Netexceed IT by Jason Mohan» Netexceed by Jason Mohan

How to kill a VM through ESX CLI

Jason Mohan — Fri, 06 May 2011 18:07:34 +0000

If you got an ESX that has a VM that’s stuck which means you can’t shut it down, and it’s non-responsive but it’s running like a phantom vm on the ESX host then follow these instructions. First off understand this will kill the vm process for that VM. Note this is not considered a graceful shutdown, it’s what I call a “Fat finger” the server.

1. Find the virtual machines process id: ps auxwww | grep -i VMNAMEHERE.vmx

2. Now you should see something like: root 2315 0.0 0.2 etc….

3. The “2315″ is the process id of the VM.

4. To kill it issue the command “kill -9 2315″.

This should kill the VM.

Exchange 2010: The Active Directory Schema is not up-to-date

Jason Mohan — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 20:36:21 +0000

If you get this error, ”The Active Directory Schema is not up-to-date and Ldifde.exe is not installed on this computer.”. Just run ServerManagerCmd -i RSAT-ADDS in windows powershell.

Exchange 2010 Installation: Unable to read from the metabase

Jason Mohan — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 20:19:03 +0000

Let me guess you are installing Exchange 2010 and you landed here because you keep getting this error, “Unable to read from the Metabase. Ensure that Microsoft Internet Information Services is installed”. However you’ve installed IIS on your Windows 2008 box, so what gives? You are missing just missing the IIS 6 compatibility feature. It’s a simple fix, go to your web roles and just add it. Normally it’s not checked off when you install the IIS role. Hit retry on your Exchange 2010 installation and it should go past the error this time. Annoying, but then again that’s Microsoft!

How to stop some vm’s from turning on during an HA event in vmware

Jason Mohan — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:13:10 +0000

Okay let’s say you have 2 ESX servers running both at 70% utilization. If one server goes out, and VMware HA turns up the vm’s on the surviving ESX server you’ll get a major performace degradation on your critical servers. However you realize some of those vm’s are test machines or non-critical servers and you don’t care to have VMware HA turn on those machines. How do you do it?

1. Right click on the cluster.

2. Select edit settings.

3. Select VM options. You will see all your VMs in the cluster here.

4. For the machines that you don’t want turned on during an HA event, go to “VM restart priority” and select disabled for those machines.

5. For the “Host isolation response” select “Leave powered on”.

That’s it.

How to enable root access in ESX 4.1

Jason Mohan — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:24:15 +0000

You have to love vmware if you are into virtualization as much as I am. ESX comes with high security and most user accessible ports either blocked or the port is closed on the firewall side. If you need to SSH into your ESX box you will need to open a port on your firewall. We are not talking about the firewall on your router, or ASA. ESX comes with a built-in firewall, you need to open a port on the built-in firewall. Below are the steps, enjoy.

01.) First you must login as a root at the console of your ESX 4 Server.

02.) Then you must navigate to the /etc/ssh directory. Just type in: cd /etc/ssh

03.) Open nano (text editor, easy to use…) type: nano sshd_config

Navigate to the line saying PermitRootLogin no and change it to Yes.

04.) Type then CTRL+X to exit. On the prompt answer Y (as Yes to save the modified file).

05.) Then you’ll need to restart the sshd service typing: service sshd restart.

06.) While you are in the console just type in the following two commands to open firewall ports:

esxcfg-firewall -e sshServer
esxcfg-firewall -e sshClient

07.) Now you should be able to access root functionality.

Save RDP connection with username and password for all users

Jason Mohan — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 14:51:18 +0000

I needed to create a citrix published application that would login using a RDP connection to another server with a saved username and password. Well I thought all you needed to do was create a RDP file, save the username and password and then run mstsc.exe with the RDP file. Yeah that only works for the person who created the file, but won’t work with all users, because the password is encrypted in hash against the logged users SID. Bascially in laman terms you are screwed, it will work for you, but you can’t just make that file public and make it work for anyone. After searching high and low for a solution I finally found one. Now I’m using this to publish a citrix application but this will work for anything. This guy, Remko Weijen created a command line RDP tool called LaunchRDP.exe. This will launch RDP, with a username and password. Note this isn’t encrypted. The link to the file is here, or you can find it in the downloads section of the website. Here’s the command line.

LanchRDP.exe SERVERNAME PORTNUMBER(TYPICALLY 3389) USERNAME DOMAIN PASSWORD CONSOLE(0-false, 1-true) REDIRECTDRIVES(0-false, 1-true) REDIRECTPRINTERS(0-false, 1-true).

So if I wanted to launch RDP to 10.10.1.1 with a username demouser, and a password of demopass, but no domain heres the command I would use. No console, not redirecting drives or printers.

LaunchRDP.exe 10.10.1.1 3389 demouser demopass 10.10.1.1 0 0 0

Simple as that!

Create ICA files with Citrix Quick Launch Tool

Jason Mohan — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:18:19 +0000

Creating ICA files is usually pretty easy, but not all the time. I had an instance where I couldn’t create an ICA file with the access management console. So I used the ICA file creator from citrix, however it kept throwing up errors, and generic errors at that. I was fed up trying to find a solution. Then I found this Citrix Quick Launch tool, which allows you to directly connect to a published application on a citrix server, and creates and ICA file. So for my purposes bascially it did the same thing create an ICA file, but this one actually tells you what the error actually is instead of throwing something generic at you. Low and behold once I found out what the error was, the fix was to remove all my Citrix clients off of my machine and download the latest version (the one with the agent and the web). Then the ICA file creator worked and so did the Citrix Quick Launch tool.

Citrix Quick Launch Tool: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX122536

Citrix ICA file Creator: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX113472

Use the Quick Launch, it looks and works better at least in my opinion.

How to backup WSS 3.0 automatically

Jason Mohan — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 20:52:41 +0000

So how do you backup WSS 3.0 automatically? Well you know you can go into the operations center and backup manually, by setting the destination. However this will not automatically backup your sharepoint farm on a daily basis. There is a simple command to backup your sharepoint farm via command line. Once you have a command line then you can create a batch file and backup however your want.

Here’s the backup command: stsadm -o backup -directory c:\backup -backupmethod full

Here’s my batch file, I’m backing up to the local hard drive and then copying it to a share (my share is not a Windows computer, so I can’t backup directly to it, but if you want to backup to a share you can as long as it’s on the domain).

cd “c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin”
stsadm -o backup -directory c:\backup -backupmethod full
net use s: \\192.168.0.21\backups
xcopy c:\backup s:\wss /e /h /y
net use s: /delete

How to start a full crawl on sharepoint

Jason Mohan — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 18:20:23 +0000

If you trying to get sharepoint to start a full crawl of your site, or you need to diagnose a problem you have to wait for sharepoint to start it’s full crawl interval. However with the below command you have it start immediately.

Stsadm -o spsearch -action fullcrawlstart

How to access embedded SQL on WSS 3.0

Jason Mohan — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 15:54:32 +0000

I wanted to access the SQL databases on my WSS 3.0 server, however I was using the embedded edition of SQL. So I downloaded SQL Management Server studio, but I couldn’t still access the databases. It kept saying it can’t make a remote connection to the server though I was trying to access it via local to the machine. Then I found this. Type it in as the server name, and violia!

Server Name: \\.\pipe\MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE\SQL\QUERY