Friday 21 February 2014

Not Enough Server Storage Is Available To Process This Command - Large File Copy Problem

At work we were trying to copy a huge file across the network from one server to another. It was around 30 or 40 gig if I remember correctly.

The file transfer kept failing part way through. The error was "not enough server storage is available to process this command".

Of course, that was completely bull, there was at least twice that amount of space free on the destination disk.

That copy was attempted using Windows Explorer. I next tried one of my favourite utilities, Microsoft's RoboCopy.

Again, the transfer conked out.

I looked around and heard that RichCopy could do the job. It's an internal Microsoft developed copying utility. It's very powerful despite using a gui. It features a really cheesy 90s-style splash screen too!

Anyway, it worked great and the copy was successful. I will definitely keep Rich Copy in my toolkit from now on.

Larger Icons RDS - Increase Text Size RDS

We run an RDS environment on Server 2008 R2, a not uncommon combination, at least for now.

One thing we've found is that it's not easy to change the font size in Windows. Right-click the desktop and the display properties are locked down.

They can be changed for individuals by editing the registry but it's a bit overkill for what you're trying to achieve.

In the end I found a great utility online that will allow you to run it while on RDS and change your font size bigger or smaller using a slider bar.

I learned about it from this thread on the Citrix forums: (the display settings can't be changed from a remote session).

The guy who posted it (Mark Prigg) said it was co-developed with Microsoft. You can download the tool directly here.

Saturday 15 February 2014

Check Website Availability From Multiple Locations

Our company web sites (all hosted externally on a Windows Server box) all went down the other day.

The first thing I wanted to check was that it was not an internet routing issue affecting some geographic regions but not others.

So I found this cool site (there are many others but this one is superb) that checks connectivity from multiple locations, giving you response times and other useful stats:

Monitor Website Uptime

Our site was down all over the world. But I was able to connect to the server itself. Very strange. I checked IIS and it was up and running with no issues whatsoever. Right about that time, the site availability came back. I checked the logs but there was nothing to note.

I'm still scratching my head about that one. I would think that the hosting company maybe went down but I was still able to remote in. Perhaps outgoing page loads were temporarily blocked/down? Who knows.....?


RDS Load Balancing Relative Weight

As with Citrix, you can set load balancing in RDS so that you can control roughly how many people are on each sever.

If each server had identical specifications then you would set the number on each to be identical.

If your RDS was installed long ago and all you want to do is change the relative weights, simply log into each server (using mstsc /admin), fire up Server Manager, go to RD Session Host Configuration, double click "Member of farm in RD Connection Broker" and you should see in the middle of the page the value for relative weight.

This page is handy, it explains the entire install of RDS, including the configuring of the weights.

Outlook - Automatically Delete Meeting Responses

Especially for those who organise a lot of meetings (e.g. personal assistants a.k.a. secretaries), they often receive a lot of notifications in their inbox when someone chooses to send confirmation back that they have accepted a meeting request.

You cannot unfortunately disable this in the first place but you can do something about them as soon as they hit your Inbox i.e. use a rule.

Here are some instructions on how to create a rule that will automatically delete these as soon as they hit the Inbox:

Create a Rule to Manage Meeting Responses (PDF)

You basically need to select the condition "uses the form name form" in Step 1, then choose the "Accept Meeting Request" form from "Application Forms". The PDF explains it with screenshots much better than I can with text alone!


Exchange 2003 Change Quota

That's right - where I work we are still in the Dark Ages and using Exchange 2003!

I guess basic email is pretty simple when you think about it, and I have no complaints about how it does that, still strong over a decade later. Even my last client used Exchange 2003 too.

I had a call from someone who couldn't send or receive emails. Naturally, they had hit their quota again. Previously, I had told people that the quota policy was uniform and couldn't be changed.

But then I discovered that you can actually override it on an individual basis. Simply log into the Exchange server and fire up the Exchange enabled Active Directory. Find the user, right click, properties. Go to the "Exchange General" tab, click the "Storage Limits" button and change it to whatever you want.

There is, however, a 2GB hard limit in Exchange 2003. In my case, the guy was already close to this. I gave him another 100 meg but told him he had to delete some email urgently and there would be nothing I could no for him if it happened again.

Other Tech Support Blogs

Occasionally, I find a similarly cool blog about problems (and their fixes) found while working in Tech Support/Desktop Support.

