Restoring a backup tape using backup Exec 11D

Today I built a 2003 server Enterprise edition and installed Symantec 11D on it.
I installed the SCSI HP LTO4 drive and setup a restore.

Catalog took 12 minutes and restore of 250gb of data took 1 hour and 52 minutes.

No errors

Very impressive I was honestly expecting to be left restoring for 6 hours.

Great piece of kit

Restoring a backup tape using backup Exec 11D

I started my day with building a 2008 R2 server on a test server I have.
I tried to load Symantec backup Exec 11d onto the server and it wouldnt install giving a compatiblity error. So I double checked and I was infact using the 32bit CD so i swapped it and the same problem wont work.

So I said work around. I installed Hyper-V and installed windows 2003 R2 server and then installed Backup Exec onto it. After an hour of updating my backup exec was working fine.
I then decided to try do a restore and found my VM wouldnt find the HP LTO4 drive.
I double checked the hyper-v manager SCSI cards are definitely added. I removed them added them again.. still nothing.

So I posted it on Twitter and then started Googling. My good friend and MVP Aidan finn found the first post but he knew already himself... backup tape drives dont work that way with hyper-V. What a pain I cant just do a restore using the SCSI card on the server to a VM running backup Exec.

I'm yet to find a solution but its looking like I'm going to have to drop back to windows 2003 server and do the restore or do the restore on a different legacy box and then move the data to the more powerful test server.

VMware ESX Problems

Well yesterday I had to restart a Virtual Machine so I shut down the VM as normal from windows after serveral minutes the box hadn't powered down.

I right clicked on it in the VIC - Virtual Infrastructure Client and clicked reset but I got an error saying the box was powered off.

I started googling and found some very complex solutions so I tried 2 of them but my Shell couldnt find the "kill" command.

So I resorted to Tweeting my problem and a contact I have in Novosco got me in touch with a Gentleman who helped me sort the problem.
What I should have done was connect directly to the host using my VIC. In there I noticed that the virtual machine was infact powered off.

So the problem was with the VIC client. I connected to the Shell again and ran

service mgmt-vmware restart

It shows up 4 { OK } automatically disconnects any VIC clients you open it again and the problem is solved.

Thank you Novosco for your help it was much appreciated.

Windows Search in Terminal Services for Adam Browne

Today I encountered a strange problem – windows search was returning no results now on a single pc this is an annoyance but on a 2 terminal servers (citrix 4.5 PS) with 20+ users on each this was starting to create issues.

After looking at all settings for searching etc I narrowed the problem down to the fact that no one seemed to have the “include subfolders” box ticked. Not a problem I say tick it on one close Windows search only to go in and find out it’s now unticked again. Starting to get strange looks from the customer I explained it was a search setting that only administrators can configure and to leave it to me.

I returned back to the server room to go through all of the settings for searching once again to no avail. I Googled, I looked on Experts exchange I even looked at a few news groups but no one seems to have had this problem before and if they have they clearly haven’t put anything about it online!

I noticed that my own search(as a domain admin) had “include subfolders” ticked – a simple reg search later revealed that there was a REG_DWORD value on my hive reg settings.

I took note of this value (IncludeSubFolders - REG_DWORD – 0x00000001 (1) )

I opened both terminal server registry’s and inserted the above reg value in to the following locations:

HKEY_USERS.DEFAULT
Software
Microsoft
Windows
CurrentVersion
Explorer


I got a user to log off and log on and to my amazement the box was ticked! Even better I unticked it closed search and reopened it and it was still ticked!! Awesome!

Thanks Adam Cool Post!

PDED.SYS from Protectdrive - Edisk

The joys of running windows updates, yet again my laptops have decided to bluescreen with error BSOD’d and PDED.SYS. This from previous experience is from the Laptop encryption software we use named ProtectDrive/Edisk is the product and its great but causes some fantastic crashes sometimes when you install windows updates.

I contacted there support desk and they've sent me a nice batch script to rename the old pded.sys file to old and replace it with the new one..

Fingers crossed this solves my problems

Installing Hyper-V

I started installing Hyper-V for the first time today added the Role and clicked next.. it installed..
Got to love that simple.

started the Hyper-V manager..

Tried to create a VM with 1Gb of ram and a 30gb hard drive. click New go through some simple menu's and it threw back an error very simply saying.. NO !

Interesting lingo for a corporate server. Anyway I had a little flashback to something a MVP friend Aidan Finn said about enabling Virtualisation in the BIOS. After wiping the blood from my nose I restarted the server and hit F2 and delete with great force hoping to get into the BIOS..

No such luck.. I then read the screen.. F12 for boot options.. interesting writing it on the screen.. for everyone to read.. like thats going to help. Finally into the BIOS.. or the "configuration menu" as Dell now call it and went down to the options virtualisation clicked enable rebooted and went through the menu's again.. it booted now for the MCITP should I install Datacenter edition or Enterprise edition that is the question.. If you're an MCITP what did you use to pass? if you say testking I'm not interested but thanks.

New Server has arrived

I bought a new server its a Dell T3500 running one Intel Xeon W3503 2.4ghz with 12Gb of DDR3 ram and 3 x 500gb Sata disks in a RAID5 Array.

I've built this machine with a mission to get certified welcome Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V.

If anyone is interested in certification let me know.

Fun with clearing errors in System events

Running 2003 Server STD with Service pack 2 and I was getting a red error saying Service control manager

Event ID 7011 Source Service Control Manager
Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the service.
and
Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the Symantec AntiVirus service.

After some trawling through google and bing I gave up and decided to restart the AV services.. low and behold a clean error log..

**This post was brought to you by Common sense**

Apart from the fact it took me 30 minutes to figure out :P

Devicewall msiosrv

The joys of being a sys admin. I rolled out the latest patches from Microsoft today and on the Dell desktops I have running devicewall all bluescreened with error msiosrv.dll.

If anyone comes across this the solution is boot to safemode with networking remove the devicewall client from the machine. Restart it and login then redeploy the client for some reason the new updates pack must over write a DLL that it needs.