot of faults.

There are 20+ domains, 1000+ servers and everything is running on old hardware. And when it comes to the software I can count all the servers on one hand that runs a operating system newer then 2008 R2.

They didn't even have a deployment solution for the servers, they did everything manually with CD's!

We even have a few NT domains!

After the vacation I have a tonne of things to fix and I don't even know where to start!
I suspect that the first task will be to migrate the old NT domains,

And I have a tough battle when it comes to trying to convince the bosses that we should migrate from VMWare to Hyper-V.

On the home-network front I have just now finished the physical installation of all the servers.  And I have been living here since the beginning of April!

I will do my best to update the blog, but at the moment I am happy of I get some time in front of the computer.

Over and out!
/Joseph

Out-Of-Sync-Error

Ok, I've just finished the second day at a big company that supplies equipment to the pharmaceutical industry and the first two days has been filled with introductions to the various systems that this company has.

And prior to getting started at work I have been focused on getting my stuff sorted out. I can say that it's still a few boxes unpacked but atleast my main computer is up and running. :)

I noted that HP has released a new version (1.1) of thier Powershell tools for iLO management for the Proliant servers. You can grab it over by HP with this link http://hp.com/go/powershell

On a different subject, I was sitting by the desk at the office when my boss came over and said "Hey, Joseph, Could you install a server.. We got a CD somewhere that you can use"..
When he said that  you could hear my jaw drop. I instantly said that "I will never ever install a server using a CD or almost never use a USB" so I started implemeting a MDT envirorment. So I got my work cut out for me for the next week or so.

Over and out!
/Joseph

Big changes in my life

At this moment I've taken everything I own and moved it 1530km south from Santa down to a small town called Getinge.

Here I've entered a domestic relationship with a beautiful girl so this means that I'm not currently in sync with anything!