Here is one such I found the other day, check it out:

IT Stuff I Learned Today

It's written by a fellow sysadmin called Charles Stemaly. I don't think he writes as much as I do but he has been writing since 2012. Let's hope he gets back into the swing of things again.


How To Empty Recycle Bin Server 2008 R2

Our servers are always running out of space. We have alerts set up but they don't buy you much time to do something about it.

I use Space Sniffer to see what is taking up space on the server (folders and sub-folders) and the Recycle Bin itself had a couple of gig in it. So, how to empty it?

Unlike regular Windows, you can't just right-click and empty it.

There are a few ways to empty it but the easiest is to simply delete the contents of folder "c:\$Recycle.Bin"

Saturday 8 February 2014

Linux Unzip z01 z02 Files Extract

I recently downloaded a couple of files from the internet that were spanned zip file volumes. One had the extension .zip and the other .z01.

I right clicked these and clicked "extract" but Archive Manager couldn't work with them. I used the unzip command and the same happened - all I got were reports of errors with the zip file.

The first time I figured that the original zip might be corrupted for any number of reasons. But when this happened again, I knew it was no coincidence.

Pretty dumb that Linux can't handle these zips very easily but I do understand that zip is not a usual format for Linux.

Luckily, I found the solution here.

The last poster explained that if you have files such as coolapp.zip, coolapp.z01, coolapp.zo2 etc. then you can unzip them by typing into a Terminal window:

zip -F coolapp.zip --output newarchive.zip

This command will convert the individual volumes into a single volume called newarchive.zip. This itself can then be unzipped in the usual way.

How to Read Product Key XP - Portable

I had 100% legitimate cause at work recently to get the XP key from a machine. It was an OEM machine mounted in a server rack with no way to access the exterior sticker.

I wanted a portable program because I did not want to touch the registry. I really hate the Windows registry, the less I would be required to "touch" the system, the better.

I found a couple of good candidates. One of which was "Jelly Bean". However, I was dismayed to discover that the install wasn't portable at all, at least not for the free version anyway.

Instead, I found something better: winkeyfinder.

If you run the install, it will dump the contents into a folder. You need only the main program .exe file, however. You can get rid of the rest and then copy this single .exe to a usb stick or direct to the server and then run it from there.

It will display the XP key, product key and more. You can modify values with it. It even works for Vista and Windows 7.

As I mentioned, I had 100% legitimate cause to do this at work. Do not use this application for anything other than 100% legal, bona-fide reasons.

Configuration Reboot Mode Merge Immediate - Cisco Avaya

We have very old Cisco Avaya phones at work. I remember around 10 years ago when these things were considered state of the art but today they are pretty basic, albeit still better than the thousands of unbranded phone systems in use in small businesses around the world.

Despite it being quite basic by today's standards, there is still a lot you can do on the configuration side. I was using the configuration software called IP Office and had changed the config for an extension. I clicked the "Save" button and it asked me how I wanted to send the configuration.

The choices were:


  • Merge
  • Immediate
  • When Free
  • Timed
Now I could not remember which was the best option. "Immediate" sounds like the obvious one but I recall my colleague telling me that one option would reboot the server!

Basically, "Merge" works with most config changes and will merge your changes with the existing configuration.

"Immediate" will guaranteed the changes immediately by rebooting the server! This is only really needed for changes for which "Merge" alone would not be enough. Luckily, most simply changes can be under "Merge".

Cisco Avaya NoUser Display

We have a Cisco Avaya system at work. I was experimenting with some commands and accidentally logged myself out and got "NoUser" on the display screen.

The simple solution is to press the login button and then type in your extension. Then click "Next" and key in your code. There is probably a default one for your site such as "1234".

This will log you back in.

Incidentally, if you ever actually wanted to log off then *36 will achieve that for you.

HP Elitebook 2570p Touchpad Not Working - How To Enable - Orange Light Showing

I got a call from someone working from home. His touchpad had recently stopped working.

The keyboard and the nipple still worked. In fact, even the buttons directly adjacent to the touchpad were still working. Seeing as the buttons and the touchpad are normally a single unit, this surprised me and led me away from thinking it could be hardware related.

