“I’m not the techie, you are”

We’ve all heard things like that.  Usually they are in the form of an excuse for a user that can’t figure out how to do something, find a setting, format something they way they want. We’re the IT guys so we’re automatically supposed to know the answer. The answer magically exists in a deep corner of our brain, just waiting to be summoned to the front for action.

Yes it’s true; we often do know the answers.  We don’t always, but doing what we do means we will come across all sorts of issues along our travels. Usually we come to the answer by way of Google, F1 (Help), or a little something I like to call Common Sense.  Now, Common Sense can’t be implied. We can’t assume someone will be able to dig deep into their being and work out the answer with deductive reasoning, however often we expect others to do it as we do.

So that leaves us with a few options: Google for the answers, search Help for the answers, or ask someone else for the answers.

Yes, sometimes it is pure laziness on the end users’ part that forces them to ask someone else instead of fixing their problems on their own. Usually we techies assume it is either laziness or lack of intelligence. End users are people too, so we can’t expect them all to be rocket scientists, but we also can’t expect them to all be lacking any sort of intelligence.  Many of my customers are in fact extremely intelligent.

So whats the difference between them and us? It dawned on me this morning as I was supporting a user that is neither lazy nor ignorant - We expect to be able to find the solution while they expect the solution to find them.

“No shit sherlock!”

That’s what you probably just said. Well maybe the problem is that we continue to make users think they are always lazy or always ignorant. We might get better results if we show them that solutions don’t usually just present themselves; show them how to F1 and Google for answers.

We should take all the blame here.  We are afterall bigger, faster and stronger than end users

A few months ago I started the process of getting all my ducks in a row for a migration that involved moving all physical servers a customer had to a VMware ESX environment. This environment wasn’t anything special: 60 users running Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange 2003, Blackberry Enterprise Server and Sage Timberline Office as their accounting app.

The Microsoft parts were easy.  I was sure there would be no problem those. My one concern was with the Sage Timberline software package. This program never ran particularly well, and its obvious it is running using very old programming languages much like alot of the LOB apps companies use these days.

I needed to make sure this package would both a) run within a VMware environment and b) be supported by Sage from a technical perspective. When I called the Sage Customer Support desk and asked their response was:

Sage Timberline Office is not supported running as a virtual machine, however we will troubleshoot any issues you have to a reasonable extent, while not allowing any support calls to be escalated to the engineering department.”

That actually sounds pretty fair. The woman I spoke with sounded fairly knowledgable about the Sage product and had been one of the technicians to previously work with another Sage customer that had issues running their software in a virtual environment. I asked her what the specific issues encountered were and all she really could tell me was that the Pervasive Database performed very badly and lots of unexpected things would happen while using the software.

So here I was - ready to get a signature for a proposal that would cost my customer 10’s of thousands of dollars and I had no factual evidence that showed that the accounting package they used would even work. If there were ever going to be a problem with this software it would be related to performance alone, right? There only about 10 users that access this application, so that shouldn’t really be an issue, right?

Well it turns out Sage Timberline Accounting software runs just fine in a virtual environment. It runs better running in VMware ESX 4 than it ever did on its own dedicated Dell Poweredge 1650 with RAID5.

I guess the moral of the story is that if it should work and it isn’t, you’re probably doing something wrong. Fight through the problems with a sense of resolve, do your research, follow guidelines and procedures and most things will run just fine in a virtual environment….and never take no for an answer.

Anyone familiar with ESX will know how finicky it and vCenter can be about name resolution for all parties involved.  I typically make my VI and vCenter Server HOSTS file identical.  This usually solves all my HA problems and other weird issues that arise.

Today I realized it’s also beneficial to duplicate the HOSTS file on a machine that is being converted from physical to virtual using vCenter Converter (the machine I am converting). Before I appended those entries to the I was receiving “FAILED: A system error encountered during an operation.” each time I tried running the conversion.  The error cleared up right away.

I still don’t know why this continues to be an issue. The infrastructures are setup as vanilla and as “by the book” as possible.  DNS and WINS are always setup and working properly.  Short name and FQDN resolution always works from every host and client on the network.

I suppose it isn’t the end of the world. Seems like it should be an easy thing for VMware to “fix”…then again maybe they don’t consider it to be broken.

Last week I had the unfortunate and immediate need to migrate IIS 6.0 from one Windows Server 2003 to another. I thought this process was going to be very painful, when in fact it was quite simple and straightforward. It’s hard to believe that after all these years I’ve never had to do this. There really is a first time for everything!

