Bhargav Shukla’s IT Playground

Passion for Technology. Power of Messaging.

Archive for category Windows Server

Enterprise Root CA Web Enrollment – RTFM, but what if I didn’t?

Mar 1

Posted by Bhargav in Windows Server

I was building Enterprise Root CA in my lab and was in rush so ofcourse, I did not read the fabulous manual and went forward with installing the Enterprise Root CA without installing IIS. I did know IIS is needed for web enrollment but did not care to check if it was already installed. It sure wasn’t.

So the Root CA was installed but I could not request certificates using web enrollment.

I went ahead and installed IIS and enabled ASP after the fact but web enrollment still wasn’t going to work as the virtual directories for web enrollment were missing as expected. Only if I had read RTFM.

What can I do now? How big of an issue this is going to be for me? luckily not any bigger than issuing a command “certutil –vroot”. As long as IIS was installed correctly, the command creates necessary, checks if ASP is enabled and warns you if not. That’s it for fixing the problem I created for myself. Thanks fabulous programmers at Microsoft to make products work for those who don’t read the fabulous manuals without real headache of reinstall.

Off to my next task…

  • Windows Live Favorites
  • Windows Live Spaces
  • TechNet
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Technorati Favorites
  • Share/Bookmark
Print

Tags: , ,

No Comments

Exctrlst.exe - The case of missing Performance Coutners

Jun 22

Posted by Bhargav in Windows Server

Recently I wrote about how to fix Corrupt of Missing Performance Coutners on a Windows Server. If you read the KB Article mentioned, it may sound complicated. One of the steps is to go through registry and find all services that have performance subkey. This could be very time consuming and tedious.

Also, if you missed, the article does mention you have to make sure you rebuild counters from other programs such as Exchange Server and SQL server among others. It’s not part of rebuild process outlined in the KB.

So, I went digging for gold and found Exctrlst.exe. If you run the exe, it will bring up the UI and displays all registry-based performance counters installed on the system. There is a neat option in the UI. The check box “Performance Counter Enabled” allows you to see if you have any performance counters that are not loaded. The UI is not very helpful in making user aware that you can just click the checkbox if the counters are not loaded and it will load it for you. There are no “OK” or “Apply” buttons and change is instant.

There may be services that does not immediately reflect this and you may have to unload/reload counters but I will let you figure out how to do that. Most of the counters should load immediately and you should be able to report on them using Performance Monitor.

For those who need to see the gold I dug up, follow me.

P.S.: I have read some posts which confirms this will also work with Windows Server 2008. Don’t take it as my word, but you have one more reason to experiment.

  • Windows Live Favorites
  • Windows Live Spaces
  • TechNet
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Technorati Favorites
  • Share/Bookmark
Print

Tags:

No Comments

Corrupt or Missing Performance Counters

Jun 12

Posted by Bhargav in PowerShell, Windows Server

One of the functions in the code I posted in “Check Exchange 2003 vitals with PowerShell” is to check performance counters. When running the script, you may encounter an error:

Get-WmiObject : Invalid Class

 

This could happen for 2 reasons:

1: You have a typo in Perf Counter object.

2: The performance counter is missing on the host you are checking.

 

When this happened to me, I checked and verified this by loading performance monitor on affected server and trying to load Memory counters which the code was checking for. To no surprise, I found that the server did not have Memory object.

There are many reasons why the performance object could go missing from the OS. The KB article “How to manually rebuild Performance Counter Library values” explains how you can resolve this problem and bring the missing performance counter objects back.

  • Windows Live Favorites
  • Windows Live Spaces
  • TechNet
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Technorati Favorites
  • Share/Bookmark
Print

Tags: , ,

No Comments

What information do you collect anyway (Microsoft Privacy Policy)

Jan 27

Posted by Bhargav in Vista, Windows Server

As I was browsing away, my IE crashed. Vista then asked me if I wanted to send collected data to Microsoft. I said yes.

This is when I started thinking what information is being collected from my computer and how is it used. A quick search resulted in a pleasant surprise.

The surprise was how much information is published about each feature of Vista, what information it collects, processes and transmits. How the information is used by Microsoft and what choices users have.

If you are an Enterprise administrator and ask, forget Vista, tell me how do I control communications from my Windows Server 2008 machines. What features of Windows Server 2008 communicate to Internet and how the information flows? What ports do they use? What if I want to prevent Windows Server 2008 from communicating over Internet to satisfy my organization’s security requirements?

Well, I am glad to inform Microsoft has provided detailed documentation on this as well. you can access it here.

I like it the way the documentation is clearly defining each component and how it communicates back to company servers, information collected and choices users are provided with. I have yet to find such details from other vendors.

I don’t believe anyone reading this post would not care about privacy policy. For those who don’t, I would let you read the quote below.

Quote of the day:
An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out. - Will Rogers

  • Windows Live Favorites
  • Windows Live Spaces
  • TechNet
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Technorati Favorites
  • Share/Bookmark
Print

Tags: , ,

No Comments