Monthly Archives: May 2011

Ordered HP EliteBook 8460w

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HP EliteBook 8460wSome days ago I compared the new HP EliteBook and ProBook series. Now I decided to buy the HP EliteBook 8460w mobile workstation. I think this is the best option between performance and batterylife.

Here the 8460w configuration I ordered:

  • HP EliteBook 8460w Mobile Workstation
  • Intel® Core™ i7-2630QM Processor (2.0 GHz, 6 MB L3 Cache)
  • Mobile Intel QM67 chipset
  • 14.0-inch diagonal LED-backlit HD+ anti-glare (1600 x 900) with 720p HD Webcam
  • AMD FirePro™ M3900 w/1 GB gDDR3
  • 8GB 1333 MHz DDR3 SDRAM (2D)
  • 500 GB 7200 rpm 2.5-inch hard drive
  • DVD+/-RW SuperMulti DL Drive
  • DualPoint (TouchPad and PointStick)
  • Intel Centrino® Ultimate-N 6300 (3×3)
  • Bluetooth® Wireless Technology 2.1
  • TPM & Fingerprint
  • HP 9-Cell 100 Wh Li-Ion Battery
  • 56K v.92 high speed modem
  • HP Elite Support with limited 3 year standard parts and labor warranty 3/3/3

As I said the main reasons for me to buy this notebook, are the performance, the form factor, the batterylife and of coure the design. I am sure the EliteBook 8460p would be enought performance for me, but I really like the color of the EliteBook w-series notebooks.

Since HP will not release the EliteBook 8460w in Europe I ordered the notebook directly in the HP Online Store with my myus.com account.

Error: IIS6 Error EventID 1059 and 1021

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Just a had a problem with an application pool which always crashed after start. The application pool worked some days ago without any problems. After watching den System Eventlog I got the Error with Event ID 1059 and a Warning with Event ID 1021.
I had this problem on a Windows Server 2003 SP2 with all the latest patches
EventID 1059
Event Type: Error
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1059
Date: 27.05.2011
Time: 11:49:31
User: N/A
Computer: WEB-WIN
Description:
A failure was encountered while launching the process serving application pool 'www.domain.ch'. The application pool has been disabled.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

EventID 1021
Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1021
Date: 27.05.2011
Time: 11:50:01
User: N/A
Computer: WEB-WIN
Description:
The identity of application pool, 'www.domain.ch' is invalid. If it remains invalid when the first request for the application pool is processed, the application pool will be disabled. The data field contains the error number.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 2e 05 07 80 ...€

The Solution for this problem is very simple. Just reset the password of the specific IUSR and don’t forget to reset the password for the application pool identity.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 now shipping in Switzerland

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ThinkPad X1

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 is now shipping in Switzerland. A lot of online shops have it allready in stock.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 is a ultra light and thin business class notebook. It’s the thinest ThinkPad ever made. And it looks pretty impressive.

“To the optimist, the glass is half full.
To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”


Continue reading →

Powershell: How to export Windows Eventlogs with Powershell

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Powershell Header

This is a little dirty Windows Powershell script which exports or backups Windows Eventlogs. The script creates a .evt file which can be used with the Windows Eventlog Viewer.

# Config
$logFileName = "Application" # Add Name of the Logfile (System, Application, etc)
$path = "C:\temp\" # Add Path, needs to end with a backsplash

# do not edit
$exportFileName = $logFileName + (get-date -f yyyyMMdd) + ".evt"
$logFile = Get-WmiObject Win32_NTEventlogFile | Where-Object {$_.logfilename -eq $logFileName}
$logFile.backupeventlog($path + $exportFileName)

And with the next code it cleans up older exported Eventlogs.

