Windows

Sometimes it’s necessary to have two DNS servers that are authoritative for the same DNS namespace. This is the case if you use the same namespace for your web site and your internal Active Directory domain, e.g. terlisten-consulting.de. Or that you have created the zone terlisten-consulting.de in your Windows DNS to point specific hosts to internal IP addresses. The DNS servers at your ISP would be authoritative, and the domain controllers of your Active Directory would also be authoritative for the same domain. The response to a query depends on which DNS server you ask. So what would happen if you try to resolve www.terlisten-consulting.de, and the internal DNS has no record for it?

This is not a specific problem of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) OmniSwitches, but I’m affected by this behaviour and it’s really, really annoying. It’s not a problem with the switch, but with the device handling of Windows.

ALE delivers a micro USB-to-USB cable with each OmniSwtich 6860E. This cable is used to connect to the console port of the switch. Each time you connect the cable, Windows will discover a new USB-to-UART bridge and creates a new COM port. This happens each time you connect to a new switch or if you choose another USB port. Over time, you will see the number of COM ports increasing (COM 2, COM 3, COM 4, COM 5…).

As any other environment, my lab needs some maintenance from time to time. I use a Windows 2012 R2 VM with the Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) role to keep my Windows VMs up to date. Like many others, I was surprised by KB3148812 (Update enables ESD decryption provision in WSUS in Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2), which broke my WSUS. But the fix was easy: Uninstall KB3148812 and reboot the server. The WSUS product team published an artice about this known issue in their blog: Known Issues with KB3148812. In the meantime, Microsoft has published a new update, which supersedes KB3148812: KB3159706.

Last week, I was surprisingly booked by a customer who observed a problem in his network. Unfortunately, colleagues worked on this network some day before (moving servers, routers etc. to a new pair of HP 7509 new core switches).

It was quickly clear, that some of the clients have received the wrong DNS servers from the DHCP server. The environment is a bit unusual. The customer is running two Active Directory domains (root and sub domain) in a single layer 2 broadcast domain. This nothing unusual, but he is also running two DHCP servers in the same layer 2 broadcast domain. To get this working, the customer uses exclusion ranges and reservations. This guarantees, that the client receives the correct DHCP information.

Generating a certificate signing request (CSR) is the first step towards a signed certificate. The requests is generated with the applicants private key and consists of the public key, a name and optional attributes.

To generate a CSR, you can use tools like OpenSSL on a Linux box, or sometimes the application itself can generate a CSR. But if you have a Windows box, you don’t have OpenSSL by default. And it’s unhandy to install something just for a single CSR. You can use certreq.exe to create a CSR. This tool is mostly unknown, but it’s included since Server 2000. The syntax slightly differs between the version, so I focus on the version that is shipped with Server 2008/ Windows Vista and newer.

Some day ago, I installed a new Exchange 2013 CU11 for some test ins my lab. Nothing fancy, just a single server deployment on a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM. I deployed this Windows Server from a template, which was updated with the latest Windows Patches and WMF some days ago. The Exchange setup went smooth. I updated the SSL certificates and the internal and external URLs for the virtual directories. Then I started the Exchange Management Shell (EMS), to update the Autodiscover URL in the service connection point (SCP) of the Active Directory.

IPv6 is not really new. According to Google, 10% of all users that access Google, do this over an IPv6 connection (Source). My blog is also accessible over IPv6 since its start in January 2014 (and since January 2016 only over HTTPS - thanks to Let’s Encrypt!).

When I talk with customers about IPv6, I often hear things like “Oh, we had to disable it. Too much problems!” or “We had to disable it. With IPv6 enabled, we had connectivity problems.". Sometimes it went wrong. Especially in this cases, where IPv6 was only unbind from the network adapter. That’s the wrong way to “disable” IPv6.

Some days ago, I blogged about the new HP StoreOnce software release 3.13.0. This release included several fixes. One fix wasn’t mentioned by me, although it’s interesting.

• Fixed issue where Windows 2012 R2 built-in native backup was not supported with 3.12.x software (BZ 61232)

Windows Server Backup (WSB) is part of Windows Server since Windows Server 2008. WSB can create bare metal backups and recover those backups. The same applies to system state backups, file level backups, Hyper-V VMs, Exchange etc. Very handy for small environmens. Backup can be stored on disk or on a file share. With Server 2012, the file share must be SMB3 capable. So if it’s not a Windows file server, the NAS that offers the file share has to be SMB3 capable. This doesn’t apply to Windows Server 2008 (R2).

A customer of mine is currently refreshing his branch office server infrastructure. A part of this project is to demote the Active Directory Domain Controllers, that are currently running in each branch office. The customer has multiple branch offices and each branch office has an Active Directory Domain Controller which is acting as file-/ print- and DHCP server. Each branch office has its own Active Directory site. The Domain Controller and the used IP subnets are assigned to the corresponding AD site. Due to this configuration the clients at the branch office choose the site-local Domain Controller as logon server. This works totally flawless since a couple of years. Over the year bandwidth of site connection has increased and even small branch offices have a redundant MPLS connection to the HQ. And no one likes single domain AD forests with 20 or more Domain Controllers…

Sometimes you have to update the OS of your DataCore Storage Server, or the server is crashed and you have to reinstall it. In both cases, a configuration backup is the starting point. The procedure remains the same, regardless if it’s an update or a reinstall after a server crash:

• Install Windows Server OS
• Copy configuration backup file to C:\Program Files\DataCore\SANsymphony\Recovery
• Install DataCore SANsymphony-V

Take a backup

You can take the configuration backup on different ways: