:( I am almost computerless

I just sold my trusty Mac Pro I had since I landed in Canada almost 4 years ago. A week ago I sold my MacBook Pro 17" I bought three months ago. I only have one tiny Mac left. This is strangely odd for me.

Lame tip: Mass register / unregister DLLs under Windows

Register all DLLs in current folder:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Some Directory>for /f %a in ('dir /b *.dll') do regsvr32 %a

Unregister all:

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Windows Server 2008 with HyperV crashing

One incident is a co-incidence. Two is a pattern. For the second time I dealt with a strange situation that did not seem to adhere to any predictability other than the fact that it will happen. Sometime. A Windows 2008 Server Core and now a Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Server with Hyper-V and some virtual machines would run fine for days, then suddenly become unresponsive. The machine is up, Hyper-V VM's are inaccessible, console is locked up, can telnet to SMTP service but for the most part the system is dead. Only a hard reset helped. Until the next time.

The way I fixed the Server Core issue, and hopefully the R2 incident, is by configuring Hyper-V's network settings as follow:

  • Since my servers each had two NICs, I configured one for the host OS called LAN, and the other for Hyper-V's exclusive use.
  • The LAN interface is the one used to access the host itself.
  • The Hyper-V interface is used exclusively for each VM.
  • Ensure the "Allow management operating system to share this network adapter" setting is OFF.

    Virtual Network
    Virtual Network
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Determining which FSMO roles a DC owns

Everyone knows this most likely, but the fastest way to determine which FSMO roles a domain controller holds is by typing in:

C:\Users\administrator> netdom query fsmo
Schema master               server.domain.local
Domain naming master        server.domain.local
PDC                         server.domain.local
RID pool manager            server.domain.local
Infrastructure master       server.domain.local
The command completed successfully.

Exchange 2010 Fails Best Practices Analyzer due to Not Being Backed Up

I recently had an issue where a client's Microsoft Exchange 2010 server failed the best practices analyzer due to an "Database backup critical" error. I was confused at first since I had a fully functional wbadmin scripted backup that I could see backed up Exchange. Only after fiddling for a while did I discover the missing parameter I had to provide before exchange indicated a successful database backup and subsequently cleared out all the thousands of database log files it kept:

wbadmin start backup -backupTarget:\\1.2.3.4\backups -include:c: ^
   -user:msbackup -password:"password" -quiet -allCritical -vssFull -systemState

Without -systemState this never worked.