Luckily I run everything within VMware ESX Environment, so no data needed to be copied from one machine to another. I simply provisioned a new Windows Server 2003 guest and added the old server’s VMDK disk to the new machine.

• The first thing you need to do is backup your old IIS configuration. In IIS Manager, right click in IIS Manager > All Tasks > Backup/Restore Configuration.

• Probably the most imporant part of the whole process is to make sure you “Encrypt the backup using password”. This makes th e IIS config “portable”. If you don’t encrypt it, you won’t be able to import it on a different system as there are sessions keys stored withing the IIS metabase.

• By default the configuration backup goes to C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\MetaBack. So you will need to grab both files it has created and move them on over to the new server. Place them in the same location on the new server because IIS doesn’t give you a choice to browse for a backup - it looks in that directory each time.

• Now you’ll restore that configuration from within IIS Manager, right click in IIS Manager > All Tasks > Backup/Restore Configuration. Choose the one you want to restore and restore. It will ask for the encryptin password.
• Now we need to restart IIS. This will actually re-create the IUSR account in the Local User Manager, which kind of impressed me. The password will be wrong for this account so you need to set it to something manually by the normal Reset Password function.
• Now you need to need to tell the metabase about that new password. Microsoft has a nice article outlining how this is done.
  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297989
• Restart IIS and for the most part you should be good to go.

I opted to simply reset the password for the IUSR account that the metabase created automatically for me. The name was wrong (hence IUSR_computer), however this meant I wouldnt need to change all of the special IUSR permissions set for special files such as MDB and other special case files. You can easily tell the metabase to use a new user account as the IUSR account using the metabase explorer, but I’m not going to go into that right now.

The goal at my customer’s site last night was simple:

1. Ghost the Dell PowerEdge 2950 Windows Server 2003 C: and D: drives
2. Pull out the 3 old 36GB drive RAID 5 Array  and replace with 5 shiny new 146GB drives in a RAID 5 Array
3. Put the ghost image back on the new RAID 5 array
4. Go home and have a good night’s rest

My night can be summed up in two simple words:  MISERABLE FAILURE

Almost two hours into the project I finally realized that the PERC3/Di drivers are actually inserted into the PERC2/3 bundle of PERC drivers rather than the PERC 3/4 bundle of drivers.  There are PERC Di’s,, Si’s, DC’s, SC’s, and QC’s.  The Di and Si versions apparently are the bastard child of the PERC drivers.

Once I was able to boot into Bart PE Ghost kept crashing with Error 32000.  Symantec basically says this could mean anything, or nothing.  Thanks Symantec.

I was finally able to take an image of the machine, however it was useless.  It turns out the previous IT guy decided it would be a great idea to turn the RAID 5 Array into a dynamic partition.  Ghost, and from what I’ve read cannot clone RAID 5 volumes - only spanned, striped or mirrored volumes.

What upsets me more than the fact that this just a stupid decision by the last IT guy, and more the fact that several hours were wasted by me trying to get it to work is the fact that the last guy must have made a concerted, conscious effor to make this change in Windows. This was not a case of simply choosing the wrong choice - Door A or B. A colleague of mine reminded me this morning as I was venting that Microsoft suggest making all volumes Dynamic (or at least they did a while back).

I take full blame for not preparing for the w0rk I was embarking upon last night.  It just goes to show that you really can’t trust the work of others. Nothing is safe.

After all these years.  All the upgrades, complaints, replacments and new versions - we still need to interact with our Windows Update process. It started out years ago with the special program interaction that was required with IE installations for WU.  Then it was the Malicious Software Removal Tool and Service Packs.  Now we have this silly Microsoft Live Installer.

It would seem to me that the easiest way to get more users to install updates would be to actually make it easier for them to do! Could Microsoft not really want users to install updates?  Do they enjoy being lambasted in the blogosphere about how insecure their systems allegedly are?

Maybe the folks over at Microsoft have been misunderstood all along. Maybe they make these boneheaded decisions on purpose.  Maybe they are just masochists and they thrive on pain and torture.  They’d rather fight the big fight rather than do the little things that might make our lives easier.

I suppose on some level we all like the pain.  That’s why we still put up with it.

