six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2014-03-26

Lync Automation

We're using Microsoft Lync 2010 at work, and I find it quite annoying that the software keeps resetting my status to "available" when I don't want it to. So I started looking for a way to automate setting the status back to "busy".

Unfortunately the normal Lync installation doesn't seem to include a PowerShell module. There is, however, a .Net assembly included with the Lync SDK (this article describes the details). Having to install Visual Studio, SQL Server Express and the Silverlight 4 Tools seemed a little overkill to me, though.

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Posted 21:46 [permalink]

Cleanup of DB2 Backups Fails with Return Code 136

Recently I encountered a rather weird problem with the cleanup of backups of some of our DB2 databases. The database backups are done via TSM by running the following command:

db2 "backup db DBNAME online use tsm"

Cleanup of obsolete backups is done by running the following commands via a scheduled task.

db2adutl delete full older than TIMESTAMP db DBNAME without prompting
db2adutl delete logs between S0000000.LOG and S(xxxxxxx-1).LOG db DBNAME without prompting
db2 "connect to DBNAME"
db2 "prune history DATE and delete"
db2 "prune logfile prior to Sxxxxxxx.LOG"
db2 "connect reset"

Sxxxxxxx.LOG is the oldest log of the oldest backup to be kept, which is extracted from the output of db2adutl query full db DBNAME. S(xxxxxxx-1).LOG is that log number minus one.

Although this setup had been working for several years without problems and no changes were made to the system, the log cleanup step suddenly started to fail for some databases while it still worked fine for the others.

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Posted 21:10 [permalink]

2014-03-18

Migration of SMB Shares

Share migration is a common (if not integral) part of a file server migration. If you just move the shares from one host to another host the process is pretty straightforward as described in MSKB article 125996:

  1. Export [HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares] on the old file server to a file:

    reg export HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares shares.reg
    
  2. Copy the file to the new file server and import it:

    reg import shares.reg
    
  3. Restart the Server service:

    net stop server && net start server
    
  4. Done.

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Posted 21:09 [permalink]