Sam has been working in the IT industry for nearly 20 years now, and is currently working for VMware as a Senior Technical Marketing Manger in the Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) focussed on Automation. Previously, he has worked as consultant for VMware PSO, specializing in cloud automation and network virtualization. His technical experience includes design, development and implementation of cloud solutions, network function virtualisation and the software defined datacentre. Sam specialises in automation of network virtualisation for cloud infrastructure, enabling public cloud solutions for service providers and private or hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise.
Sam holds multiple high level industry certifications, including the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) for Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2013-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert NSX, vExpert VSAN and vExpert Cloud sub-programs.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time today trying to sort out my iPhone sync to my Exchange Server, failing miserably. It used to work, pre-upgrade to iOS4, but for some reason fails to sync.
Symptoms were:
iPhone fails to sync, generic timeout error (or is very slow)
This is a pretty specific set of instructions for a specific environment:
If
you are using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007
and
you have a Microsoft Certificate Services 2003 Certificate Authority on your domain
and
you have non-domain Windows Server 2008 servers you wish to monitor or set up as a gateway server.
Getting a certificate for either a Gateway Server or remotely monitored Server can be a touch vexing. If you’re installing on the same domain as the SCOM management server the security settings take care of themselves, not so for non-domain servers, which require mutual certificate authentication. The Gateway must trust the Domain CA and identify itself as trusted to the Management Server. I have bashed my head against this several times now, so I thought I’d make a precise blog post to cover the steps required!
I’m currently testing an Exchange 2010 server for the organisation prior to a migration project, specifically testing moving mailboxes backwards and forwards. Something that confused me slightly for a few minutes was this: if there is an existing Move Request (pending, in progress, failed or completed) you will not see the “New Local Move Request” or “New Remote Move Request” -
Fortunately this is very simple to counter – simply clear the old “Move Request” and the options will be back in the Mailbox options:
Shhhh, don’t tell the spam-bots, but after a blissful month of having broken the comments system and not having enough time to fix it, I’ve finally got round to doing it! Comments will now work without errors - and the spam-bots should have a hard time getting past reCaptcha too!
At some point I’ll update to 1.6.1, but for now, I’m glad it’s working again!
If you have a Windows Server 2008 box in a workgroup that you require access to one of the admin shares, it can be a little more complicated than with Server 2003. In my case, we had a SQL server on the back end which was trying to access the web server in the DMZ using PSExec.exe to remotely run a process. Executing PSExec and passing the correct credentials failed with “Access is Denied”.
I rebuilt an ESX host in my HA/DRS cluster today, following my build procedure to configure as per VMware best practices and internal guidelines. When the host was fully configured and up-to-date, I added it to the cluster and enabled HA and DRS. Then I went to generate some DRS recommendations to balance the load an ease off my overstretched host, but no recommendations were made.
I couldn’t manually migrate any VMs either – it was odd, because both hosts were added into the cluster, and could ping and vmkping each other from the console.
This was a bit of an odd one. I was adding a Gateway Server to a newly rebuilt SCOM 2007 R2 Root Management Server when I kept encountering this error:
The certificate specified in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Operations Manager\3.0\Machine Settings cannot be used for authentication. The error is The credentials supplied to the package were not recognized(0x8009030D).
I followed the Microsoft install and setup guides exactly, and it’s not my first time either – but I’d never seen that one before.
We run to monitoring systems where I work, the first is HP SIM and the second is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Currently, they and their databases all reside on a single rather battered server, “MONITOR1”.
I’ve installed a new SQL Server 2008 server “SQL1” on Windows Server 2008 to take some of the load, and take advantage of the 64-bit OS and SQL installation.
If you install Reporting Services on Windows Server 2008 (RTM or R2) and attempt to verify the installation by opening the http://SERVER/ReportServer
site, you may well see the following message:
The permissions granted to user ‘MCGEOWN\Sam.McGeown’ are insufficient for
performing this operation. (rsAccessDenied) Get Online Help
SQL Server Reporting Services
Additionally, you may be able to access the http://SERVER/Reports
site, but will have no permissions:
