Disabling a network card when running sysprepping a Windows machine is easy.  Two things need to happen: 

My Blackberry Media Manager kept exiting on me when trying to access the Media stored on my Blackberry Storm.  The specific error was:

Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library X Runtime Error!

Program: C:\program Files\Roxio\Media Manager 9\Mediamanager9.exe

R6025 – pure virtual function call

The problem ended up being that the RoxMediaDB9 service was disabled.

I changed the service from disabled to manual (could have been set to automatic if I wanted it to start following each reboot), started the RoxMediaDB9 service, which allowed Media Manager to start without issue.

The Problem

SQL Agent won’t start on a Windows cluster for a particular instance

The Symptoms

Microsoft has released their Remote Desktop Load Simulation Tools which have nothing to do with Remote Desktop in the RDP sense.  Instead, the tools are designed for 32-bit and 64-bit server capacity planning and performance/scalability analysis.  According to Microsoft:

In a server-based computing environment, all application execution and data processing occur on the server. Therefore it is extremely interesting to test the scalability and capacity of servers to determine how many client sessions a server can typically support under a variety of different scenarios. One of the most reliable ways to find out the number or users a server can support for a particular scenario is to log on a large number of users on the server simultaneously. The Remote Desktop Load Simulation tools provide the functionality which makes it possible to generate the required user load on the server.

Supported operating systems are:

• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Server 2008 Datacenter
• Windows Server 2008 Datacenter without Hyper-V
• Windows Server 2008 Enterprise
• Windows Server 2008 Enterprise without Hyper-V
• Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows Server 2008 R2 for Itanium-based Systems
• Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2
• Windows Server 2008 Standard
• Windows Server 2008 Standard without Hyper-V

(Notice the lack of Windows 2003 support?)

A minimal test environment requires:

1. Target Remote Desktop Server
2. Client Workstations
3. Test Controller Host

I’m finalizing a Windows 2003 R2 build that will become our gold image, which will be the source of all new server deployments within our organization.  One challenge I had to overcome was getting the CD-ROM/DVD drive to be set to drive Z: after the syspreped image is cloned and booted.

Many people are familiar with changing drive letters within the Device Management tool aka devmgmt.msc.  I needed to automate this task so the CD-ROM drive, which shows up as drive D on my image after running sysprep, would be automatically set to drive Z.

To accomplish this, I needed three things:

1. An entry in the [GuiRunOnce] section of my sysprep.inf file that calls a batch file after booting up the sysprep’ed image for the first time. 
2. The batch file mentioned in step 1, changeletter.cmd runs diskpart.exe, with the parameters supplied in drives.txt
3. The drives.txt file, which details the diskpart.exe commands that change the CD-ROM’s drive letter from drive D to drive Z.

The applicable portion on my sysprep.inf file:

[GuiRunOnce]
Command0=”C:\changeletter.cmd”

My changeletter.cmd file:

diskpart /s c:\drives.txt

My drives.txt file:

select disk 0
select volume d
assign letter z noerr

Put all these pieces together, and your CD/DVD drive should be changed to drive letter Z after booting up the sysprep’ed image.  Note that in the [GuiRunOnce] section of the sysprep.inf file, the part to the left of the equals sign is Command0, as is Command zero.  If you wanted to run additional scripts, the next would be Command1, followed by Command2, etc.

If you’re curious about diskpart.exe, check out the details on syntax in KB300415.

Last night I converted a physical Windows 2003 R2 server to a VMware virtual machine using VMware Converter Standalone version 4.0.1.  The entire process was extremely simple, only four steps.  After the P2V conversion completed, the physical machine powered off, and the newly created VM booted up.  Everything appeared to be normal, until I realized I couldn’t RDP into the new VM.

I jumped on the server console via the Virtual Infrastructure client, and found that my VM was receiving an IP address from DHCP, rather than the static address the physical server was configured with.  I attempted to assign the static IP to the NIC, and received a message that an existing NIC already was using that IP address.   No other NICs were visible in the Network Connections applet.

I immediately thought back to my post from earlier this summer titled Fix: The IP address you have entered for this network adapter is already assigned to another adapter that is hidden from the Network Connections folder because it is not physically in the computer”  This post details how to start Device Manager in a mode that shows hidden devices.  I was able to follow the steps to remove the phantom NIC, then was able to assign the static IP address to the VM’s NIC, which allowed me to RDP into the server once again. 

The steps are:

1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd.exe, and then press ENTER.
2. Type set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1, and then press ENTER.
3. Type Start DEVMGMT.MSC, and then press ENTER.
4. Click View, and then click Show Hidden Devices.
5. Expand the Network adapters tree.
6. Right-click the dimmed network adapter, and then click Uninstall.

When trying to install Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) on a PowerEdge R610 server running Windows Server 2003 R2,  I received the following error from the prerequisite checker:

 ”This is not a supported server. Server Administrator software can only be installed on supported servers.”

I recevied this error when trying to install OMSA 5.4, 5.5, and 6.0.1. To get around the error you can run the installer with the option to bypass the prerequsite checker. To do so, from command prompt, run the following:

C:\OpenManage\windows\SystemsManagement\msiexec /i SysMgmt.msi SYSTEMCHECK=NO

Dell’s official documentation says version 5.4 and 5.5 of OMSA are not supported on the R610, but it runs great on many systems in my environment.

When you start up ConsoleOne, the application usually selects a random read-write replica to connect to.  You cannot specify which replica to connect to, but you can tell ConsoleOne to connect to the Master replica by using the forcemaster option.

In various Novell TIDs the syntax is shown as either -forcemaster or /forcemaster or .  YMMV, and it may be dependant on your version of ConsoleOne, so try them both out.  Example syntax is:

C:\1.2\bin\ConsoleOne.exe -forcemaster

C:\1.2\bin\ConsoleOne.exe /forcemaster

Here’s a quick and easy way of checking how long a Windows server or workstation has been up, via the command line.  It pipes the results of Net Statistics Workstation into find.  Run the following from a command prompt:

net statistics workstation | find /i “statistics since”

The results will look like

Statistics since 8/12/2009 11:08 PM

Which shows the machine has been up since 11:08pm on August 12, 2009.

I received the following message when attempting to run the standalone GWcheck today:

Mailbox/library maintenance can not be executed because a duplicate request is running

To resolve my issue (Groupwise 7.0.3HP2), I renamed the ngwcheck.db file in the post office directory.  Worked like a charm.