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

PRTG Push Notifications to Microsoft Band 2 from Windows Phone

Its been a day or so since buying a Microsoft Band 2 (took a while to find a high street shop that had one to try on in the first place!) and its proving rather useful to me as a person who rarely has his phone turned on loud and really never notices the little vibrations from it. My most… Read more

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

Automated Change Detection and Reporting – Network Switches

Following from Automated backup for your network switches with WinSCP and PowerShell you can take things one step further and with a little more PowerShell its possible to get email reports on any changes between switch configs. This kind of setup would be useful for any sized organisation who have a need to ensure changes are logged or want to ensure that no… Read more

Automated backup for your network switches with WinSCP and PowerShell

Although it may not be the most glamorous side of IT every sysadmin will appreciate the value of a rock solid backup system. All too often though these systems do not extend down to the ’embedded’ systems like network switches and firewalls. However with a little WinSCP (and its fantastic .NET assembly automation package) and PowerShell combined its pretty easy… Read more

Dell T430 Hyper-V Host Looses Network Connectivity (or more precisely the Broadcom NetXtreme Network Adapter does)

Have been having a bit of an interesting issue over the past few weeks whereby our Hyper-V Hosts (Dell T430 Tower Servers) would loose network connectivity at seemingly random intervals; the only resolution was to restart the server or to remove and replace the network cable. After much investigation looking at the servers and associated network switch we discovered that… Read more