Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Working with registry in Windows 2008/7 startup repair

To access your windows registry in startup repair, you need to load it first in a temporary key then run regedit.

Suppose you want to edit the HKLM\Software key, load it with the following command

REG LOAD HKLM\Tmp D:\Windows\System32\config\Software

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Delay boot for Hyper-V Guest Machine

I was trying to boot a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V machine into safe mode but it was booting too fast to catch my F8 keystroke.

From the machine settings -> Automatic Start Action you can specify boot delay as below

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

CRM 2011 Cluster In-place Upgrade Part 3/3

In Part 2 We upgraded the remaining web servers and updated the application address with the load balanced URL.
At this time we have successfully upgraded the organization database and all the web servers. You should be able to browse the CRM application but you cannot any reports



Also the Deployment Manager will show a warning about Reproting being not enabled

To fix this, you need to install the Reporting Services Extensions.

CRM 2011 Cluster In-place Upgrade Part 2/3

 In Part 1 We have upgraded the first CRM web server as well as a the organization database.
Now we upgrade the other web servers that we have

CRM 2011 Cluster In-place Upgrade Part 1/3

This is an in-place upgrade of a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to 2011.
The CRM 4 is a multi-server deployment on:
  • Dedicated SQL 2008 R2 Database Server (2-node cluster)
  • Dedicated SQL 2008 R2 Reporting Services Server
  • 2 Load balanced CRM Web Servers (Microsoft NLB, Windows 2008 R2)
Please note that an in-place is the riskiest upgrade, if something went wrong there is no going back! You will have to resort to DR and restore everything again. But also it is the simplest and least-costly upgrade.
If you have a heavily customized CRM and prefer a safer downtime-free approach, you can install CRM 2011 on a new server then use the deployment manager to upgrade a copy of your CRM 4 database via the "Import Organization" wizard. That way you can keep your CRM 4 up and untouched during the whole upgrade process, then switch to the new CRM 2011 installation once you have tested and became happy with it.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

The selected tapes cannot be erased because they belong to protection groups

If you try to erase a tape that belongs to a protection group you receive this error


Use the script below to mark the tape as "Free (containts data)" and then you can erase it

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Allow multiple remote desktop sessions per user

When you connect to remote desktop with an already logged in user, you can configure terminal services to either take over the current session or start a new one by allowing multiple sessions per user

Navigate to the following registry key

Thursday, September 22, 2011

DPM will not recognize SQL recovery model changes after you configure the protection group

I had a protection group taking backups of SQL server databases for a while, I decided later to change the recovery model of some DBs from simple to full to get them synchronized every 15 minutes as configured in the protection group.
After changing the recovery groups I noticed that DPM was still not synchronizing these dbs.
I stopped their protection without deleting the replicas, removed from the group then added them back.
Now they are getting synchronized.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Broken IE9 installation via windows update W2K8R2

Today windows update broke after an appratenly incomplete Internet Explorer 9 installation.

I just installed the updates and rebooted normally, did not get any errors, IE was indeed upgraded to 9 and working fine, however windows update still thinks that it is not installed and keeps offering it again but when I try to install, it fails.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Increase disk space of a Hyper-V virtual machine

Your virtual machine is running out of space and you need to increase the available space in the same disk drive not add another one.

You can easily do that in a couple of steps: 1) expand the virtual hard disk itself. 2) grow the file system of your partition to utilize the new added space.

Optimize DPM Tape Usage by enabling Data Co-Location

In DPM 2010 if you have multiple protection groups you can share tapes among them allowing recovery points from different protection groups to be written on the same tape.

Run the following command in DPM Management Shell to enable Data Co-Location:

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Test SQL Connectivity Without Management Studio

If you need to test SQL connectivity from a web to the database server and not just ICMP or TCP without having to install the SQL Client Tools, you can use the ODBC control panel applet to setup a data source using the connection parameters you want to test

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

The performance counter name string value in the registry is incorrectly formatted

Event Type: Error
Event Source: LoadPerf
Event ID: 3001

Description:
The performance counter name string value in the registry is incorrectly formatted. The bogus string is 445, the bogus index value is the first DWORD in Data section while the last valid index values are the second and third DWORD in Data section.


Performance counter string tables have become corrupt, rebuild them with this command:

lodctr /r

DPM 2010 might be wasting storage pool space if you don't calculate data size of protected members you add

I was configuring some backups when I noticed that the available storage was decreasing rapidly and I don't have that much data yet
I went back to the check the disk allocation for the new members I created and I found that DPM has allocated several gigabytes to backup some hundred megabytes and retain just a few days.