six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2015-03-12

Repairing a Suspect msdb Database

Sometimes a situation arises where an SQL Server instance comes back up with a database tagged as "suspect". Apparently there is a number of possible causes for this, like transaction log corruption, insufficient memory or disk space, or unexpected shutdowns due to hardware or power failure. In our case the reason was probably a hardware failure, since the database resides on an iSCSI volume, and we were making changes to our iSCSI network. And to make things a little bit more interesting, our msdb database just had to be among the affected databases.

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Posted 19:07 [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]

2014-02-26

A Bar Graph for the PowerShell Console

As a sysadmin I frequently have the need to get an overview of the utilization of particular system resources (disk space or memory for instance). Visualizing the numbers greatly helps with spotting bottlenecks.

One way to visualize data with PowerShell are DataVisualization objects in Windows Forms, which are rather versatile, but not exactly what I would consider straightforward. They also might be overkill for various tasks. The current usage of a system resource for instance could easily be displayed with a bar graph in a text console.

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Posted 23:38 [permalink]

2013-01-28

Creating blank VMs for PXE boot

For a customer project I had to create a couple dozen virtual machines on our Hyper-V cluster. The machines were to be installed via a 3rd party software deployment system (the customer doesn't use SCCM), so I had to assign static MAC addresses and enable PXE boot. The respective reservations on the DHCP server had to be created from the MAC addresses in a second step, because the customer domain is separated from the infrastructure domain.

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Posted 11:09 [permalink]

2012-11-17

Importing VMs From external Hyper-V Hosts

I've been working on a project where I needed to migrate (clone actually, in order to maintain a fallback scenario) virtual machines from external (standalone) Hyper-V hosts to a Hyper-V cluster. The external hypervisors were not members of the same domain as the cluster nodes. The networks were separated by a firewall. A trust relationship between the domains was not desired.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (SCVMM) supports this scenario, but there are several steps that must be performed to prepare for the migration.

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Posted 20:03 [permalink]