Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

Importing Powershell Active directory module into windows 2008

Wednesday, June 17th, 2015

I am “crash and burn” testing windows 10. Painful but a good way to get the feel of it. One painful loss was the Active Directory module for Powershell. You have to have Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) and they stopped working for Win 10. There was a special release for the January version of Win10 but it died with the May version and Microsoft reported they will fix it with the general release.

What to do?

I thought about using one of my test VMs running Windows 2008. It had RSAT but when I tried to import the Active Directory module into Powershell; I received an error saying it did not exist.

I found there were a extra other steps needed to be done:

1) Import-Module ServerManager

2) Add-WindowsFeature RSAT-AD-Powershell

After that, I was able to import the active directory module.

-edit- 07/23/15

There was a recent update to windows 10 and it nuked RSAT.  Microsoft will basically fix it after the OS is released.  *sighs*

Posted in 2008, PowerShell, Windows | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Windows 10 Preview won’t activate!

Friday, June 5th, 2015

I am early testing windows 10.  Overall I am liking the OS but it has it quirks and issues. My biggest issue involved the Juniper Pulse client no longer functioning.

I recently upgraded to release 100130 and found the pulse client not working and the OS required activation.

The product key had changed and the new one would not take. The error basically said the wrong product key is in play?

I tried many things and nothing worked. Then, I remembered I was testing the Enterprise version.

A quick check of the site and sure enough there was a different product key.  I used it and the OS activated.

The pulse client decided to be a pain again. It would take the token and then sit forever with a message about securing the tunnel.

I installed the latest build of but the problem remained.  I removed and installed the client and this time it was able to connect!

Posted in 10, Windows | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Missing Internet Settings GPO for Internet Explorer 11

Tuesday, April 14th, 2015

I had a request for a server running a tool to allow users to access it via Citrix and not have to enter the URL into the trusted sites.

With old versions of IE, you would simply modify the local GPO for Internet Settings. To my surprise, this was gone. It seems Microsoft decided to favor Global Policies starting with version 10 for such issues. It makes sense when it involves many systems; but It seems overkill for one system. I do not have access to the Domain Controllers so my choices were rather limited.

I decided to play around with the registry and found this could be accomplished by creating a couple keys and dwords.

Using regedit, I drilled down to : HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Internet Settings\ZoneMap

I created a new key called: EscDomains and inside that another key for the ServerName

This is used when enhanced security is enabled for IE.

Inside this key, I created two new DWORDS :   http and https and set both to 2 which signifies Trusted Site.

Not knowing why Enhanced Security was in use for this server, I decide to create a couple more entries in case somebody decided to disable it.

The two new keys went in the ZoneMap\Domains:   company.com\servername

Obviously you change that to your domain name and the name of the server.

Inside the servername key I created the same two dwords as before.

After that I tested the access and the users could get the login screen without modifying IE.

Granted not the best solution and caution should be used but it solved my issue.

Information used to research this:

MSDN Inhanced Security Zones

ServerFault post

Spiceworks

thesysadmins

Posted in 2008, Internet Explorer | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Winlogon initiates shutdown. Reason Code: 0x500ff

Thursday, April 9th, 2015

One machine decided it didn’t want to work anymore. The event viewer showed a message logged where the winlogon initiated a shutdown with the Reason Code: 0x500ff.

Not a typical error.  Power was ok and there wasn’t anything else obvious.

A Technet question found a similar issue happened to someone else.

The power supply was reseated and so far the system remains up.

Posted in 2008, troubleshooting, Windows | Tagged , | Leave a comment

iLO 3 reports (Error code: ssl_error_bad_mac_alert)

Monday, April 6th, 2015

We are transitioning our console management setup and one of the Windows systems reported an error when trying to access it through the iLO management port.

Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to <FQDN>. SSL peer reports incorrect 
Message Authentication Code. (Error code: ssl_error_bad_mac_alert)
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of 
the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

It’s an odd error as this was the only system reporting it and it happened on different browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome).

I tried resetting to factory defaults but that didn’t solve it.

Drivers were up to date but the firmware looked old.  I pulled down the latest version and installed it.

Problem solved.

