In this guide I’ll show a ‘working’ method to upgrade from MySQL Server 5.1 to 5.5 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. In this case MySQL Server 5.1 was installed by the Microsoft Web Platform Installer some time ago, however this version doesn’t deliver very good performance (and its horribly outdated!) so it was time to get it replaced. The… Read more
Category: Servers
Servers power many organisations and are even making their way into homes (even if it is a simple NAS box). With more RAM then you could even imagine (I have to admit I’m a RAM addict) and processors that make the latest and greatest gaming PC look minuscule in comparison it is these mighty machines that make the world go round.
Server Room – The latest
Work is coming along nicely with the Server Room, we’ve now removed the last Cisco switch from our infrastructure and the HP 5400R series switch is deployed replacing the 2530 that was in its place; over time we’ll be bringing more fibre from our edge switches into this room as well hence the number of SFP+ ports on the 5400R…. Read more
5 fun applications to think about when deploying Smart Cards
Looking for some fun ways to get more out of your your Smart Card deployment? If so have you tried……? Use Smart Cards to login to your Servers via Remote Desktop Use Smart Cards with the PowerShell Get-Credential Commandlet Use Smart Cards with your Firewall for single sign on Use Smart Cards to login to IIS Web Applications (just a box… Read more
Powershell Function to prevent a script from continuing if a Domain Controller is offline
One of those monthly jobs that every SysAdmin will come across is good old Patch Tuesday; to help make Patch Tuesday a little more fun after all of the servers have been updated I use Hyper-V Replica (run by a PowerShell script) to shutdown each Virtual Machine and move it onto another host (ticks the box for the machine reboot… Read more
MDT does not apply WSUS updates
A silly gotcha more than anything else…. after recently updating my WSUS server to use SSL (to allow publishing through the firewall) I noticed my clients that were deployed with MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) were not installing updates as part of the Task Sequence; indeed the message log at the end indicated that the updates could not be downloaded as… Read more
Hyper-V Replica Reverse Replication with Certificate Authentication ‘Hyper-V failed to establish a connection with the Replica server ‘‘ on port ‘443’. Error: The connection with the server was terminated abnormally (0x00002EFE).’
While working on my most recent Hyper-V Replica PowerShell script when attempting to reverse replication from a source Hyper-V host to the a target host using Certificate authentication I was getting the error message… Hyper-V failed to establish a connection with the Replica server ‘<target hostname>’ on port ‘443’. Error: The connection with the server was terminated abnormally (0x00002EFE). As it… Read more
Dell T430 Castors – what do they look like?
Having recently purchased a Dell T430 tower server which we will be using for backup and Hyper-V replica I thought I’d share some photos of what the castors (an option in place of either the rack mounting kit or the floor stand feet) look like! The castor assembly comes in a separate box to the server and only takes a… Read more
Tweaks to make the PRTG WMI Memory Sensor results more helpful
The screenshot above shows a portion of the sensor in its default form; in this post I’m going to show how to… Remove the red ‘downtime’ line from the bottom of the chart Set maximum and minimum values of the graph to display 0 to 100% Set the gauge to display its value in GByte instead of MByte Red Downtime… Read more
Server Room Progress – Photos
With the front to back patch panel installed and T430s rack mounted the server room is coming along quite nicely. Next up will be a tidy up of the cables at the back of the rack bringing all of the power cables to one side and the network cables to the other. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks!
Rack Mounting a Dell PowerEdge T430 – where do I put the rails in relation to the 5U of space?
As part of an ongoing project to improve the room today we’ve been installing a set of rails for a pair of Dell PowerEdge T430 servers. You may have noticed the ‘T’ in the T430 to indicate they are tower servers but Dell provides a 5U rack conversion kit which is pretty easy to install. One small question came up… Read more