Posts Tagged Windows Server 2008

Corrupt or Missing Performance Counters

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.

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What information do you collect anyway (Microsoft Privacy Policy)

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

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