While reviewing a server for an issue; I noticed a few messages from LSF.
saveIndx: Unknown index name <name> from ELIM
This message is reported a missing flag from lsf.shared. A quick edit and a process and service restart and the message went away.
If you are lucky to have a company which will pay for professional training, count your blessings. All to often, there is little or no budget for such things. Add in the mentality of “if we train them, they will leave!” pretty well eliminates professional training.
To remain employed, you always have to stay current and read and play with new things as much as possible.
As the year is coming to the end, people start making predictions as to what will be the hot knowledge for the next year.
Such is the case with this blog entry. And of course, I have my viewpoints. 😉
Migration to the Cloud is going to remain the effort as the reduction of IT people seems to be on many peoples minds. Many will try to fight it. Having survived a couple of reduction efforts, I advise all to embrace it and get involved if at all possible. It doesn’t matter, it’s a leaky sieve in matters of security. Companies will attempt it and declare it a success no matter the result. I would like to get involved with the Cloud; however, at the moment I don’t have access.
As to Powershell;if you work in the windows world, you are are foolish not to know it. I have finally started playing with it and now wish I had started awhile ago. It’s fun and it makes life easier!
IPv6; we have heard about it for a long time. It’s will start appearing! Just recently, Microsoft announced it ran out of IPv4 addresses for Azure. I expect other companies to run into the same problem.
Security is a good thing to understand. I don’t know if we are changing to a security minded world as some of the hype is motivated by the recent examples of security failures. It may be the start of a trend or it could very well be the usual fad and get reduced in effort as events die down and security starts being a massive expense. The security world is a certain type of mindset. It would be good to talk to a few people before deciding this will get you a job as with the glut of IT workers awhile ago. Many people working but many didn’t have the aptitude.
Compliance is rather boring for me. Not something I would want a career.
Vmware and Hyper-V are are mentioned but I am wondering if virtualization is becoming one of those expected skills but will not do much for you. I have used vmware and am currently getting ready to play with a Hyper-V cluster.
Office 365 and Google apps are growing. I can see this being a good thing to know especially when I hear more and more arguments of why do volume license when you can basically rent what you need? I am considering looking into Google Apps certification.
Time to start reading and setting up test environments!
A trouble call reported an old server running Solaris 10 with a full root partition.
Looking around I noticed the FMD log files were quite large and the active file was growing. To ease the space condition, I deleted the rotated files (ie .0, .1, etc.) and started looking into what was the problem.
The Solaris Fault Management Facility was created to provide a self-healing capability. It through the fmd daemon monitors various aspects of system health and as in this case, logged many messages for system issues.
The first obvious check was to use the fmadm faulty command to see if anything was flagged as faulty. In this situation; there was a bad dimm.
This wasn’t enough to fill log files so I had a look at /var/fm/fmd file and it had several entries for a processor.
The fmstat command which will report statistics logged by fmd and it’s modules confirmed the log activity.
Since it was an old server with no warranty; the hardware people were notified to look at the server and retire it if they couldn’t repair it.
One of the most annoying things is a server which is hung up and won’t allow you to access it remotely. Especially, if it requires driving to get to the server.
Such was the case of a trouble call from a user trying to access a server. He would try remote desktop and received the following message:
Please wait for the System Event Notification Service…
The login process would remain at this point.
Remote Reboot failed but the system would ping and I could mount a hidden drive.
I needed remote desktop to work so I could look into this problem.
The System Event Notification Service as described from an article in the Microsoft Developer Network states:
Applications designed for use by mobile users require a unique set of connectivity functions and notifications. In the past these individual applications were required to implement these features internally. The System Event Notification Service (SENS) now provides these capabilities in the operating system, creating a uniform connectivity and notification interface for applications. Using SENS developers can determine connection bandwidth and latency information from within their application and optimize the application’s operation based on those conditions.
It sounds like something that is not needed, but it wasn’t the time to make this call when there was an annoyed user waiting for the server. I suspected we could at least kill the process and see if Remote Desktop would work again. Time to use the useful SC command:
sc \\servername queryex SENS
This returned:
SERVICE_NAME: sens
TYPE : 20 WIN32_SHARE_PROCESS
STATE : 4 RUNNING
(STOPPABLE, NOT_PAUSABLE, IGNORES_SHUTDOWN)
WIN32_EXIT_CODE : 0 (0x0)
SERVICE_EXIT_CODE : 0 (0x0)
CHECKPOINT : 0x0
WAIT_HINT : 0x0
PID : 976
FLAGS :
Using the PID; I could attempt a taskkill of the sens process.
taskkill /S <servername> /PID 976 /F
This made the login session continue and I had access to the server.
Checking the Net; there are a several situations which could cause this condition. It ranged from removing Live Messenger (which was not installed), registry changes (which didn’t work or didn’t apply) to removing an update (which was not installed).
I had to log out and found the error was back. I used the same taskkill steps and was able to access the server again.
Not seeing the obvious; I figured I would try the “fix most things Microsoft” solution and rebooted.
The error went away.
Sometimes a reboot is all that is needed.
Windows Server 2012 can be a little disconcerting due to the new look and layout.
Such was the case for a request of a 2012 server with Remote Desktop Services enabled. I installed the OS and added it to AD. I installed the requested applications and then I went through the wizard and installed the “Remote Desktop Session Host.”
I didn’t need the license server installed as I have a couple already in place.
When it came time to configure verify the setup; I went to Administrative Tools and looked at Remote Desktop Services and only found “RD Licensing Diagnoser”
Ok? Where do I configure the license servers? Oh wait! the Dashboard. I looked under that and found the same thing.
I reinstalled the role and found nothing changed.
I did get the warning about licenses and so I ran the diagnoser to see what was wrong. Two license servers were found but the problem was the missing license server had the licenses for 2012.
Time became an issue and I literally had the user panicking to use the server so I needed a quick resolution as this system was a short term “crash and burn” setup.
I decided to add the missing entry via the registry and reboot.
The license server list can be found here:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services
The entry you need to modify is : LicenseServers
I added the missing license server to the list and rebooted.
The warning message about licenses went away and I verified multiple users could access the server.
Time to crack open the 2012 books and papers!
techdork 