No email option in SCOM 2012 report subscription
Reading Time: 2 minutesSo this is the issue — you’re going to subscribe to a report in SCOM and the only options are “Windows File Share” and “Null Delivery Provider”.
Well that’s a problem…we want these reports emailed. This error typically occurs when a SQL Migration is done, the reporting role is migrated, or on new installs. So go open up SQL Server Reporting Services Configuration Manager, and go to the “email settings” tab on the side. Notice there’s no data in there.
Configure this to include whatever you want your sender address to be, and your SMTP server, then click apply and you should get this.
Now, let go back and open up the SCOM Report Subscription again, and there we go!
I hope I’ve made your day, at least a little bit easier.
Thanks!
vSphere 5.5 Client Download
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI had to find the vSphere 5.5 client today and I have to say — it wasn’t very easy. In light of that, I’ll just leave the links here for everyone.
Download vSphere Client 5.5 Update 2: VMware-viclient-all-5.5.0-1993072.exe
Download vSphere Client 5.5 Update 1b: VMware-viclient-all-5.5.0-1880841.exe
Download vSphere Client 5.5 Update 1: VMware-viclient-all-5.5.0-1618071.exe
Download vSphere Client 5.5: VMware-viclient-all-5.5.0-1281650.exe
Powershell Script to Test SMTP
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis one is going to be short and sweet, I’ve been testing SMTP with and without encryption and wanted a good script for that.
Here are the lines that you’ll want to look at configuring:
- Line 5: “$smtpServer =”InsertYourSmtpServerHere”
- Line 12: Change the $false value to $true if you want to encrypt your SMTP with SSL
- Line 13: If you’re using a non-default SMTP port, change the “25” to whatever you’re using
- Line 15: Only change this if you need to enter credentials for authentication
- Line 18/19: Change these to who you want to say the email is from, and to whom it is being delivered.
- Line 21: Change this to whatever you want your email title to be
- Line 25: Change this to say whatever you want the body of the email to say
There are also some write-host’s in there to let you know the values that are being run and whether or not they were successful, which will print to the powershell console.
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Powershell-SMTP-Test-Tool-621b07ae
Wireshark not equal to filter
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI came across this today and thought I’d share this helpful little wireshark capture filter. Based on wireshark’s documentation if you use
“ip.addr != 10.10.10.10” that should show you everything except for packets with the IP addrress 10.10.10.10. The problem is … it doesn’t work. It turns yellow like this, and doesn’t filter that IP.
The trick is to negate the whole statement, then it will work. Instead of doing “ip.addr!=10.10.10.10” run “!ip.addr==10.10.10.10”. Wireshark then is able to read it as NOT ip equal to, instead of IP is not equal to. Once you do that, you’re golden (well, green).
Simple enough, and it works with any statement — IE if you RDP into a machine and run a capture you should probably include “!tcp==3389” somewhere in your filter statement.
I hope I’ve made your day, at least a little bit easier!
Disk Performance on Server 2012 Task Manager
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSomething that I’ve noticed not a lot people know, is how to get your disk performance to show up on a server’s task manager. Yes, yes, I know. With the new Microsoft model you shouldn’t be RDP’ing to servers anyways — but I still get asked how to do this. For some reason they have this by default on Windows 8, but not enabled on Servers. So here’s the one command you need to fix that.
1) The problem, no disk portion on task manager. 🙁
2) Run the following command to enable it.
“DiskPerf -Y”
This enables the physical and logical disk performance counters.
3) Close and re-open task manager.
There ya go!
I hope I’ve made your day at least a little bit easier.
SCCM 2012 “Perform site maintenance or reset this site” Greyed Out / Unavailable
Reading Time: 2 minutesAs I went to upgrade an evaluation version of System Center Configuration Manager 2012 to a full version, I noticed unlike Operations Manager — you have to do this through the setup/install interface. Upon first search people were saying just run the setup again and choose “Perform site maintenance or reset the site”, though it was greyed out. Here’s the quick tip to remedy that.
Here, I’m just running the setup again and choosing Install, and the option is greyed out to perform site maintenance.
So here’s what you do instead. Close the setup window, and go open Programs and Features in your Control Panel. Find “Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Primary Site Setup” (this may be different if the top of your hierarchy is a CAS), and click “Uninstall/Change”.
