Remote Desktop Services (per user) license monitoring with a script
With Windows Server 2008 (R2) and the new Remote Desktop Services, you need CALs. They’re essentially the same as the Terminal Services CALs that you used to get, and with Server 2008 you get a lovely little GUI that allows you to generate reports of the current users who have valid licenses etc.
What you can’t do (easily) is use something like the old lsreport.exe to generate a list of who’s using a CAL at a given point in time.
After alot of searching I found a blog post which helped over at the Remote Desktop Services Team Blow: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2009/11/09/per-user-cal-reporting-script.aspx – it dumps a .csv file of current CAL users and their licence state (valid or expired).
Because what I actually wanted was just an updated csv file every hour so I could trend usage, I added a few lines to the script that looked like this:
objTextFile.WriteLine "time, valid, expired, total"
objTextFile.WriteLine Now() & "," & NumOfW2K8_Valid & "," & NumOfW2K8_Expired & "," & NumOfW2K8_Total
And commented out all the others before setting on a repeating task.
Quick: Install .NET 3.5 on Server Core 2008R2
No explanation I’m afraid, just a quick post!
Do it like this:
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3-ServerCore
Quick: vCMA (vCenter Mobile Access Server)
If you’ve not seen it yet, VMware have have flung out a product called vCMA – it allows you to manage your VMware estate from a mobile device, and although only in first release and officially a “power toy”, it’s pretty neat.
What’s even more neater* is that you also use the free iPad application to connect and then administer remotely with a shiny interface (no, you can’t do it on the iPhone I’m afraid).
Anyway, the point of this was to note the default options, after downloading the OVF file and installing it,
- the default URL is https://ip-address/vim
- the management URL is https://ip-address:5480
- the management username/password by default is root/vmware
*yeah, why not?
Quick: Why not to buy the iomega ix4-200r for veeam backups
In previous blog posts (Using veeam to backup the new virtual infrastructure to Iomega NAS boxes and Backup Strategies with Virtual Machines in VMware using Veeam) I mention my purchases of the iomega ix4-200r, generally I haven’t been impressed with them because they’ve been a little unreliable.
Looking at use around the net I decided that the best way to have a target for my veeam backups would be the iSCSI initiator from Windows straight onto the device, so I should provision a LUN, add it to Windows and write to it.
I tried and failed, after about a week of to’ing and fro’ing with veeam, vmware and iomega support I got to the bottom of the issue: these nas boxes are software locked to provide LUNs that are <= 2TB in size* – bearing in mind my 8 file servers each serve up anywhere between 500GB and 1TB worth of data this means that my first backup file from veeam is always going be over 2TB, making the device pretty much worthless in my environment.
*I’ve been assured that a LUN that’s exactly 2TB will work, although I can’t actually get that working in my test lab having tried it on two separate devices.
Quick: Using DISKPART in Server Core 2008R2 to setup a new disk
Yes, I could use the MMC from another machine, but I was pretty convinced that I could do it all much more quickly using the DISKPART command… I’ve provisioned the LUN on my EqualLogic box, added it via VMware as a new .vmdk on that LUN and, as predicted, it shows up as offline and readonly, I therefore need a combination of the following to make it work:
DISKPART> list disk
DISKPART> select disk 1
DISKPART> attributes disk clear readonly
DISKPART> online disk
DISKPART> create partition primary
DISKPART> list volume
DISKPART> select volume 4
DISKPART> assign letter=e:
DISKPART> EXIT
C:\Users\Administrator> format E: /v:Label /Q
You might not need to list and select the volumes as when you create the partition is usually does, but nice to see that little asterisk to indicate the disk/volume you’re working on.
Quick: VLAN on Cisco PIX (6.3) – Public Wifi access?
There is a shelf in the store room that’s full of old and unused Cisco PIXs – they used to be essential when site-to-site VPNs were handled internally, but now they’re only used to protect the network internet intruders via the ADSL line we use as an internet breakout.
In a couple of offices it would be really helpful to offer public wifi to guests, but the problem is there’s no secure default gateway that the guests can use – which means unless you buy a separate ADSL line for guest access (probably a waste of money), you’re stuck.
That is, until I remembered that some of the PIXs we have support VLANning… A quick “show ver” will tell if you can:
...
Maximum Physical Interfaces: 2
Maximum Interfaces: 4
...
Ah ha, only two NICs but the ability to have four interfaces – sounds like we can VLAN here, here’s the code:
interface ethernet0 auto
interface ethernet1 auto
interface ethernet1 vlan1 physical
interface ethernet1 vlan3 logical
nameif ethernet0 outside security0
nameif ethernet1 inside security100
nameif vlan3 wifi security4
...
And then, for added ease, why not use dhcp on that interface?
dhcpd address 192.168.15.100-192.168.15.200 wifi
dhcpd dns 194.72.0.114 62.6.40.178
dhcpd lease 3600
dhcpd ping_timeout 750
dhcpd enable wifi
ip address wifi 192.168.15.1 255.255.255.0
Simples. Switch just needs to be set to recognise VLAN tagging on the port that ethernet 1 will use and Robert is your father’s brother.
