Free PowerShell event: 24th March

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I’ve been working with Andrew Westgarth, who runs the VBUG Newcastle events, to try to provide IT Pro (i.e. sys admin) content as well as their traditional developer events. The idea is that we’ll run free developer and IT Pro events alternate months on the Newcastle University campus.

The first of the IT Pro events will be held on the 24th March in Claremont Tower and I will be presenting “Windows PowerShell: 0-60 in One Evening”. The presentation will highlight a number of free tools to help you get up to speed quickly with PowerShell.

All the details are on the VBUG site at:
http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/March-2009/VBUG-NEWCASTLE-Windows-PowerShell-060-in-One-Evening-with-Jonathan-Noble.aspx

If you’d like to come along, please book your free place (just so we don’t run short of refreshments).

Which Operating Systems are we using at Newcastle?

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I thought it would be interesting to see where things stand with Operating System usage in the Active Directory. These figures are based on 10984 active computer objects.

Windows Clients: 10398

Windows Clients

Windows Vista: 472
Windows XP: 9894
Windows 2000: 32

Windows Server: 392

Windows Server

Windows Server 2008: 65
Windows Server 2003: 323
Windows Server 2000: 4

Other: 192

Other

Windows 7 Ultimate: 9
No Operating System: 125
Mac OS X: 43
Samba: 17

Generate a list of Windows startup programs using the command line

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One of the first ports of call (at least for me) when troubleshooting performance issues on standalone PC’s is to have a look at the start-up programs using ‘msconfig.exe.’ While msconfig.exe is fine for IT Pros it’s not the most friendly of things for the average end user.

I was recently helping out a friend over IM and explaining the concepts and working out which entries to remove was taking a long time. I did some research and found this handy command.

wmic startup get caption,command,description > outputfile

Simply get the person at the other end to run this command and then they can send you the full list for you to inspect.

Forthcoming Events on Campus

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I will be preseting a brief introduction to Windows PowerShell at this month’s Super Mondays event in the Beehive (Old Library Building) on the 23rd at 18:00. These events are growing rapidly and well worth attending – the topics are usually diverse enough that there should be something of interest to everyone. See SuperMondays.org for the full line-up and the Upcoming link if you’re attending. I hope to see you there.

The postponed VBUG Newcastle developer event on “Parallel Programming in .NET (VS2010)” with Eric Nelson has now been rearranged for Tuesday 24th February at 18:30 in Claremont Tower room 118. Sign up at:
http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/February-2009/VBUG-NEWCASTLE-REARRANGED–Parallel-programming-in-NET-VS2010-with-Eric-Nels.aspx

Updated: Vista is so protective…

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A bit of a gotcha with using the Active Directory Users and Computers tool on Vista is that it (very sensibly) protects the objects you create from accidental deletion but (very annoyingly) doesn’t inform you that it’s done this. If you are using the AD Tools on Vista and you suddenly find that you can’t delete something you created, then check the Object tab on the object in question. If the “Protect Object from Accidental Deletion” box is checked as shown here within the red circle:

* You will need to select ‘View’ from the menu bar and then check ‘Advanced features’ first. *

Active Directory object

… you’ll need to uncheck it before you can delete or move it.

Updated: Installing Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT)

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Introduction:

Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) are an excellent set of tools for managing Windows Servers and Active Directory environments from a desktop machine.

Prerequisites

Windows Vista Business, Enterprise or Ultimate Editions
Windows Vista SP1
Administrator Account on local machine.

1. Browse to \\campus\software\ISS\Public\ActiveDirectoryTools\WinVistaAdminTools you can also download the tool from Microsoft [x86 or x64]

2. Choose either the x86 or x64 version.

3. Run the MSU File within the folder.

RSAT Install

4. When the install is complete you need to enable the RSAT Features. Go to Control Panel and select ‘Programs and Features’ > ‘Turn Windows Features on or off’

5. Select the features you want to install and click OK.

Features

6. There are a number of fixes required for the RSAT tools in order to reveal missing tabs and speed up the operation of the tool. Choose \\campus\software\ISS\Public\ActiveDirectoryTools\WinVistaAdminTools\32bit\fixes or \\campus\software\ISS\Public\ActiveDirectoryTools\WinVistaAdminTools\64bit\fixes as appropriate and run each of the hotfixes as applicable to your chosen installation of RSAT (32-bit or 64-bit). Inside the folder named ‘FixMissingRemoteInstallTab’ you need to run fix_rsatXX (x64 or x86) – this registers dlls. Note that you will need to run the fixes as an administrator.

9. The tools can then be found under ‘Administrative Tools’ in the Control Panel. You will need to right click and ‘Run as administrator’ if you are not logged on with your s-id.

.Net Developer Event Cancelled

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[UPDATE] This event has now been rearranged for Tuesday 24th February. Sign up at:
http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/February-2009/VBUG-NEWCASTLE-REARRANGED–Parallel-programming-in-NET-VS2010-with-Eric-Nels.aspx

Unfortunately, due to the weather causing flight cancellations, the VBUG Newcastle event on 3rd February, which was announced here: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/blogs/index.php/wit/2009/01/21/developer_event_parallel_programming_in_ has had to be cancelled.

The event will be rearranged for a later date which will be posted on this blog.

Monitoring SQL Server – in praise of MOM!

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We’re currently building an SQL 2008 server cluster which will use resilient SAN-attached storage. This will provide the University with a leading edge hosted SQL service on which to safely manage its databases as well as making available a whole host of new SQL 2008 Business Intelligence services. More news about that to follow in future blogs…

In order to decide upon the best RAID configuration for the new service (i.e. whether to configure the disks to get biggest capacity or best performance) I’ve had to gather some stats about the transactions per second (TPS) on the current (SQL 2000/2005) servers. To this end, I started monitoring with SQL Profiler in conjunction with Performance Monitor. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but let me tell you, it is something of a black art and unless I’m very much mistaken, it does come under the category of Rocket Science if only because it makes you want to hurl your computer at the moon! Fortunately, all was not lost – to my rescue came MOM: Microsoft Operations Manager. You can Google for MOM and get all sorts of info but, for a quick overview of what it is, this covers it really:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Center_Operations_Manager (and yes they changed the name from MOM to SCOM but we all still call it MOM out of habit…)

So, how did MOM help in this case? The MOM servers run by the Windows Infrastructure Team have (amongst a lot of other things!) a MOM SQL Management Pack installed which means that when they connect to SQL servers, they are able gather SQL specific data in addition to the other more generic monitoring of disks, memory, network connectivity, etc. So, MOM has been quietly monitoring TPS and storing the data into MOM reports for some time. All I had to do was request the report and hey presto! Here’s a couple of examples:-

This image shows a top-level report which gives a broad view of various SQL-specific data over the last quarter of 2008 for a range of performance data on one of the SQL servers:-

SQL report details

And then… you can drill into, for example, the Transactions per Second data and obtain a more detailed view….

SQL report details

A lot prettier (in so many ways!) than Perfmon and Profiler. These are just 2 basic reports but there is a wealth of other information that can be got from MOM, and not just for SQL – and not just in retrospect. MOM carries out service-specific monitoring for Exchange, IIS, Terminal Services, ISA… in fact all of the Windows Server services run by our team, keeping an eye on services – 24/7 – and alerting us to any problems or errors as soon as they arise.