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More CSS Fun

As I am sure you gathered from other recent posts, we are using (read: testing) CSS for a lot of stuff. Well, we found out a beautiful new issue when creating and editing projects from the command line.

When you look at MSDN about adding a filter to a Project, you are presented with the following syntax:

/Filter “+text1.txt -*.exe -dir1 +…*.jpg”

Needless to say, that is not correct. For AddProj, they syntax has to be correct, but for EditProj, syntax is a lot more lax (the below is the syntax for EditProj). Regardless, everything in the quotes is incorrect. Instead a filter should look like the following:

Filter=+“text.txt” -”*.exe” -“dir1” +”…*.jpg”

They are either updating the MSDN article or creating a KB article about this.

Windows Home Server

With the release of Power Pack 3 for Windows Home Server, I have been thinking about trying it out. Having an MSDN subscription and a virtual machine host made this quite a bit easier, as I didn’t need to purchase any additional hardware to use it.

Prior to installing WHS, I had a Windows 2008 virtual machine that I installed all my stuff on and had shares. It definitely worked, but some of the cool features of WHS kept me wanting to move in that direction. Things like automated backups of client machines, a console, better managed and accessible shares, and Media Center tie-ins (I have a Win7 virtual machine as a Media Center and an Xbox 360 as the extender). All in all, I think it is definitely going to be a move in the right direction, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t issues getting there. I am going to outline a bunch of them here in the hopes that others can find comfort in the work I have done to resolve them.

Installation – As I mentioned before, I was installing it to a virtual machine. No big deal right? Wrong. My virtual machine host does not have a keyboard, monitor, or mouse hooked up to it normally. I just have it sitting in the closet chugging a long. The downside to that is when I am building a new virtual machine, it had better not need the mouse until I can directly connect to the machine or install the integration drivers. This is because in Hyper-V when you are using Remote Desktop to manage the host, until you are able to install the drivers, you have no mouse. Well, sadly, with the MSDN version (not sure about pressed CDs), the tabs are not correct with the EULA Accept page. There is no way for you to accept the EULA to progress through the installation. Boo. That means I had to drag a monitor, keyboard, and mouse into the closet to get things working. It just seems silly that this is an issue for something that is meant to run headless anyways (obviously not during the installation, but still).
Domain Membership – Do not add the WHS machine to a domain. I know you want to if you are running a domain at home, but don’t, just don’t. I really wanted to run it as a domain member too, but there are just too many issues, and tricks MS has done to make it not worth your while. Things such as the machine powering down every 48 hours when it is a member (annoying at best), to the console crashing after adding domain members to the local windows home group manually. While I know you can work around most of these things (except for the console crashing), what benefit are you really getting? Just leave it as a member of a workgroup.
Firewall Rules – Much like domain membership, the best answer here is just to turn off the Windows Firewall on the box. I am not sure if it was because it updated to Windows 2003 SP2 which enabled it by default after the base install or what, but there was nothing but headaches with the Windows Firewall enabled. Some of the more quality examples were:
- The website you are supposed to access resides on ports 55000/56000. That was not allowed in the rules by default.
- When setting up the Media Center connector, it uses DCOM to connect. DCOM typically uses a random list of high ports (1024-65535) to do its bidding. Granted, you can change the ports to only use a few, neither of which is added into the firewall rules.
Just silly stuff like that, which take awhile to troubleshoot, when they don’t need to. Turn it off.
Carbonite Online Backup – This is the current beast I am dealing with and it is a fun one. Carbonite works exactly how I want it to, and I have been using it on my Windows 2008 machine to do online backups for over a year now. It works. It isn’t fast, but it works. Moving it to WHS has been a fun test of intelligence. In my setup I had 2 drives, one was 80GB (the minimum to get it setup because I just wanted to play at first) and one 800GB. Everything works great, except for Carbonite. For the time being, I just wanted to backup the data in some of the shares. No problem, right? Just point it to where the share is located on disk (D:sharessharename) and we are good to go. Wrong! WHS has a special drive configuration that allows you to simply add drives whenever and whatever size and it will automatically add that space to your shares. It does this via junctions, tombstone files, and a service that manages where all the files are stored. I won’t delve into it here, but you can read all about it yourself. Basically the files in your share are elaborate shortcuts to the actual files, which are spread across all your drives, and then the files are managed by the service, and then could move every hour. So, when you point Carbonite to D:sharessharename, you are effectively backing up the shortcuts. Instead you need to point it to the junction point and all the files there (these are hidden system files) at C:fsDE. As I mentioned, these files are always moving around though based on the service. Therefore, the only way for Carbonite to work correctly on a WHS is if you have a single large drive, which is exactly what I am going to do. As soon as you add another one, files could get moved, and your backups will not be complete.
Protocol Mismatch – For the longest time I was receiving the following error whenever I was trying to install the connector on a client machine (Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Win 7)

