My most recent server problem (Satan and Raid 5) was caused not by a faulty or two faulty disks, but by a bad firmware in the Raid controller card that was sent to me by Dell. I used to check all my firmware / controller firmware / bios, etc at regular intervals, but since I started at the Church there just doesn't seem to be time... EVERYONE should double check thier firmware on thier Dell servers... Don't get stuck rebuilding! Anyway, the server rebuilt wonderfully, and I was able to Document (cough, cough) this time.
Pray for servers without ceasing!
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Monday, October 8, 2007
Satan and Raid 5
Well it's official -- Raid 5 just ain't good enough no more. We have had a long weekend. Saturday morning, I got a phone call that Shelby and Email were down. This hasn't happened before... Both of those apps are on our Super Redundant VMWare Server that hasn't ever even hiccup'ed. I came and in and the worst fears were there. 2 Hard Drives blinking yellow at the same time. That's right, my 408GB SAS Raid 5 Array was gone, and all the VM's with it. We are still in the process of restoring the system, but I have some very good lesson's learned from this little excercise. Hopefully I will get the SAN I have been waiting for...
We'll find out!
We'll find out!
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Better Windows Media Services Monitoring
I have had volunteers doing monitoring of our live services for quite some time. One of the trivial tasks that they have done is record the number of active streams during the service so we have metrics of how many people are watching, and of how much bandwidth we use. This has started becoming a growing task since we are adding more streams, and about to start streaming our multi-site service as well.
In the interest of getting better data, and more data points I have written / hacked together a script that will log the data for all the WMS publishing points with active data, and will also record total bandwidth. This little script can be scheduled to run every 5 minutes during your services and it logs the data to a CSV file so you can then import into any Database or Excel and graph or do what you want with it.
I will email the script to anyone interested along with installation instructions. Don't worry, it's really easy. Should take no more than 5 minutes to install have running!
Leave a comment or email me for a copy of the script and installation instructions!
In the interest of getting better data, and more data points I have written / hacked together a script that will log the data for all the WMS publishing points with active data, and will also record total bandwidth. This little script can be scheduled to run every 5 minutes during your services and it logs the data to a CSV file so you can then import into any Database or Excel and graph or do what you want with it.
I will email the script to anyone interested along with installation instructions. Don't worry, it's really easy. Should take no more than 5 minutes to install have running!
Leave a comment or email me for a copy of the script and installation instructions!
Tuning Terminal Server
We have been using a thin client environment for many of our administrative staff for the last year, and the system has run almost maintenence free, but the time comes when all things need a cleanup. One of the areas I was always curious about was a cleanup of the IE Temporary Items in multiple profiles. I did what any good IT guy does... I googled it. Here is a link to a script that will scrub all the IE Temporary Folders for all profiles on a computer. I have run it and can testify to it working.
http://www.greatnorthcomputing.com/System+Admin+Articles/109.aspx
After making this change, I modified my Group Policy to automatically empty the IE temporary folders every time a user logs off. If you are looking for this Group Policy Item, it can be found in Group Policy Management under:
Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Internet Explorer->Internet Control Panel->Advanced Page
Here you will see the Empty Temporary Internet Files folder... This will start preserving the space you have available on the drive because how clean our users are....
Other GP items to note:
I Enabled the Turn Off Crash Detection to knock down some of the annoying IE crashed on... messages when you log onto the Terminal Server as Admin.
I hope this helps someone else!
http://www.greatnorthcomputing.com/System+Admin+Articles/109.aspx
After making this change, I modified my Group Policy to automatically empty the IE temporary folders every time a user logs off. If you are looking for this Group Policy Item, it can be found in Group Policy Management under:
Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Internet Explorer->Internet Control Panel->Advanced Page
Here you will see the Empty Temporary Internet Files folder... This will start preserving the space you have available on the drive because how clean our users are....
Other GP items to note:
I Enabled the Turn Off Crash Detection to knock down some of the annoying IE crashed on... messages when you log onto the Terminal Server as Admin.
I hope this helps someone else!
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Windows Steady State
Windows Steady State
A new product from Microsoft for controlling changes to PC's. Allow full roll back of the system. This is something I am definitely going to be looking more closely.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx
A new product from Microsoft for controlling changes to PC's. Allow full roll back of the system. This is something I am definitely going to be looking more closely.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx
Monday, August 27, 2007
Gallery 2 Online
A couple of weeks ago, we launched a Gallery 2 image management solution for our photography / production ministries. (http://gallery.menalto.com) Needless to say they are in love with it, and so am I. We were able to use one of our older servers to host the application. We bumped up the storage with an Areca Raid 6 Storage Controller and 6 500Gb Drives. I was able to run Gallery on Windows by Downloading and installing the Web Developer Server Suite (http://www.devside.net/). This gave me the core of what was needed to install the Gallery 2 programs with out all the usual headaches of configuring the Apache / PHP / MySql core on Windows.
Once that was done, we were only 30 minutes from having a functioning Gallery 2 Site. If you want a sneak peak, check our http://gallery.calvarymelbourne.org.
Once that was done, we were only 30 minutes from having a functioning Gallery 2 Site. If you want a sneak peak, check our http://gallery.calvarymelbourne.org.
All New Wireless
We just got our new wireless system from Aruba Networks. I was very excited to get this equipment. It is a really easy / awesome way to handle wireless, and what's better, they dropped thier price to meet the "other" company we were looking at. Aruba produces some serious Enterprise Wireless equipment. Setup was unbelievably easy. No configuration is made to any of the AP's. There is a base controller unit that we installed in our server rack. We configured the secure SSID, and then the public access SSID. Made one DNS entry, and viola. Anywhere we plug in an AP we get immediate secure access.
The Aruba gear locks onto your network and then GRE tunnels back to the controller where all of it's security and configuration data are TFTP'd back to the individual AP's. Basically, it took about 1 hour to configure the controller and the network, and now it only takes the time to plug the AP into the network (because all the ap's are POE).
Very Cool!
The Aruba gear locks onto your network and then GRE tunnels back to the controller where all of it's security and configuration data are TFTP'd back to the individual AP's. Basically, it took about 1 hour to configure the controller and the network, and now it only takes the time to plug the AP into the network (because all the ap's are POE).
Very Cool!
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