APP-V Server install

Found a very helpful write-up on how to get app-v installed on a Server 2k8r2 box.

They tech net articles are a little convoluted, while all the information is there, you have to find about 10 articles to get things set up.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/how-to-install-and-configure-the-app-v-management-server.aspx

Also, one of the things that I had issues with was the fact that .net 4 was installed on the servers. Make sure to uninstall .net 4 framework before trying to install app-v, unless you like scratching your head.

Remember to reinstall .net 4 after though

Cheers!

Ports to be opened when using RD Web in a DMZ

 

Found this on MSDN’s blog. Has a good write-up on what ports need to be open in different scenarios.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2009/07/31/rd-gateway-deployment-in-a-perimeter-network-firewall-rules.aspx

Domain Controller Assessment

I really wish Microsoft would release a single product that would be able to assess the health of the overall domain controller.

Server 2008 does come with built in Best Practice Analyzers and they are very helpful.

This is really nice because you are able to click on anything that gives you a warning or error and open up the properties of that error.

As you can see, Microsoft even suggests how to fix the issue.

This is all fine and good and you can run these BPA on any of the roles you have installed, however, some times you run into a server that is so broken that these BPAs won’t run. That is when you have to use a basket full of commands. I have added in few that I use and just put them into a batch file that I can run on the servers.

Example:

mkdir c:\<Folder> dnscmd /info > c:\<Folder>\dnsinfo.txt dnscmd <SERVERNAME> /directorypartitioninfo DomainDnsZones.<DOMAIN> > c:\<Folder>\dnspartitioninfoDomain.txt dnscmd <SERVERNAME> /directorypartitioninfo forestDnsZones.<DOMAIN>> c:\<FOLDER>\dnspartitioninfoForest.txt repadmin /showreps > c:\<FOLDER>\replog.txt repadmin /replsum /errorsonly > c:\<FOLDER>\replogerror.txt route print > c:\<FOLDER>\routes.txt copy c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\* c:\<FOLDER>\

I grab the routes as well as all the files in the etc folder because I have run across issues before where someone had gone in and put static routes on the servers or static entries in the hosts file or protocols file that had me scratching my head for a few hours until I figured it out. It’s best to just grab these files and make sure they are clean.

I would like to know what other commands people use and why they use them, maybe we can get a super script that will take 2 seconds to run and generate a nice report with useful information.

EDIT: I left DCDIAG and NETDIAG.. not sure why.. I just did

Exporting a list of services from all machines in your domain

 

This can be done pretty quick with a power script, rather than going into each machine and opening up services and exporting manually.

Get-Service | Export-Csv -path "C:\services.csv"

Ranked Dimms?

 

So, today I was specing out a couple SQL servers, and I have not had to do any hardware specing in a few years, so things sure have changed when looking into the hardware components. One of the things that I was seeing on HPs site was Ranked Dimms. I found this website that explained what Ranked Dimms are, good read!

http://www.oempcworld.com/support/Whatis_4-Rank_DIMM_Memory.htm

Remote uninstall of SEP 11

 

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH105827&locale=en_USWhile Logged into an account that has domain admin rights, you can run this command after downloading psexec.exe from Microsoft.

psexec @c:\computers.txt MsiExec.exe /norestart /q/x{2EFCC193-D915-4CCB-9201-31773A27BC06} REMOVE=ALL

Where @c:\computers.txt is a txt file that I pulled from the AD computers OU and chopped it up in excel so that it lists all the computers, one line at a time.

Example:

XPPC001 XPPC002 XPPC003

{2EFCC193-D915-4CCB-9201-31773A27BC06} is the uninstall string from the local systems registry. This can be found by going to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH105827&locale=en_US

If there is a password set on the clients you can:

A) disable it from the SEP Manager

B) Edit the registry to zero out the password Value.

I will post how to do this soon.

Ever want to double check who has what FSMO roles quick?

 

I always seem to forget the stupid command to type to look at show what servers hold what FSMO roles. This can be nice when walking into a network that is having issues and there are multiple domain controllers. Knowing what domain controllers do what can help in your troubleshooting.

Open up a command prompt with enterprise admin privileges and run the following command.

Netdom query fsmo

You should see something to the effect of..