Then, there it is — not greyed out!
Click next and you’re able to do what you need to do.
At this point you can do a few things.
- Reset your site with no configuration changes
- Modify SQL Server Configuration
- Modify SMS Provider Configuration
- Modify Language Configuration
- Upgrade Evaluation Edition to a Licensed Edition
I just needed to upgrade my site to a licensed edition, and this worked like a charm.
I hope I’ve made your day at least a little easier!
Enable Disk Cleanup on Server 2008 R2
Reading Time: < 1 minuteI know, I know — we shouldn’t use this on servers. Sometimes though, in the right environment and for the right reasons, it can be useful (and you don’t have to install something like ccleaner).
This process is honestly, really easy — the files are already on your system, they just need to be put in the right place. Take these lines below and either run them one at a time with an administrative command prompt or put them in a batch file and run all at once.
Server 2008 R2 x64:
copy C:\Windows\winsxs\amd64_microsoft-windows-cleanmgr_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_c9392808773cd7da\cleanmgr.exe C:\Windows\System32
copy C:\Windows\winsxs\amd64_microsoft-windows-cleanmgr.resources_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_en-us_b9cb6194b257cc63\cleanmgr.exe.mui C:\Windows\System32\en-US
cleanmgr.exe
These three lines will copy the needed files from your sxs folder and put them in your system32 which will allow you to call “cleanmgr.exe” from the command line.
I hope this makes your day at least a little bit easier!
Domain Controllers “Grayed out” in SCOM 2012
Reading Time: 2 minutesI did a few new SCOM 2012 installs recently and noticed that after pushing the agent to the DCs, they showed up grayed out in Ops Manager. Here’s a quick tip on how to fix that.
Logon to the DC(s), and with an administrative comand prompt run the HSLockdown tool, and add the local system account to the allowed group.
C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager\Agent:
*NOTE* In newer version, this is now stored in “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Monitoring Agent\Agent”
Run the command “HSLockdown /L” to show what accounts are being allowed or denied. In this case, my local system isn’t even populated.
Now run the HSLockdown tool again with the add switch to allow local system.
“HSLockdown /A “NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM”
Restart the agent with “net stop heathservice && net start healthservice” and give it 5 minutes or so then it should be all green in your dashboard.
Hope this made your day at least a little easier!
Config File Iteration Backup – Change Checking Config Files
Reading Time: 2 minutesIn a lot of environments that have developers that use a lot of config files, sometimes it would be nice to keep older versions of those files. Fortunately Microsoft has graced us with shadow copies so we can have “Previous Versions”. The only issue with that, is you can only can’t turn on shadow copies (as far as I know) for specific files. So what I did was write a powershell script to take care of that, in a round-about way.
What this script does, is wait until the file has been modified then copy it to an “archive” location and time stamp it so you can review older copies.
At the beginning of this script there are two arrays that include variables of full paths to the files. “$OriginalPath” is the array that holds the full path to each file you want to watch. In the script here the two files I’m watching are “C:\configs\config1.txt” and “C:\configs\config2.txt”. Then the second array is where you want to archive the files to. In the script here it’s “C:\archive_configs\config1.txt” and “C:\archive_configs\config2.txt”.
What’s done after the arrays are initialize, is the time -1 minute and compares the last write value of the file in question to the current time -1 minute. If it has been modified, it copies to the archive location then modifies the name with a time stamp. Then loops back through if there are more files being checked in the array.
What I’ve done is put this in Task Scheduler to run every 1 minute. If you want to modify that, take the line:
$1MinAgo = (get-date).AddMinutes(-1)
and you the “Minutes” portion and the “(-1)” portion can both be modified.
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Config-File-Iteration-ab2a69df
I hope I’ve made your day a little bit easier!
Unable to Compress in NTFS
Reading Time: < 1 minuteRecently when working with a very old, decrepit server that was running out of disk space I went to compress a folder of logs in NTFS and the compress box was greyed out and I was unable to compress it.
This is because in NTFS the compression attribute isn’t supported for volumes with cluster sizes larger than 4k — this happened to be sized at 64k thus the inability.
The way that I typically check this is by simply running “CHKDSK D:” replacing D: with your prospective drive letter. The output of this will display your cluster size in bytes (divide by 1024 to get the cluster size in kb)
Hope I’ve made your day a little bit easier!
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