Networking randomly dies on a 2012 R2 vSphere VM

Strange issue. Simple solution. We had a Windows Server 2012 R2 Domain Controller sitting on vSphere 5.5 (2068190) which would randomly lose it’s network connection. When you logged into the system locally the network interface appeared to be up but you could not connect to anything outside of the VM. If I rebooted the VM … Read more

Previous version of the Active Directory Replication Status Tool

Who liked using the Active Directory Replication Status Tool? I did. Who thought it was a great, simple, straight forward tool that was far easier than interpreting the output of some command line tools and didn’t feel it needed to become a cloud service with a less intitive interface? I do. Digging through a few of my … Read more

Powershell script to monitor mount points in Windows and e-mail an alert

Simple script inspired by this blog post. This script will read a servers.txt file located in the same directory as the script, check each server listed (one per line, use the servers FQDN) for mount points, see how much free space is available, compare it to a minimum amount you set and then e-mail an … Read more

NetApp SnapManager for Exchange – Error Code: 0xc004146f

We use SnapManager for Exchange and NetApp Single Mailbox Recovery to backup our Exchange 2010 environment. We’ve noticed that randomly our backups will fail with a verification error. The backups are still good and the failure usually happens 2-3 times in a row and then doesn’t happen again for a month. NetApp has a KB … Read more

Samba update breaks AD authentication

We’ve got a Samba server running on a CentOS 6.7 server. As part of the CentOS 6.7 upgrade a new Samba package was also installed. The packages were specifically: samba-common-3.6.23-20.el6.x86_64 samba-winbind-clients-3.6.23-20.el6.x86_64 samba-client-3.6.23-20.el6.x86_64 samba4-libs-4.0.0-66.el6_6.rc4.x86_64 samba-winbind-3.6.23-20.el6.x86_64 samba-3.6.23-20.el6.x86_64 Our Samba server is tied into a Windows 2003 Domain and we use groups to provide access to the shares … Read more