Category Archives: Windows Servers

Anything related to Windows servers

Windows 2012 server and Public vs Private network change Location

First up I have to thank http://www.jenovarain.com/2012/09/server-2012-network-location/ for the starting point on this.

A Windows server without a domain was installed but it had both ethernet interfaces listed as Public networks which meant that specific firewall issues existed, including being unable to connect as a remote desktop user. Turning off the Windows software firewall was one option that did allow the RDP connection to be completed, but this was sub-optimal and not persistent after a reboot.

The above-mentioned URL held out the section of the Windows Server Tools that was needed to setup more open access to allow the user to change the network location from Public to Private.

  • In “Server Manager” open the “Tools” menu and select “Local Security policy”.
  • Select “Network List manager policies” in the console tree.
  • Open “All Networks” properties.
  • Change “Network location” to “User can change location”
  • Now reboot to apply the changes, or at a command prompt use gpupdate /force

But it did not work for me. What I found was that the existing network connection settings were not over-written with the global settings after the reboot.

In the same “Network List manager policies” section, I had to select the specific Network Location and apply the changes there as well. Once that was done, the location could be changed from Public to Private, and my server was accessible with the firewall turned on.

DeltaCopy, Rsync, Cygwin and Windows to Linux backups

I wrote a while back regarding Rsync backups from Windows servers to Linux using DeltaCopy.

It’s all been working ok but I’ve had some files failing with a “file has vanished’ message.

At first I tried searching for a solution based on the failures being any file with a special accent character.

The log email that I get sent by DeltaCopy contained something like this:

[text]
Profile datafiles failed to execute.
Execution log
————-
sending incremental file list
file has vanished: "/cygdrive/D/datfiles/A standard Windows type file?.jpg"
file has vanished: "/cygdrive/D/datfiles/Another file with two questionmarks ??.docx
….
[/text]

Investigating the Windows server the files did exist and they were not “in use” during the backup. However, some (note: not all)  some, files had special non-standard English characters in the file names. So characters with umlauts etc, like È, É, Ê  were giving issues alongside some punctuation characters that appeared normal but I suspect have been prepared from a non-English keyboard or system with a different character set.

So assuming that the character set was the issue I went searching.

I had narrowed it to the Cygwin toolkit rather than Rsync itself and came across this old message thread that included a link to a modified cygwin1.dll as http://www.okisoft.co.jp/esc/utf8-cygwin/  except that the link was broken. So I chased a modified cygwin1.dll and found what appears to be the updated link at http://www.oki-osk.jp/esc/utf8-cygwin/.

Downloading the compiled library file cygwin1-dll-20-11-18.tar.bz2 and extracting it to my Windows server using 7-Zip I renamed the old dll as cygwin1.dll.orig and copied the modified cygwin1.dll into the DeltaCopy directory.

Then I re-ran a data file backup that had given me “file vanished” errors and it seemed to work. But the next time it ran, it gave errors again.

So I delved deeper and found that the version of Rsync that is distributed with DeltaCopy is quite old, replacing the Rsync toolkit that supports DeltaCopy was the next thing to try and it worked a treat. I will document that process shortly.

 

 

Windows SBS 2008 and WSUS 3.0 Wizard Object Moved Error

I have done battle with an SBS Server in recent weeks. Some of it was simple fixes, while getting WSUS working and updates generally has been challenging.

The server had not been patched for almost 18 months and the reason was that WSUS was not working and there were some group policies that apparently were disabling connections even for the server.

I have not fully resolved this but one of the key items was this Microsoft TechNet Thread on WSUS Configuration Wizard where I learn that there is a mandated update KB2734608 which resolved the connection issue.

Now that the server is patched and updated, I’ll delve into what the workstations need to get their dose of Windows medicine.

Getting a list of IIS web sites with the WS3SVC identity number

As per the title, this is for IIS7 and rather than manually trawling through the IIS Manager to find all the site ID numbers so that I can get to the log files, this command exports them to a spreadsheet / text file.

At the command prompt on the Windows Server – noting that you will probably need to run the Command Prompt As Administrator

[bash]

%windir%system32inetsrvappcmd list site > c:sites.xls

[/bash]

Then get the file by copying or whatever to a machine with Excel on it and open it up.