# Deletes all .evt logfiles in $path
# Be careful, this script removes all files with the extension .evt not just the selfcreated logfiles
$Daysback = "-7"

$CurrentDate = Get-Date
$DatetoDelete = $CurrentDate.AddDays($Daysback)
Get-ChildItem $Path | Where-Object { ($_.LastWriteTime -lt $DatetoDelete) -and ($_.Extension -eq ".evt") } | Remove-Item

UPDATE: If you wanna clean the Eventlog after the export you can do that by using the Clear-Eventlog cmdlet. (Thanks to Michel from server-talk.eu)

Clear-Eventlog -LogName $logFileName

And here the whole “script”

# Config
$logFileName = "Application" # Add Name of the Logfile (System, Application, etc)
$path = "C:\temp\" # Add Path, needs to end with a backsplash

# do not edit
$exportFileName = $logFileName + (get-date -f yyyyMMdd) + ".evt"
$logFile = Get-WmiObject Win32_NTEventlogFile | Where-Object {$_.logfilename -eq $logFileName}
$logFile.backupeventlog($path + $exportFileName)


# Deletes all .evt logfiles in $path
# Be careful, this script removes all files with the extension .evt not just the selfcreated logfiles
$Daysback = "-7"

$CurrentDate = Get-Date
$DatetoDelete = $CurrentDate.AddDays($Daysback)
Get-ChildItem $Path | Where-Object { ($_.LastWriteTime -lt $DatetoDelete) -and ($_.Extension -eq ".evt") } | Remove-Item
Clear-Eventlog -LogName $logFileName

How Microsoft Hyper-V and the Cisco UCS changed our lives

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Cisco UCS Hardware

At the end of last year we had our Cisco UCS ordered and in your datacenter. In January we started the testing and made the Clusters ready for the production environment. In February we started the migration of our existing environment, mostly P2V and also some V2V migrations.

Here some interessting facts about our Cisco UCS and Hyper-V project.

  • We use 12 Cisco UCS Blades this is like 10 HE of rackspace
  • We migrated 45 Windows Servers and 47 Unix Servers in just one week
  • We replace 2 racks of server with a half rack of two Cisco UCS Bladecenters
  • We think we can replace 2-3 racks more with our two Bladecenters.
  • At the end of this year we think we could replace 4-5 racks with 1/2 rack
  • We still have a lot of physical and virtual server which will be needed to be migrated to the Bladecenter.
  • We will get even more out of our Blade Servers by activting Hyper-V Dynamic Memory as a new feature of Hyper-V R2 ServicePack 1

This migration had a lot of positive influence on other things in the datacenter.

Datacenter Power

  • we need now 4% less energie overall
  • we need now 6% less cooling overall
  • we need less space (1 and 1/2 racks at the moment)
  • now our system administrator travel 50% less to the datacenter, because of hardware defects or other administrative tasks.
  • We can deploy new servers in minutes instead of hours

I think all of this numbers (except the time we need to deploy new servers )will increase after the next migrations.

Now I started to write a series of blog posts about installing Microsoft Hyper-V R2 on the Cisco UCS system:

Microsoft Hyper-V and the Cisco UCS Bladecenter are a powerful team. The UCS Virtual Hardware takes alot of complexety from the hypervisor in your case Hyper-V. You don’t need NIC teaming and stuff like that. Thats is making it very easy to deploy Hyper-V Clusters. And with the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager you can save a lot of time in managing your clusters, hosts, virtual machine and also in P2V and V2V migrations. Since Microsoft SCVMM supports Windows Powershell you can also do a lot of scripting automation. And with the release of the new Version of SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012) this will even get better for deploying new virtual machines, services and even public and private clouds.

Hyper-V R2 SP1

We started with Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Servers before the release of Service Pack 1. We think we can even get a lot more out of your systems with the new Dynamic Memory feature for Hyper-V which comes in Service Pack 1.

At the end we think choosing the Cisco UCS, Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager for our datacenter was the best choice we have made, in terms of costs and technology.

DirectAccess Deployment done

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Microsoft DirectAccess

In the last 3 weeks we had do some little Windows Server projects in a Microsoft Workshop at KTSI. Since I was really interessted in Microsoft DirectAccess as an alternative to “legacy” VPN such as PPTP or L2TP, I made a little project out of that and installed DirectAccess in my LAB. And I also created a documentation step by step documentation for LAB and SMB installations of DirectAccess.

I had some respect of the installation of DirectAccess and the requirements of DirectAccess. But to my surprise after the first try everything worked fine. So if you do everything step by step and pay attention to the details you will succeed.

Now to DirectAccess, it’s not just another VPN technology. It can save users and the IT deparments a lot of time. How many hours do you have spent do troubleshoot VPN connection problems? Now with DirectAccess users can work with their notebooks as they were within the company network. You don’t really care about firewalls or connection losses.

But more on DirectAccess later, I will post the step by step guide later this week.