I had the need to manually reset the Admin password for the Administrator’s Web Console for a Trend Micro OfficeScan Server 8.0 today.  Oddly enough, my googling failed me and I was forced to call Trend Micro for some quick and free support.

Everything I found while googling showed me how to reset the Uninstall password for the OfficeScan Client.  However none showed how to reset the Administrator Web Console to manage the network. It’s just two simple steps

1. Edit: C:\Program Files\Trend Micro\OfficeScan\PCCSRV\ofscan.ini
   Change master_pwd= to be master_pwd=70
   Save the file
2. Edit: C:\Program Files\Trend Micro\OfficeScan\PCCSRV\ofcserver.ini
   Change master_pwd=!CRYPT!blahblah to be master_pwd=70

You can now log in using a password of "1" - minus the quotes of course. Happy resetting

As reported on serveral sites such as BerryReview.com over the past few days RIM has announed they will be giving the axe to Blackberry Professional Software (BPS). For those of you not familiar with BPS, it began as “BES Express”, basically BES with a CAL limit of 15 users without the need to plop down $3k to get started.  They then rebranded BES Express as BPS and upped the CAL limit to 30 and changed their development branch.

BPS users have been waiting for HTML support for several months, all the while RIM has been telling us to be patient.  Well it looks like thats just a dream now.

This news might have horrible implications for companies like mine who thrive on the Microsoft Small Business Server installations for the 5-15 user offices.  One our biggest selling points is giving users the ability to be completed synced up wirelessly without having the spend the $3k like big guy’s do. That’s all gone now.

Anyone that has met me knows that I have a hard time functioning without my Blackberry in hand. I push this technology on customers, friends and barmates.  Once BPS is gone for good can I really continue to convert people Blackberry’s?

There is alot of speculation that RIM must be planning on replacing BPS with some other product, or at the very least a new pricing model for the full-fledged BES.  But alas this is still just speculation.  We can only hope they hear us loud and clear.  Make this right!

So I’ve had the problem in the past where I need to remove very old snapshots for ESX virtual machines and eventually after hours of merging it fails with no apparent reason.  Recently I was looking into how I could get aroudn this.  The idea I was testing was to use Converter Enterprise to esentially do a V2V.  That way, if the conversion failed I will still have the original machine in its old working state.

After starting this process on a test VM, after 3 hours of converting it failed.  The logs gave me the following:

UNKNOWN_METHOD_FAULT(vim.fault.NotAuthenticated)

I stumbled upon a post on the vmware communities that suggested I try the following

When setting up the conversion, don’t use “convert all disks and leave current size”, use “select volumes…” and leave all volumes selected and the default options checked.

I gave it another try and voila! Conversion worked without error.

I wonder if multiple disks has anything to do with the snapshot merging problems I’ve had so many times.  As I attempt to remember specifics of all past failed attempts, I believe they’ve all had multiple disks.  Maybe that was the problem all along?  As long as this Plan B works I’m happy!

It absolutely amazes me that some websites start making sound as soon as you go to them. Day after day I stumble upon sites that have music or advertisements that decide to play just because I’m there, not because I asked it to.

Besides the fact that it is completely obtrusive and widely known to be horrible ettiquete, think about all the people surfing the web at work. Do you think they will ever visit your site again if it starts making noise advertising the fact that you aren’t doing the things your boss is paying to do?  I didn’t think so.  And don’t get me started on the sound objects that don’t even give you an option to mute.

ESPN.com for instance has lost my business from this point forward.  It used to be that when you visit espn.com a small video would play on the left hand side of the page.  I emailed them a while back complaining about how this was a huge nuiscence.  To my amazement I actually received a response a couple days later:

Dear Michael,

Thank you for your reply.

Unfortunately undert the current format the videos will play without you being logged in ahead of time.
However with our new website that we expect to have completed by sometime in January, you will be able to navigate the new ESPN.com website without having the videos pop up on the screen.

For live assistance with this or any other issue, please call Customer Care at 1-888-549-3776 (ESPN) between 7:00 am and 2:00 am EST.

Regards,
Corey
ESPN.com Customer Care

Well, ok so maybe this will change?  It didn’t.  In fact, now for the new and improved espn.com front page, Jay Saunders takes up half the page and he has a virtual conversation with Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs talking about this new Ford F-150. GREAT! So now its not just a small box, it’s two guys having a conversation on the whole page!

WEB DEVELOPERS AND MARKETERS PLEASE GET A CLUE!!!