Quick: iPhone Tethering without iTunes
Just a quick link for reference really, spent ages hunting around the web for how to do iPhone tethering (i.e. using your iPhone as a 3G modem/datastick) without having to install iTunes on every single machine (because, of course, most enterprises don’t want iTunes on every laptop they’ve got).
Found the following site which has a messy workaround, but at least it works, and I’ve just confirmed it still working today with iOS4.2: iPhone USB Tethering without iTunes
In short, you need to open up the iTunesSetup.exe (using something like 7zip) and…
- Install AppleApplicationSupport.msi (must be installed before AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi)
- Install AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi (do not change the installation directory)
- Copy QTCF.dll, QuickTime.qts, QuickTimeVR.qtx (from QuickTime) to C:\Windows\System32\
Only tested on Windows XP 32-bit, I’ve yet to try this on Windows 7 64-bit machines, but I’ll do that later and let you know what I find, it might be different because there is indeed a “AppleMobileDeviceSupport64.msi” in the setup.
Quick: Installing vCentre Update Manager 4.1 on a 64-bit OS
I had an “interesting” day today rooting round the VMWare Knowledge Base articles. It started off simply: I wanted to move my local SQL Express Edition vCentre database onto the much larger, more powerful, centralised SQL server. The KB that describes this, Moving the VirtualCenter SQL database, makes the process simple and flawless, until…
I go to uninstall the local instance of SQL Server and notice there are two, a 32-bit installation and a separate 64-bit version, quickly writing this off as a stupid glitch I uninstall both only to realise why there were two: for some reason Update Manager 4.1 (which can be installed on a 64-bit OS) needs a 32-bit DSN, a 32-bit database connection, to work. It achieves this by default by installing a local copy of 32-bit SQL Express Edition.
Some of you will already be familiar with the joy of using the 32-bit ODBC driver in Windows 7, and this is no different, but the KB, Creating a 32bit DSN on a 64bit Windows machine explains it all for those of you that haven’t.
Finally I was in a position to open up the UI again – but wait, another error message, what now?! A tiny bit more digging pointed me towards the first fix in Enabling Update Manager fails with the error: database unavailable or has network problems, which advises changing the account that the update service starts with to an account with administrator rights.
Once that was done it worked perfectly, so there you have it, a cleverly disguised list of links to VMware KB articles that I had to use when installing update manager 4.1, or more specifically, Moving the SQL databases for vCentre 4.1 when update manager 4.1 was already installed.
Quick: Installing APC Network Shutdown (PCNS) on VMWare ESXi 4.1
This is actually documented in APC Answer ID 11144 but I couldn’t find the link without actually e-mailling APC and asking for it, so hopefully by posting it here with a more sensible title others might stumble across it.
Since ESXi 4.1 was released the automatic-shutdown of hosts using PowerChute Network Shutdown (PCNS) no longer works and needs patching, to do this you must firstly completely uninstall the existing installation of network shutdown by running the uninstall script, mine is located here:
sudo /opt/APC/PowerChute/uninstall
Download the new version from the APC website (the username and password is embedded on that page, but at time of writing it’s ftp://apcftp.apc.com and then, despite what the instructions say, I didn’t rename install_en.sh to install.sh I just ran it:
- Download the above file and extract it, giving you five (5) files including the README.txt
- Copy these files into /tmp along with the original installation files
- Run
sudo /tmp/install_en.sh - Follow the on-screen instructions
- As per the APC Answer file, copy the shutdown and uninstall commands over, mine looked like this:
cp /tmp/shutdown /opt/APC/PowerChute/group1/bin/shutdownandcp /tmp/uninstall /opt/APC/PowerChute/uninstall
(Screenshot showing list of files before installation)
This felt quite a bit better to me, it actually requested an IP for the ESXi host it was supposed to be controlling as well as registering with the management interface on the UPS correctly – this is more than I got when I used the version for ESXi 4.0 – I have tested this by issuing PowerChute shutdown command from the UPS and both of my ESXi boxes shut down correctly.
Remember that you’ll need to have configured the Low Battery Duration to at least 5 minutes under the UPS web interface for this to be effective and worth having.
Quick: Configuring Server Core 2008 R2
Since my post on sconfig.cmd I’ve been pointed at a product called CCCR2 (there’s a non-R2 version too) by its author, Joachim Nässlander. I’ve been using CCCR2 since he pointed me that way and it’s been *much* better than remembering netsh commands and trying to update my multiple vNICs on each new VM I create, it looks like this:
Having had much fun with Server Core (it seems like it should be a great idea, but no-one really supports it or does much with it yet!) I decided to actively search to see if there were any other tools for this sort of thing, there is, a nice little GUI one called Core Configurator:
So now here I am, stuck with a choice between two perfectly good ways of configuring my server core installations and no sensible way of chosing between the two of them! Both are small enough .iso files to be considered floppy-size which makes them quick and portable, both do pretty much the same thing. Interestingly I think I’m going to continue using CCCR2 because it’s a little bit faster to whizz through the menus and set my NICs up (I don’t need to do things like join domains because that’s already handled by a VMware template).
There is one setting that I frequently use which neither support though, and that’s changing the MTU size (jumbo frames on a NIC), I still need my handy netsh commands for that, but at least CCCR2 shows the interfaces with their MTU size alongside them as a reminder during my setup.
Does anyone else have any Server Core tools?