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.

Make no mistake I’m all for PRTG as my preferred Network Monitoring software so when I was asked to be featured in a case study I jumped at the chance.

That study is now live and can be seen here – http://www.paessler.com/company/casestudies/oxford_spires_uses_prtg

PRTG Case Study

Another similar article can also be seen here – http://www.networkingplus.co.uk/case-study-details?itemid=351

So you now have your WebDAV server setup and its time to get this out to your users. To help you along you feel free to edit the guides below to your particular requirements.

  Using Cloud - iOS (225.4 KiB, 4,346 hits)

  Using Cloud - Windows Phone (196.8 KiB, 4,137 hits)

  Using Cloud - Windows XP (157.4 KiB, 2,826 hits)

  Using Cloud - OSX (193.4 KiB, 2,751 hits)

  Using Cloud - Windows 7 (149.3 KiB, 4,017 hits)

  Using Cloud - Windows Vista (166.2 KiB, 2,834 hits)

  Using Cloud - Windows 8 (327.6 KiB, 2,060 hits)

  Using Cloud with iWorks - iOS (5.1 MiB, 1,836 hits)

For further reading take a look at the links below-

In the previous article in this series we looked at the topology needed to setup a WebDAV infrastructure.

I’ll assume that

  • You have a public DNS record which points to a IP address on your firewall which is in turn port forwarding 443 (HTTPS) to your IIS server (this also works through Web Application Proxys like the ones built into Smoothwall firewalls)
  • You have a internal DNS record which points to the network adapter on your IIS server
  • Your IIS server has your paid (and signed) SSL certificate imported

You will also need a few server roles installed on your IIS server (you can do this through Server Manager), these are

  • Web Server (IIS)
  • WebDAV Publishing
  • Basic Authentication
  • Request Filtering
  • HTTP Logging and Logging Tools
  • IIS Management Console (unless you feel like doing everything remotely)
Server setup

So now to the fun bit! Which is all in the screen shot sequence below…

Testing

So you now have your server setup with the basics…so its time to do some testing. The screen shot sequence below shows how to connect to the WebDAV share on a Windows 8 PC.

Things you really need to test include
  • Users only have permissions to access the folders you want them to
  • You can upload/download files up to the maxium size you defined earlier
  • That you can access the share from both inside and outside your network
Next time

In the next part you can get some example user guides that I have made for my own implementation as well as some links to further reading.

Every once in a while a magical bit of software comes along that makes life so very good; today that software is WebDAV and its been around so long that some people might have forgotten how good it is.

The premise goes
  • You have one or more internal Windows Server(s) which hosts users personal documents and shared drives
  • You would like your users to access these files on any device ranging from their home PC (running say Windows 7) to their personal mobile devices (iPad)
  • You would like your users to access these files both inside and outside the firewall
  • You would like your users to access these files natively (like a mapped drive) so they don’t have to muck around with web based applications
  • You would like your users to be able to use this service with as little configuration on their part as possible
  • All while maintaining a secure and auditable system
To accomplish this you will need a few things
  • A valid paid for SSL certificate (don’t ever think you can get away with a self signed one) – personally I use a GoDaddy wildcard certificate
  • A spare Internet Information Services (IIS) Server to host the WebDAV service on
  • Depending on how things go 20 minutes
Topology

The basic topology is your clients point their WebDAV client at a DNS address which is mapped against a IP address which is port forwarded through your firewall to your IIS server which then serves requests to your file servers (clients don’t get to talk to the file servers direct). Don’t forget to setup your internal DNS to point to the internal network adapter of your IIS server as well.

Next time

In the next article I’ll run through the setup of a WebDAV server.

sFlow - Top TalkersPRTG is by far my favoured tool for monitoring IT infrastructure. With its built in sensors you can check the PING time for a server, check that windows services are up and running or with a little tweaking monitor paper trays in a MFP (and so much more).

A recently discovered feature for me is the sFlow monitor. This tracks in near real time the flow of different types of data (e.g. SMTP/HTTP/FTP/DNS lookups) that flow through network infrastructure.

In my case the entire network is built on HP ProCurve layer 2/3 switches which makes for pretty easy setup.

To follow this guide you will need

  • The IP address of your PRTG server (in my case 172.16.8.27)
  • Admin access to your PRTG console and a ‘device’ setup for your switch
  • Admin access to your switches through Telnet/SSH (I use PuTTY to administer my switches through Telnet)
  • 5 minutes

So now that I have all of this extra info what am I to do with it? Well with the sFlow sensor setup you can…

  • See if your network infrastructure is experiencing bottlenecks…
  • …and if so where the bottleneck is and what kind of data is causing it (e.g. large file transfers)…
  • …and see what clients are causing it.

As some readers maybe aware I work in a Secondary School; part of working life at any school is the odd fire alarm/drill.

Looking up at my PRTG status monitor screens its quite easy to see at what time that drill happened.

Nothing more than a novelty but hey thought it was intresting to see 🙂

hpmsn141.dll has stopped workingAfter deploying a number of HP printers using the HP Universal Printing Driver PCL 6 (61.141.1.15198 for anyone who might be counting) I found that a number of users were getting the error message

hpmsn141.dll has stopped working

when trying to print, although they can click close program and the print goes through fine it is quite an annoyance.

Although more of a workaround I found that the fix in this situation was to turn off a feature called Printer Status Notification (described by HP at this link here). A short guide can be found in the screen shots below.

The large amount of printers are missing

For a few days I’ve found that printers that have been published in Active Directory (from our 2008 R2 printer server) were not appearing in the directory or find printers tabs (see above). With about 120 printers deployed and only 5 showing up there had to be something wrong.

As it turns out the Printer Service was starting before the Server service which was causing a whole load of Errors in event log with error Event 315, PrintService being logged.

The printer spooler failed to share printer <printer name> with shared resource name <printer share name> Error 2114. The printer cannot be used by others on the network.

The fix in this case was to restart the Server service (and if the printers do not appear for a few minutes in directory restart the Printer Spooler service as well).

The reasoning behind this is the server service was starting up after the printer spooler service; because of this the printer service was trying to share out the printers and couldn’t (because the server service needs to be running to do this). A simple reboot of the whole server wouldn’t fix this as the same could just happen again where the services start up in the wrong order.

More details can be seen in the screen shots below.

I’ve recently been testing our disaster recovery abilities particularly in restoring servers from the bare metal recovery feature of System Centre Data Protection Manager 2012.

When restoring one of our servers (that is a virtual machine) I was getting the error message below just before the drive data starts to copy over.

The system image restore failed.

Error details: Element not found. (0x80070490)

As it turns out this error message relates to the restore program not detecting the required number of hard drives attached to the VM that I am restoring the data to.

The fix is simple – assign the extra drives required. The slide show below goes into this in a little more detail.

On further thought I remembered that this particular VM was originally on a physical machine – hence the extra drive came from the tiny partition (usually 100-500MB depending on OS) that Windows creates when doing a first time install that’s used for bitlocker/bootloader stuff. Either way your server won’t work without it and neither will the restore.

One of the little niggles that you can get with Windows Server (2008 SP2 in my case) is a remote desktop connection will not let you use saved credentials to login remotely with the following error message.

Your credentials did not work
The server’s authentication policy does not allow connection requests using saved credentials. Please enter new credentials.

The fix to this can be found in local or group group policy settings by going to one of the two places

Server 2008 (and previous)
Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Terminal Services > Terminal Server > Security.

Server 2008 R2 (and onwards)
Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services Remote Desktop Session Host > Security.

Then set ‘Always prompt for password upon connection‘ to disabled. This will then allow you into your server using cached credentials.