New Blog!

My new blog can be found here:

superautomation.blogspot.com

MC Cluster configuration backups failing in HP Data Protector

We've been having an issue backing up our Windows Failover clusters in HP Data Protector.

[Minor] From: VBDA@clienthostname "CONFIGURATION:"  Time: 17/07/2015 09:26:43
[81:141]   \ClusterDatabase
 Cannot export configuration object: ([5] Access is denied. ) => backup incomplete.

Many warnings are shown in the log then the above minor error during the Configuration object backup.

Cluster configuration backups were successful prior to changing the user account that the DP Inet service was running as from system to a specific backup user. We needed to do this so that we could back up SQL DBs as a specified user.

After watching a backup job fail, I noticed that Windows creates an "Export" folder on the Cluster Quorum drive in the cluster folder. The Export folder cannot be written to by the backup process since it's running as my backup user account which doesn't have permissions.

Running the following commands gave my backup user access to the folder and backups are now completing successfully. You'll need to download psexec from here

psexec.exe /i /s cmd.exe
CACLS Q:\Cluster /T /C /E /G DOMAIN\DPUser:F

Replace Q:\Cluster with the location of your cluster quorum drive. You may need to assign a drive letter in Failover Cluster Manager.

The psexec command starts a command prompt window running as the SYSTEM user which is the owner of the cluster Quorum files and therefore has permissions to alter the permissions of the cluster folder. The CACLS command gives full control of the folder to your Data Protector backup user.

Remember that you should not do anything with the files in the cluster folder since they are required for the cluster to run correctly. Adjusting the permissions like this will mean that your backup user is now able to make changes to core cluster files which could cause problems if not carefully managed.

Add a Hyper-V virtual machine into a cluster using powershell

Couldn't find anything explaining this online and had to go through the documentation!

To add a non clustered vm to your cluster and enable high availability from powershell, run the following command:

Add-ClusterVirtualMachineRole -VirtualMachine "vmname"

My VM was already created in the cluster shared volume on one of the cluster nodes.

Dell PS4000 Firmware Update Path

I have been trying to upgrade the firmware to v6 on our old PS4000 series equallogic array for some time now without much success. It seems I can't go from 4.3.8 to any version past 5.1.2.

I thought I would post the upgrade path which I found through trial and error.

4.3.8 > 5.0.7 > 5.2.5 > 6.0.1

"Could not connect to the requested VDP appliance."

vSphere 5.1 VDP connection problems:

I was getting this error when trying to get to the VDP configuration in the web client.

"Could not connect to the requested VDP appliance.
Would you like to be directed to the VDP configuration screen to troubleshoot the issue?"

After a long time redeploying appliances and changing every setting, I tried logging into the web client as the SYSTEM-DOMAIN\admin account and can now configure my backups. I'll come back once I've worked out what permissions were not available on my regular AD accounts and update this.

Update: VMware has posted a KB article to their site which may help. My issue still stands though and I still can't get my regular AD account to work. I can get other AD accounts working though so there must be another permission somwhere.

Here is the KB

vpx.fault.SecurityConfigFault when trying to replace center certificate

The problem is due to the certificate "Issued To" field not being the fqdn of the server. The fqdn being in the subject alternative is not enough. I guess this rules out wildcard certs too.

An addition to this, all vSphere 5.1 certs need a different subject name, you need 1 certificate for each of the following services:

SSO

Inventory Service

vCenter

Update Manager

Web Client

Log Browser

This blog is pretty complete about certificate replacement:

http://derek858.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/vmware-vcenter-51-installation-part-1.html

Intel Active Monitor

I've been cleaning up my Exchange Server 2003 VM... I found a service which was installed when it was a physical machine... Intel Active Monitor...

It won't uninstall from add/remove programs and makes the machine give the "service / driver failed to load" message at startup, so I've made it a mission to get rid of it!

the eventvwr message i get is:

"The SIODRV service failed to start due to the following error: 

The system cannot find the device specified. "

problem is I can't find which windows service that relates to... From reading around it appears to be the Intel Active Monitor....

First thing I thought was to try re-downloading the monitor, Installing, then UnInstalling. I got bored looking on the intel site so decided to dig a bit further...

The only Intel service on the machine is the Active monitor and that's disabled, so what next?

I found this bad boy! So, I deleted the following Key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SIODRV

this didn't remove the Intel Active Monitor service, but has sorted the problem!

edit: intel key is here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\imonNT

deleted this and intel active monitor is gone!!

In doing this i found this... I can now shut my exchange box down in less than 10 minutes!!! The script doesn't work, but if i manually stop the services the box shuts down MUCH quicker!

This article explains the shutdown issue much better...