Protocol mismatch. This computer uses protocol version 6.0.2030.2, but partner computer [server] uses protocol version 6.0.2030.0. A connection cannot be established

This was because the http://server:55000/enrollid/id.aspx webservice that the connector uses on the WHS machine was returning the incorrect version. The only way to fix it that I found was by installing the final build of Power Pack 3. The beta didn’t work, nor did downgrading to a previous PP.

Hopefully this little guide helps someone else out there. As I tinker with it some more, I will probably add additional articles, but it is amazing how long it has taken me to get this silly machine up and running, especially when this is supposed to be an appliance. I know that MS is learning a lot from this, but the polish is still a bit missing, and this is after 3 Service Packs (Power Packs).

Copy Files Between Untrusted Domains Programmatically

Normally on a Windows machine when you attempt to access a share in a different domain you are prompted for credentials. However, there are no copy utilities (copy, xcopy, robocopy, etc) that pass credentials in the command line. Also, as it is an untrusted domain, you simply can’t do a RunAs (need to manually type in a password for that anyways).

The answer was so obvious, I can’t believe it didn’t come to me right away. However, net use, the simplest of commands, is your friend again. Using the following command you can initiate the connection and then copy between the machines as much as you like via normal UNC path.

net use [server][path] [password] /user:[username]

copy [server][path][more path]

net use [server][path] /delete /y

By using the following syntax there is no mapped drive. There is simply a stored connection with the associated credentials for the life of the profile or until the delete command is run.

PSExec

On my current project they deploy PSExec to all machines. The downside? It is a version from 2004. Yes, that is right from over 5 years ago. Needless to say, there has been nothing but problems with it. Granted, PSExec is probably one of the easiest things to upgrade as you just need to upgrade the version that you are calling PSExec from. It then copies itself out to the machine and does it’s job. However, if the old version was ever tried against a machine, you may be in some weird state like we were where PSExec wouldn’t start, or it would and wouldn’t close, etc.

Stumbling along the internet I found someone else who had this issue. However, his processes doesn’t always work because there may be something hanging onto the PSExecsvc.exe file still. Instead I recommend using the following batch file.

sc %1 stop psexesvc
sc %1 delete psexesvc
del %1admin$psexesvc.exe
del %1admin$system32psexesvc.exe

It just deletes the service before it tries to delete the files. Works like a charm.

CSS Project Destination Authentication Account

Been a long time again, but I have a few updates to put up here. They may not help a lot of people, but they are good things that I want to remember 🙂

Commerce Server uses a pretty antiquated system for doing content and code promotions. It is called Commerce Server Staging (CSS). We have set it up, but want to better automate the deployment of all the CSS projects (jobs). For the life of me, I could not figure out how to add in the destination authentication account programmatically. Thankfully it wasn’t something short sighted I was missing. After discussing with Microsoft for awhile, there is apparently some undocumented switches on CSS.exe. After you add the project (css.exe addproj), you then need to edit the project with the following syntax:

css.exe editproj [project] Destination=[server];[username];[password]

Yay to automation!

