Month: June 2008

I’m a believer in using WSUS to deploy updates to servers on a scheduled basis.  I know from experience that updates don’t get installed on medium to large farms if you rely on manual intervention.

There’s a problem though; if you run something like System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor your servers then it’s going to throw a wobbly when servers get updated.  The answer is to use maintenance windows by enabling maintenance mode on the servers you are updating.  But who is going to put the servers in maintenance mode?

The answer is to run a script that does it for you according to a schedule.  Here’s what I’m going to try to do:

• A CSV will detail day, time and server FWQN, i.e. when a monitored server is to be put in maintenance mode.
• A script will run every minute on the SCOM server.  It will parse the script and and server that’s due to be but in maintenance mode in the next minute will trigger a command.
• The script will us AgentMM to put the server in maintenance mode.
• This window will coincide with the schedule applied to the server for updating.

If you have a simpler network then this might be a simpler process.  For me, I have servers with varying times that are suitable for updates so I have to be very flexible.

I’ll post the script when I have it tested and validated.

EDIT: I’ve added a link to my script.

WSUS SP1 was recently deployed via WSUS.  To install this update I had to do some of the <NEXT>, <NEXT> thing that you’re probably familiar with from when you deployed IE7 via WSUS.

There is a warning from MS that you should install and update on your W2003 servers first.  If you don’t, your WSUS server might continually download updates.

Microsoft has released a patch for the Custom Updates Publishing Tool so that you can publish custom updates in SMS 2003 R2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. 

"The Custom Updates Publishing Tool in SMS 2003 R2 and the Patchinstall in Systems Management Server 2003 SP3 clients do not support update packages for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, which are in Microsoft Update Standalone Package (.msu) format. Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 updates obtained from Microsoft Product Support or the Microsoft Download Center cannot be authored and published using the Custom Updates Publishing Tool.

To resolve this problem this hotfix will update the publishingtool.dll (in the Custom Updates Publishing Tool) and the patchinstall.dll (in the SMS 2003 SP3 client) to provide support for update packages which are in .msu format".

It’s a pain in the backside but sometimes you’ve got to make FTP available for file transfers.  This usually means some sort of authentication is required.  Here’s the problem: this means usernames and passwords are communicated unencrypted across the Internet.

The solution when using IIS7 is to enable FTPS aka SSL FTP.  You might think of it as secure FTP.  I went looking this up and spent ages looking for a solution and nothing was doing.  If you check out FTP in the RTM release of W2008 you will see IIS6 backwards compatibility is required for FTP.  Yuck!  That means you need two consoles, the IIS7 one and the IIS6 one.

Hold on; MS did not leave us in the lurch.  Confusingly (just like with Hyper-V), there is an update to IIS7 that will include native FTP functionality.  It’s called "FTP Publishing Service for IIS7" or "FTP7" and you can get it from here:

• X86
• X64

There is also some online documentation. 

This package adds FTP capabilities to your IIS7 server.  It does not create a default FTP site but that’s easy to do.  The docs are very clear and do it all step-by-step.

Now you can create an FTP site, associate a cert with it and require SSL access.  This gives you your FTPS service.  Now all you need to do is distribute FTPS clients and you’re sorted.  The documentation shows you how to do this with a self-signed certificate.

Thanks folks!  I never thought I’d even get to 1,000 when I started this thing off.

EDIT:

Heck!  The site is closing in on 2,000 this week.

It looks like the release candidate program for SQL 2008 will duplicate that of W2008.  RC0 has just been released.

"SQL Server 2008 provides a comprehensive data platform that is secure, reliable, manageable, and scalable for your mission critical applications. With it, developers can create new applications that can store and consume any type of data on any device, enabling your users to make informed decisions with relevant insights.

SQL Server 2008 RC0 will automatically expire after 180 days".

I keep finding funnies with the HP Insight Manager agents.  I deployed a HP DL380 G5 server on Friday but a funny appeared on Saturday that I’ve not been able to diagnose.  SNMP availability keeps appearing with a warning in the Health view for the server with no associated alert.  I found a warning in Event Viewer related to a HP iSCSI agent and I though it was that.  I disabled it and the alert returned an hour later.  Armed with some time stamps I trawled through the server.  The HP logs showed a healthy server.

However the Operations Manager log for the agent showed the health scripts weren’t able to pull the performance metrics from the HP (Broadcom) NC multifunction NIC driver.  The time stamp matches the health status change.

The only thing I can think of to resolve it is to upgrade the driver.  The server in question is located remotely so I’ll not be able to do the upgrade until I am onsite.  The latest PSP (8.0) seems to include an older driver.  I’d upgraded the agents to 8.1 to resolve other issues so I guess there might be a problem with the older NIC driver?

Jeez, I wish HP’s developers would do a better job.  There’s this, the raft of SIM errors I’ve encountered a few weeks ago and the scandal with the Intel drivers on AMD computers that screwed up Windows Service Packs recently.   Is HP quality control is slipping?