Category Archives: Windows Servers

Anything related to Windows servers

Hyper-V Centos VM date time clock gains hours even with ntp

I have a system at home that is used for test and dev work. It’s a windows 2008 server with Hyper-V with various VM’s running including SME Server which is based on CentOS.

The clock has been playing up with time gains in hours and this messes me up when looking at logs etc.

I think it may be resolved thanks to Michaels blog post.

For future ref the change is in the /boot/grub/grub.conf file and we need to add

divider=10 clocksource=acpi_pm

to the kernel line, i.e. on the line that starts with ‘kernel’ as part of the command.
 

rsync windows failed: Invalid argument (22)

Rsync from linux server to a Windows server as a redundant backup using cwrsync but getting an error for the chown command on the directories being backed up.

The issue was simple enough, stop telling rsync to change the owner as the linux command is invalid on the windows server.

[php]rsync -atv /directorytobackup/ windowsserver::cwshare
[/php]
changed to
[php]rsync -rtv /directorytobackup/ windowsserver::cwshare
[/php]
and all is now quiet from an error message perspective.

Thanks to Marcin and Linux Questions Forum for the solution.

Sugar CRM upgrade IIS7 Internal Server error timeout

There are days that I loathe software. For the record, the config this relates to is Windows Server 2008, IIS 7, SugarCRM 5.2.0c, separate MS-SQL 2005 database server. PHP 5.2.6,

HTTP Error 500.0 – Internal Server Error
C:inetpubphpphp-cgi.exe – The FastCGI process exceeded configured activity timeout

Two ‘supposedly’ identical servers. SugarCRM 5.2.0c installed on production and working a treat. The dev system just just been setup for a new instance of Sugar to provide for testing of the upgrade path to 5.5.1 and probably 6.1 but first the cloned 5.2.0c had to work.

A freshly installed 5.5.1 on dev was working and apparently so was the copied 5.2.0c from production. Except that the Upgrade Wizard in the cloned copy gave the time out error shown above. The 5.5.1 however worked fine which left me thinking it was a Sugar issue, or specific to the site or app pool.

To cut a full 8 hour day down to the stuff we need to know, the issue was that while I looked at all the settings, site level, app pool, and server, for whatever obscure reason the Fast-CGI icon was not showing in the dev server configuration panel.

http://www.iis.net/download/AdministrationPack
The admin pack for IIS7 is required for that interface and provided access to the time out setting which I raised from 30 to 300 and the Upgrade Wizard could then function.

There is a marked difference in performance between 5.2.0c and 5.5.1 in the Upgrade Wizard and this is the bit that threw me at first, because the 5.5.1 clean install would run with the default timeout set at 30 while 5.2.0c would not.

Windows server 2008 install error

Installing a new server with Windows Server 2008 to a blank hard drive and during the install process it fails at the disk format stage with

“Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation”

There is a Microsoft KB article KB927520 about this and I figured that the obvious issue was that the drivers for the main board SATA controller did not match with the MS supplied drivers.

There are a couple of issues with this:

  • the suggested solution to download/update the drivers cannot be undertaken on a bare metal system, particularly when the network card is yet to be enabled to allow for communication
  • the Intel mainboard came with a special self-booting driver and management disk, but it failed to read the DVD because it could not recognise its own controller until the drivers were available, a real catch-22

So having tried a number of options, I opted to grab one of our 2003 Server install disks just to verify that there was no actual hardware issue. Having successfully installed Windows Server 2003 I then loaded the Intel CD to do the BIOS and system updates.

Once that was loaded I checked the disk via the Disk Manager utility and converted it to Dynamic, as I would be doing a software mirror later and then I loaded the Windows Server 2008 disk to try again.

Guess what, it all works like there was never an issue. Upgrade option worked a treat.

As a side issue I was mildly peeved to have a new Feb 2010 server delivered with a new motherboard that required patches and updates that were dated September 2008 which implies that the last time Intel did any on board updates was around 3 years ago!