Posted in 2008, troubleshooting | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

LSF reports “CScript Error: Loading your settings failed. (Access is denied. )”

Wednesday, March 18th, 2015

This was an odd error. We are setting up a new image for our farm and one user reported this message when he submitted his jobs:

CScript Error: Loading your settings failed. (Access is denied. )

Everything looked in order but for some reason his vbscript job failed. Looking around the Net, I did find a kb article which mentioned enabling vbscript for CGI. It seemed odd bot be touching the users key but I gave it a try.

I created the following keys:

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows Script Host
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows Script Host\Settings

The technote said to verify Everyone has access but I decided to leave it to the Users group.

I also decided to also add the following entries in the settings key:

BatchMode: REG_DWORD: 0
DisplayLogo: REG_DWORD: 0
Timeout: REG_DWORD: 0

There was no need for a reboot.

The user was able to submit jobs after that.

I did not heavily research the reason but I am assuming with Microsoft’s effort to go into Powershell (you should look at it if you haven’t); some things are left out of the Windows Scripting Host on new installs or this was a case of the user once being a local admin and that was removed.

-UPDATE-

Well now. This turned out to not be the case. We have working on automating the setups and this is what caused the problem. In the past, we would login as a specific user and finish the install. Debugging we would login as a user and the problem went away.

The villain?  No user profile on the system!

Once we logged in as the user and the profile was created; job submits worked!

A nuance that is easy to miss!

Posted in LSF, troubleshooting | Tagged , | Leave a comment

How to get the server serial number with powershell

Saturday, February 14th, 2015

I had to update some drivers and did a quick check of the server database and found it was wrong. I remembered there were a couple server changes before this install and was not sure the correct server was listed.

I needed the serial number of to verify I was updating the right information in the database.

Powershell can do this.  Note: this is a 2012 install on new hardware.  Older models might not work.

From Powershell; simply enter;

gwmi win32_bios | fl SerialNumber

Posted in PowerShell | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Comparing processes between two computers

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2014

I am reading Don Jones’ book Learning Windows Powershell in a month of lunches and found one nice little sequence of commands which can do a diff between two lists of processes.

Every so often you can get the complaint of “why do these two computers have different run times when they are the same?”

A valid complaint which can take awhile to sort out. Obvious first steps would be to compare apps installed and what is running as sometimes the “smarter then you” engineers can install things without telling anybody.

One quick way would be to use a couple cmdlets and diff.  This was taken from page 41.

Use the computer which is running as expected as the reference computer.  Get a list of processes by entering:

Get-Process | Export-CliXML reference.xml

The CliXML can hold more information then the traditional CSV file.

After you have the file, you can run:

Diff -reference (Import-CliXML reference.xml) -difference (Get-Process -computername newserver) -property Name

The output centers on the name of each process and you will get <= and => to point out where it’s different.

This is a nice little trick to compare setups.  You can keep the reference file as a baseline for future issues on the same computer.

This will work with any of the get cmdlets.

Posted in PowerShell | Tagged | Leave a comment

BHIST command windows returns an NFS path.

Wednesday, November 12th, 2014

A windows user testing out LSF reported an error message when trying the bhist command:

/remote/lsf/work/<farm name>/logdir/lsb.events: No such file or directory

This looks odd but is expected as there was a configuration option missing and the command was defaulting to what the master host had configured. The master in this situation is a Linux host.

To fix this; you simply need to add an option to the conf file on your LSF setup on windows:

LSB_SHAREDIR=”\\<windows server>\lsf\work”

Note: we use netapp filers to house our log files, etc.

Restart the LIM, RES, and SBD services and the command will work.

Note: It did take a little to respond.  Might be the way it works but the command wasn’t even used until this incident.  I may research it if somebody complains.

Posted in LSF | Tagged | Leave a comment

Job’s resource requirements not satisfied

Wednesday, November 12th, 2014

LSF had an odd message for a user.

Job’s resource requirements not satisfied

This could go in many ways and waste time reviewing the resource configuration for the server.

Many things were checked and in the end; the problem simply the server was administratively closed.

Once opened; jobs flowed again.

Posted in LSF | Tagged | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »