The IT Crownd

Currently the implementation of our Exchange 2010 SP1 installation is holding my time from Blogging about stuff. I am still active and hopefully will have some things to write about...VDI and FusionIO come to mind..:) Or even the install of CU5 for Ops Manager...just gotta get the time... Oh and if you read these pages please comment it would be good to get your views on things too.

Ok so we've been running this little test environment (see previous post) for about two weeks (almost out of the trial license (15days!)) To recap we have a SCOM environment consisting of an SQL server, a RMS server and a MS server, so a pretty simple set up infact I only have an MS server as it is advised to not have users connecting to the web console on the RMS. Also will post something about getting Kerberos working in this environment as it does - since R2 anyways so you do not need to have the web console running on the RMS - and if you have the excellent SaVision LivesMaps (which we do) then you can use the same kerberos technique to get SSO working on that too - despite what the SaVision instructions say! We also have a software Serial-over-Ethernet solution to provide connection to the SMS modem which is in a location with a signal :) this has a second benefit of failing over if the RMS is taken out for some reason. So here's how we do it: I found the most su...

We've had Operations Manager here at work for some time now.  We like it.  Warts and all.  One thing we did think of was how do we get notified that email is down.  There is a solution to this, SMS! So we purchased a nice SMS device and Ops Manager gladly informed us that we had issues via the wonders of text messages.  Hoorah!  You cannot escape!!! mwwhahaha! This was all good until we moved office.  Lovely as this office is we found that our Blackberries weren't picking up emails as often as they used to.  This office had no signal!  This was compounded by the location of the server room.  This meant that no Ops Manager alerts got through.  We only found this out when something went wrong (isn't that always the case?) Ok so we looked into either 1. Moving the RMS server as the modem HAS to be connected to the RMS. 2. Not having SMS messaging alerts (my boss wasn't keen) 3. Figuring something else out. Yes you gu...

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 ...