The IT Crownd

Recently an odd thing happened on the way to The Forum.  We are still trying to figure out why these things happened however the upshot was that we lost connectivity to our OCS server. The trouble with OCS is that it is one of those technologies which is quite involved yet once put in properly it also just works.  This has the double nightmare of when things go wrong they are normally something you have seen before but can't remember and also require you to relearn all that you forgot - remembering the best way of learning is making mistakes....so yes you do all the same mistakes again. Well that's what happens if you don't write things down.  So I am. First thing I did was reboot the box as to my knowledge nothing had changed.  Can you see where this is going? Red Herring:   Still no joy so I checked the services for OCS and they wouldn't start, the event log showed that our evaluation license for OCS Enterprise has expired.  Great.  So...

<RANT ON> VMWare documentation is pretty poor at the best of times (see the replacing the self signed certificate documentation for confirmation) and registering a simple plug in is also one of them. There is pretty much no "easy" way of doing this.  However the documents do not really tell you this. <RANT OFF> Google to the rescue and a rather naff looking but effective application by the name of... Plugin Wizard for vSphere vCenter let the naffness begin!  From http://www.virtualizeplanet.com/ . Rubbish interface (tab groups anyone?) and unwieldy name aside this was the ONLY application/script/cmdlet that I could find (in a days browsing) that actually did what it should...or more to the point what I needed. The first "Step" is to make an xml file describing your plugin to vSphere, I didn't use this application to do this as this is pretty easy and notepad is miles better...however "step 2" is something which none of the other w...

Some pretty decent blogs out there on this subject so not really much to add other than you need to be pretty patient when waiting for discovery to happen (or restart the health service) One thing I will say though is that to get things fully working I needed to install CU4 - I haven't deployed the agent as have read that this can cause reboots and hangs.  Also I removed an older version of the management pack and installed the new one rather then do an upgrade. Initial opinion is the pack is really comprehensive and if the correlation engine does what it says it does this will be an impressive addition to the SCOM *killer app* list.

Sounded like a bit of fun.  Tussling with SSRS has always been a bit of a tiresome hunt around google finding caveat here, note there and undocumented feature after undocumented feature.  So I thought I'd put somewhere what I have found. Firstly and this one is a biggy: SSRS R2 DOES NOT WORK WITH SharePoint 2007 This is really strange (or at least counter-intuitive) as we have SQL 2008 R2 so downloaded to accompanying SSRS R2.  A few fruitless hours later... As SSRS R2 is for SharePoint 2010, instead of fixing SSRS R2 to work with SharePoint 2007 they fixed SSRS SP2 to work with SQL 2008 R2.  This is shown in one section of the "fix-list" in SSRS SP2.  Thanks. Anyways, here is another gotcha: If you have a multi-server environment (who doesn't?) then you need SSRS on each server...sounds ok, except the install doesn't care or ask about this so goes ahead and not only installs the binaries but activate the feature too.  This causes all many of ...

Yes I copied the annoying spelling error.  Anyways this is to do with the other wise superb AD management pack for Operations Manager 2007. You may get the warning alert on a DC (as I did) saying that the AD Op Master Roles monitor has failed.  This is my case resulted in the afore mentioned, AD Op Master Respone monitor to be set as warning within the health explorer of my DC. Upon a quick investigation it turns out the OomADs.msi hadn't been installed, yes this happens more often than not!  A quick check of the HelperObject folder within C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\ showed no sign of the OomADs.msi at all.  I copied this from a working DC and ran it. No reboot but a restart of the System Center Manager service and you are back and running.  You don't even need to clear the health status of the affected DC.  Now things are green across the board!

There are quite a few web pages out there detailing how to get Office 2010 to stream using Citrix Profiler.  I know.  I think I found most of them :) However try as I might I couldn't get Office to consistently work from a streamed profile.  Until I just installed the thing throwing all config and extra installs out.  It just works.  I ran the setup.exe from the profiler and didn't run anything.  I have a KMS server issusing out Office licenses and now my streamed Office 2010 is activated and working. *phew* Edit: One thing I didn't mention was that this was all completed on a bare Windows 7 machine, absolutely nothing was installed - bar the Citrix Profiler. Edit: Also I had to run the installer on a second Windows 7 machine, again clean but this time 64Bit so that I could stream the resulting profile from the XenApp Server if needed.

Morning, I am currently looking into getting AppV working on our XenApp 6 farm.  We use both Citrix and XenApp to deliver applications to our users, this works brilliant for our Windows desktops and laptops however this fails to deliver the same seamless experience for those users without the required client software. This user base of non-Microsoft clients is increasing and the demand for accessing applications irrelevant of which device a user has is also increasing.  So trying to "cut them off at the pass" I'm loking at providing all applications on a platform agnostic delivery mechanism.  XenApp. Sounds pretty simple when I first looked into this, however, as with most things it turns out that it is not.  First I had to get my NetScaler working, weirdly this broke when I put on the SharePoint AppWizard template.  Once working my BB Torch showed my XenApp delivered applications just fine thank you. I followed various websites on delivering AppV appl...