Passing event details as arguments through a scheduled task to the action program

In this post I am going to schedule a task that runs a program when a certain event occurs, and pass details of that event as command line parameters to the action program

Fujitsu ServerView RAID Manager: Page Cannot be Displayed

Suddenly the RAID Manager stopped working on all my servers giving the "Page Cannot be Displayed" error message when browsing to https://servername:3172/

The problem turned out to be caused by a windows update KB2585542 which addresses an SSL vulnerability but it breaks ServerView RAID Manager through HTTPS.

You can either

• Uninstall the security update
• Enable HTTP for RAID Manager by setting AllowHTTP = 1 in the file bin\amDPatch.ini inside the RAID Manager installation directory. http://support.ts.fujitsu.com/Download/ShowDescription.asp?SoftwareGUID=4F9CD139-A802-4169-AB24-D69C06215B2F&Info=FTS
• Disable the security update by creating this registry DWORD value SendExtraRecord = 2 in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL. More details here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2643584

Protecting a non-domain server with DPM

To protect a server outside the DPM's domain:

• First install the agent manually on the server, copy the installer from C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\agents\RA
• Add a host entry on both the DPM and the server to be protected to allow name resolution of each other
• On the server to be protected, navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\bin and run this command
• SetDpmServer.exe -dpmServerName backup -isNonDomainServer -userName svcdpm

• From the DPM console go to the management tab, click the Install action and choose to "Attach agents" to a "Computer in a workgroup or untrusted domain"
• Specify the name of the server and the username you created with the SetDpmServer command

• The server now should appear in the Agents list

Reset Windows 2008 R2 administrator password

This is the old trick of overwriting any app accessible at login screen (e.g. screen saver) with a command shell to reset the password

Configuring a guest Windows 2008 R2 Cluster on virtual machines with virtual shared storage

This is a lab environment I created of a virtual windows cluster with iSCSI virtual shared disk.
The setup consists of 3 Windows 2008 R2 VMs

1. Active Directory and Storage Server: DC 192.168.1.10
2. Cluster First Node: Node1 192.168.1.11
3. Cluster Second Node: Node2 192.168.1.12

ACL permissions for IIS7 application pools

In W2K8R2/IIS7 application pools run by default under the builtin identitiy ApplicationPoolIdentity.
To grant ACL permissions to web applications running under these pools resolve names like this:

IIS APPPOOL\[APP POOL NAME]

Windows 2008 Sysprep, Newsid

To prepare a Windows 2008 template image for cloning:

• Run c:\Windows\System32\sysprep\sysprep.exe
• Configure the dialog box as in the screenshot below
• Create your image after the machine is shut down. Windows will reconfigure itself on the next boot.