For some reason a fairly important server won’t install Windows 2008 SP2 or any other updates, I’ve followed the errors in the event log and come across this excellent how-to to fix the issue: http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/408
Exchange 2010 Failure
Bugger!
It seems that after I’ve finally built a redundant Exchange 2010 cluster with DAG that I needed a reboot on one of the servers (due to some other reconfiguration) – unfortunately I had forgotten the server hadn’t been rebooted since before AVG Business Edition was installed, oops, this appears to interfere with the WinRM service which just wouldn’t work, this meant I couldn’t use anything powered by powershell through the IIS – in other words I had no Exchange Management Console (EMC) or shell commands. The problem wasn’t so much emails as the DAG implementation ensured my other server took care of that with the passive database copy becoming active at the server fail, it was my primary public folder database which had the most problems, it just wouldn’t mount, so a quick scheduled reboot (during the lunch hour) and within 20 minutes (after 2 1/2 hours diagnosis and testing) I had the public folders back, this was also partially affected by the Replication service on the healthy server being stuck in a “stopping” state, I had to kill the process in task manager to fix this and manually start it.
So, what have I learnt today?
Exchange works, now leave it alone!
P.S
somewhere along the line this reboot etc enabled SSL on the pop3 service, this affected a few of our remote users, but I managed to fix that quickly enough once I knew the issue!
Exchange 2010 SP2
Microsoft have just released Exchange 2010 SP2 – a little over a month since I built both the new email servers on SP1 – how annoying is that! – anyway, after reading the new features list provided here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/05/redmond_exchange_2010_sp2/ I am not too fussed, and will not be planning an upgrade anytime soon, maybe 6-12 months time I think…
Cent-OS Vs. Ubuntu
This is a preview into some thoughts I have regarding a full article on this subject currently I am using a number of Linux systems for various things such as web servers, email servers, network monitoring, firewall etc. I cannot really decide which Linux distro I prefer as I’m using 2x Ubuntu (Natty and Oneirc) and 3/4 Centos (5 and 6) – I find these are the best freebies but I cannot decide whether one is better than the other… time to do some testing
UPDATE:
OK so I have to say that traditionally Ubuntu was my OS of choice; quick and easy to install, great package management and lots of good tools in the repositories…however, I have to say Cent-OS 5.7 and 6 are very powerful OSes. yum is a little fiddlier that aptitude but is just as effective and the overall feel of Cent-OS is that it is more stable and enterprise ready. I’m sure I will have more experiences as the months go on and I will post updates here…
New Blog – Again!
Hi,
Welcome to my new blog, this one is intended to give an insight into the daily life of an IT Infrastructure Manager’s role within a small/medium software company. Having just been promoted to Infrastructure Manager at Beoley Mill Software Ltd. I thought it was my time to give back to the community of bloggers out there who’s content I rely on in my daily job to help troubleshoot issues and develop solutions customised to my company’s needs.
I hope that you find the content here useful and I urge you to link back to my site when you do.
Many thanks for visiting.
Jonathan
Flushing DNS on Mac OSX
I primarily work with web servers, and I use lookupd -flushcache all of the time to clear my DNS cache.
This morning was moving some websites around using my newly-upgraded Mac, and I went to flush my DNS cache with lookupd and I got a command not found error. It seems that lookupd has been removed in 10.5 and replaced with dscacheutil.
So now I can flush my DNS cache with dscacheutil -flushcache