I was thinking about reinstalling the drivers when the user told me there was an orange light showing. So I quickly googled and discovered that this denotes that the touchpad has been disabled by the user.

Turns out that the touchpad can be enabled or disabled by double tapping in the top left hand corner. He must have accidentally done it. A couple more taps and it was enabled once more...

The winlogon notification subscriber termsrv is taking long time to handle RDS & Xenapp

Our RDS environment at work slowed to a crawl over a couple of days. Specifically, the logon and logoff times became extremely long, of the order of a minute or so.

There were some clues in the event logs, namely events with id 6005 and 6006 with the error message : "the winlogon notification subscriber termsrv is taking long time to handle rds -xenapp".

I pulled my hair out trying to figure it out. This is why I find supporting Windows systems (and especially RDS) to be extremely frustrating. You find yourself eliminating things one by one....

We eliminated a number of potential root causes such as problems with the AD, with group policy and more.

This affected all our RDS servers too which I just couldn't work out.

I spoke with one of our Infrastructure experts at work and even he couldn't work it out.

In the end, the problem resolved itself. To this day, I still have no idea why the problem came to be in the first place and how it went away, all on it's own.....

Disable Remote Registry - Is It Safe To Disable The Remote Registry In Services?

One of our servers was taking up a lot of resources i.e. memory.

One of the top entries was for svchost.exe which means one of the services.

Now you can trace the source by right clicking and one of the options (I forget which one!) takes you to the source service responsible. In this case it was Remote Registry.

Now what is Remote Registry? Services.msc tells you it is a service that allows you to connect to the registry from another machine. Disabling it just stops this remote connectivity.

Personally, I use this facility a lot. I find it much easier to fire up my own regedit and go to "connect to another computer" than to log directly into the server concerned.

Note that disabling this service will also prevent you connecting to event logs and services in the same way, even though the description doesn't say as much.

Unless you never work remotely in this way, I don't recommend disabling Remote Registry. But it certainly doesn't hurt at all to do so if you want to, for whatever reason.

Blackberry mds connector error 15000

blackberry mds connector error 15000 - I saw this error in Event Viewer on the box where BES is installed.

It looks kinda nasty but what could it be?

I looked it up and apparently it's no big deal. I actually forget what it means, I think it can occur with a number of things but basically it is nothing to worry about! :)

Sunday 2 February 2014

Webmin Install Ubuntu and Mint

I was recommended to install Webmin recently so I went ahead and did so. It's a system management tool that actually runs as an internal web site from your computer (or server if you want to think of it more appropriately that way). It's pretty good.

As it's a web tool, it means you needn't worry about differences from one system to another. You simply install it and it's dependencies and then go to https://localhost:10000 to see it. It also means that if your system has no GUI (like Ubuntu Server) then you can still install and then use it from another workstation by going to http://serveripaddress:10000.

I'm running Mint which is based on Ubuntu - the steps are the same for both. This page was especially handy for me so refer to it if you want, though the below should suffice.

Go to http://www.webmin.com/download.html and download the version for Ubuntu which is the Debian based package (.deb).

Once downloaded, open a Terminal window and change directory to the Downloads folder or wherever else you downloaded it to.

Still in the terminal window, type: sudo dpkg -i webmin_1.510-2_all.deb.

(this is the general method for installing any .deb package you have downloaded, think of the command as like "Debian package install")

You will see a partial installation. It couldn't go the full way because it was lacking some perl modules and other stuff.

Type: sudo apt-get install perl libnet-ssleay-perl openssl libauthen-pam-perl libpam-runtime libio-pty-perl apt-show-versions

This will install the other dependencies. We could have run this first, of course. But then we wouldn't see the cool messages tell you that you were missing these dependencies! :D

edit: I realise now I seem to have at some point gone to this site (http://archive.debian.net/uk/sarge/all/libmd5-perl/download) and downloaded and installed the Debian package: libmd5-perl_2.03-1_all.deb

Finally, finish off the installation. apt-get has some way of knowing to fix the previous installation. Type:

sudo apt-get -f install

That's it! Now you can navigate to http://localhost:10000 from the machine you're on or http://serveripaddress:10000 if you're using another machine on the network to access the web site. You'll need a password, just use your regular system password. As you'll see, it's a pretty nifty tool. I've put a screenshot below, click it to enlarge.

The main page of webmin, click to enlarge to full size

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