DCMCD Fixes

As with most of my posts, scroll to the Solution  section if you are only here for a quick fix.  BUT be sure to check out the Examples at the end of the post!    WARNING:  You will bypass my attempts at humour to make this read interesting if you skip! I recently came up against a scenario whereby a client who uses a WHM/cPanel server as a dedicated mail server.  Fine.  Easy Peasy, no issues there. These guys wanted to relay their mail through an online service for reporting and reputation reasons.  Fine, again, simple. Naive little me thought "Simple, all I gotta do is log into WHM and tell Exim where to push the mail in their sweet little web interface".  Turned out to be not so straight forward. The Scenario (long-story-short) Client uses WHM/cPanel system as dedicated mail server (Exim) Wanted to send email for specific domain to specific IP address Wanted to relay all other outbound mail via 3rd party relay serv...

Long time no blog..... WARNING!!!  Big Hero 6 spoiler coming right up! Remember when Abigail Callaghan gets stranded in a mysterious void within the teleportation portals?  Well, that is where I have been in when it comes to the blogging world.  But what is this I see before me?  Why it's a Hiro Hamada and Baymax gliding towards me to save me, in the form of a career change. I am going to be freed up a little more now so think I will put this time into filling up this blog space with useful steps and processes. Now I am warning you.  These entries will range from attaching NFS datastores to ESX hosts/clusters to  something as mundane as enabling SNMP on a Windows Server. I am just going to do a memory/knowledge dump of anything I feel may be of use to even just one fellow human the world.

In my previous post I had outlined that I was going through a filer migration and I have just come across another small issue with regards to my VMware world! The Issue Via the NetApp VSC (Virtual Storage Console) I have a number of backups configured and I needed to take this into consideration when I was setting a volume to "Offline".  I needed to carry out a number of preparation tasks within the VMware world, mainly: Update the backup policies within VSC to remove any trace of a datastore hosted on said volumes Detach the datastore from all ESX hosts Now, being extremely excited and buzzing with anticipation of having the old filer completely unreferenced from my virtual world I inadvertently offlined a volume and deleted it a few weeks later as there had been no issues, alarms, alerts, fires, explosions etc. Noticed this week that one of the VSC backup policies still references one of the old datastores.  Thought I would try a...

Currently in the middle of cleanup tasks after a SAN migration and this one pain-in-the-a** datastore would not unmount from one particular ESX host.  Each attempt returned the following status: " Operation failed, diagnostics report: Sysinfo error on operation returned status : Busy. Please see the VMkernel log for detailed error information " Many posts/fixes where pointing towards a VM holding a connection to the datastore or HA being enabled on a cluster which accesses the particular datastore.  None of which gave me any joy or further progress towards a solution. Having tried many ESXCLI commands to see which virtual machine was keeping a connection to this datastore and checking HA settings, I stumbled upon another option.  SYSLOGS for the ESX hosts! In my scenario, this one ESX host (unlike the other 10+ hosts) was set up to push it's SYSLOGS to this particular datastore.  No idea who set it, why they set it, when they set it or fo...

Recently we came across an issue whereby one of our servers was having terrible memory issues (worse than Dory from Finding Nemo).  This should be a simple one, limit the SQL instances, we thought! The setup was a Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard (64-bit) )with 2 SQL instances running, one for each of our main applications.  To make things a little more interesting SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 were in play.  This shouldn't be an issue though, limiting the memory is the same process for both versions! Limiting Memory Usage for an SQL Instance Open SQL Server Management Studio Log into the first instance Right-click on the instance name at the top of the Object Explorer and select Properties Select the Memory page from the left-hand menu Enter the size of memory you want to limit your instance to (in MegaBytes) Press OK Repeat steps 1 - 6 for each instance you have configured within your SQL server(s) Now at this point we thought we could sit back, thr...

My post prior to this one outlined the steps for renaming an in-use AD user account's username.  That post only covered standard user accounts with no home folder shares etc.  This post will outline the steps which I needed to go through as our accounts are on a Citrix environment with home folder shares. Rename account username and associate with mailbox Open Active Directory Users and Computers Navigate to the Employees Organizational Unit (OU) Right-click on the name of the employee for the name change and select rename Rename the employee Rename User dialog box appears - Full Name should be correct - First Name should be correct - Last Name should be changed to the new Last Name - Display Name will changed in the above step - User Logon Name should be changed to the new Last Name - User Logon name (pre-Windows 2000) will be changed in the above step Open Exchange Management Console Under Recipient Configuration click on Mailbox to view all user mailboxes Right c...