Category Archives: Windows SBS2008

Windows Update | Restart Prompt

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“RESTART YOUR COMPUTER TO FINISH INSTALLING IMPORTANT UPDATES”

windows_update_restart_reminder

My life would be so much simpler if this prompt didn’t keep showing.

Yes we know Windows has updated…
Yes we know if needs a reboot…
No we can’t do it in the middle of the day… So don’t ask me again in 4hours time or infact ever (until I have rebooted), especially when it’s on a TS / RDS with multiple domain users connecting.

Although I do enjoy (sarcasm) having another email whinging about why the server is prompting for a reboot, when in fact, the update has already been applied. (Yes I do understand this is there for a reason, but sometimes it just isn’t practical to restart servers every-time, every-day of the week, this is what a reboot schedule is for!)
OK. RANT OVER…
I’m not sure why you can’t fully disable this, Microsoft’s way of ensuring you do actually reboot, however there are a few workarounds I’ve listed to help rid of that pesky message.

Temporary Method using CMD:

sc stop wuauserv

GPO Method (gpedit.msc):

Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update / and disable Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations.

Regedit:

This will allow you to set the 1440min “Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations” to more that 1440min.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc708449%28WS.10%29.aspx

Show Host Name via VBS (ShowHost.vbs)

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Simple script to show host name of the local machine in a popup window add code to “ShowHost.vbs”

Dim Shell
Dim CompName
Set Shell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
CompName = Shell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%COMPUTERNAME%")
Msgbox "Your Computer name is " & CompName
VBS_ShowHost

WBAdmin | Daily Backup and Restore via Schedule

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I’ve been working with the windows backup. One downside of this in Windows 2008 is that you can’t schedule a routine backup job to a network device. A work around is use a scheduled task and the WBAdmin tool.

Scheduled Task: (Create a scheduled task and us the following switches)

WBAdmin-scheduled-task 
wbadmin start backup -backuptarget:\\server\backup$\ -vssFull -allCritical -quiet

This command will backup the entire drive including a system image. I don’t think the “allcritical” will work if you then specify items to exclude.

Show Backups Running:

Wbadmin get status

Full list of switches: cc742083

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HP Proliant Server (Safemode / DSRM)

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After a bad day with a Windows Server 2003 AD failure I had to do a system state restore using Directory Services Restore Mode (DSRM)

How hard could it be?? F8 in the BIOS before the Windows start right? Wrong!

This was on a HP Proliant ML310 G5 with multiple RAID & ILO devices using F8 as their configuration options, therefore every-time I pressed F8 (trying not to miss my window) I’d simply keep going into these config screens.

The Fix:

Wait until the initial RAID & ILO has loaded and processed to the next item then keep pressing “F5”

Yes F5 not F8!

SBS08 | Disk Space / Exchange / “Back Pressure” Thought Process & Resolution

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It all started off with this problem, after being all scatty and trying to get my head around the issue I thought I’d need to document this, hopefully to give a better sequence of debugging the issue rather than the mad chicken running round with no head!…

Problem:

  • Internal Email all working
  • External Email outbound all working
  • No Inbound Email but no NDR from recipients.

Checks:

  1. MX Lookup mxtoolbox.com: Confirm where the mail goes to?
  2. SMTP check mxtoolbox.com: Confirm the status of the server?
  3. Telnet: CMD -> “telnet tothedomain.com 25” Also another method to provide some different information and confirm if this server is answering requests for the inbound email…
  4. Server check Disk Space: This is one of the most likely causes I have seen with server problems causing a raft of issues. But was thrown by 4GB free (Assuming this would be enough)
  5. Check Event Viewer: Ahh… the log of knowledge! well not quite if it doesn’t show anything obvious… At first glance this didn’t hi-light any problems but looking further I was given this to work with: “Exchange Server 2007 Transport: 452 4.3.1 Insufficient system resources”
  6. Google check: With something to go on I can do a little bit of Googling. To be fair I’m sure that’s what we all do for a new problem!
  7. Cause Identified: http://exchangepedia.com/2007/03/exchange-server-2007-transport-452-4-3-1-insufficient-system-resources.html

Cause:

  • The “Back Pressure” feature has kicked in and is not accepting requests.
  • The problem is the 4GB DISK SPACE!!

Solution:

  1. Free Disk Space: The link above shows the tweaks and how to turn off “Back Pressure” but this can be avoided by simple cleaning up the disk space on C:\ and restarting the “Exchange Transport” service.
  2. Where is Disk Spaced used? Download Jamsoft Treesize, to show what space on c:\ has been consumed.
  3. How can I free up disk space on Windows Small Business Server 2008? – Being new to SBS as I usually work with Server 2008 STD/ENT I needed to confirm what can be cleaned up. Cleanup: IIS log files seem to waste a lot of disk space. The following script taken from: sbsfaq.com will clean them up.

@echo off
rem Script to clean up disk space on SBS 2008 servers
rem Downloaded from SBSfaq.com
rem V1.0 – March 28th, 2010

rem Certificate Services Logs
net stop “Active Directory Certificate Services”

del c:\windows\system32\certlog\*.log
del c:\windows\system32\certlog\*.chk
del c:\windows\system32\certlof\*.jrs
net start “Active Directory Certificate Services”

rem IIS Log Files
Del C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\*.log /f /s

Fix:

Once the disk space issue was addressed we could then restart the “Exchange Transport” service. This then kicked Exchange back into life, although it didn’t comeback up instantly! And the service was restarted a few times for it to register (not sure the reason for this)

Although this has resolved the problem for now, we will need to move the Exchange DB off the C:\ (not sure why there in the first place) so this doesn’t become an issue again…

Move the Exchange Server Data

Links which helped (Thank you)