When Software Attacks!

Building environments for Lab Manager: Why bare metal scripting fails

In the world of DevOps it’s all about the scripts: I’ve seen some great work done by some clever people to create complex environments with multiple VMs all from scratch using PowerShell. That’s great, but unfortunately in the world of Lab Manager it just doesn’t work well at all. We’ve begun the pretty mammoth task of generating a new suite of VMs for our Lab Manager deployment to allow the developers and testers to create multi-machine environments.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, September 29, 2013

Adding DHCP Option 119 (Domain Search List) to Windows Server 2008 R2

If you’ve seen my recent blog post on making Android work in Hyper-V you will have seen my problems around DNS resolution when in the office. That turned out to be down to the DHCP options being handed back by our Server 2008 R2 box. Or rather, it was what wasn’t being handed back to the client that was the problem. Linux (and Apple OSX, as it turns out) both want a response to option 119, which defines the domain suffix search order.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, June 18, 2012

Server Core, Hyper-V and VLANs: An Odyssey

A sensible plan This is a torrid tale of frustration and annoyance, tempered by the fun of digging through system commands and registry entries to try and get things working. We’ve been restructuring our network at Black Marble. The old single subnet was creaking and we were short of addresses so we decided to subnet with network subnets for physical, virtual internal and virtual development servers, desktops, wifi etc. We don’t have a huge amount of network equipment, and we needed to put virtual servers hosted on hyper-v on separate networks so we decided to use VLANs.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, December 6, 2010

Fixing SharePoint 2007 IIS WAMREG DCOM 10016 activation errors on Server 2008 R2

Anybody who works will SharePoint will grumble if you mention DCOM activation permissions. No matter how hard we try, how many patches we install (or how hard we try to ignore it), granting activation and launch permissions to the SharePoint service accounts is like plugging a dike with water-soluble filler. On Server 2008 R2 our job is made that much harder by the fact that, by default, even administrators can’t edit the security settings for the IIS WAMREG service (GUID {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}, for when you see it in your application event log).

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 8, 2010

NewSID fails on Windows Server 2008 R2

The title says it all. I’m currently building a virtual lab to test DirectAccess and every time I run newsid on windows server 2008 R2 the system bluescreens irrevocably on reboot. I’ve now switched to using sysprep to change the SID. Here’s hoping the sysinternals guys update what is undoubtedly one of the most useful tools around!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, May 8, 2009