Update:
Turns out you can do this with the Addproj also doing the same way with the semicolon separated items for the destination.

Xbox 360 and Netflix

Netflix streaming straight to the Xbox 360 has got to be the coolest thing ever. Last weekend we watched two movies that way. I just wish they would get more movies on the streaming feature. Screw DVDs moving forward. It’s all about the streaming media.

SQL Performance Optimizations

The team that I’m currently working on is focused on performance testing. None of us on the current team are really SQL experts though and we’re running into an issue that appears to be SQL related. Well, it turns out in SQL 2005, there’s these great new things: Database Management Views. What makes them even cooler is that you can pool them all together. And the hottest thing about this whole thing, is a script we found to do most of the work on our own. This things is awesome for SQL performance testing, and will definitely get a lot of reuse, that’s for sure.

Commerce Server 2007 Performance Counters

Having issues accessing Commerce Server 2007 performance counters remotely? We were too. It seemed like only specific ones were able to be remotely accessed. Well, it turns out that is “by design” (bullet point #2). However, you can get around this by allowing the Remote Registry service run as an account that has access to the database. Down side to that is I’m not exactly sure what permissions are actually required for the Remote Registry service (something above a normal user), and who knows what that breaks.

Visual Studio Test Load Agent Brain Dump

On my current project, I’m doing a lot with performance testing using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Test Load Agent. Now, there’s not a whole lot of things on Microsoft’s site about it, and blog postings are fairly sparse too. Hopefully some small nuggets listed here will be beneficial.

The first thing to note is that there is some documentation for 2005, but very little about the 2008 version. Do not use the 2005 version if possible. It has many blocking issues you probably will encounter. Use 2008 as many have been fixed. Many of the guides below are for 2005, but work just as well for 2008.

Installation:

Installation Guide for VS Test Load Agent
Firewall Visios

Configuration:

Misc Good Configuration”
In the installation documentation, it talks about if you have a domain or workgroup. However, in many test scenarios you will have multiple domains with no trusts in place (i.e. controller sits in one domain while the machines to be tested and monitor sit in another). Don’t panic. Simply create the Controller service account with the same username and password in all the domains. Make the Controller service account a member of the Performance Log Users and Performance Monitor Users groups, and it will do synchronized pass-though.

How-To’s and Walkthroughs:

FAQs and Indexes:

MSDN Forum FAQ
Ed Glas’s Content Index

Hopefully those links will help people. This is usually the set of links I send people who are knew to the whole Visual Studio Load Test Agent stuff.

Data Protection Manager and Windows 2008

I’ve been playing with getting DPM running on Windows 2008 (SQL) for awhile now. Mostly on and off, just when I have time to think about it. Well, today I finally got around to getting it installed, successfully.

First of all my setup:

Frontend is on Windows 2003 x86 R2 with SP2
SQL is on a Windows 2008 x64 box
Reporting Services front-end is on a Windows 2008 x86 box

Things I found out while trying to install:

DPM will not install unless Reporting Services is installed on the same box as the SQL database. You may be able to fix that afterwards, but this is a serious limitation. In any sort of enterprise, reporting services is (or at least should be) segregated from the production database services box. This was a large pain as I needed to move everything, ugh.
DPM’s installer doesn’t play nicely with UAC. There’s a step that a registry item needs to be added to the remote SQL server. However, if UAC is enabled on the SQL box, the installer fails saying that it can’t create that registry key eventhough I’m logged in as an administrator on both machines. This is because on the SQL box, it’s probably getting the allow dialog box. Simply turn off UAC on the remote machine, or run the installer as the local administrator account (password must be the same on both machines).

Now I just need to start backing up my Exchange 2007 server, since it has log files dating back to March the 3rd (ouch).

*Update*
Well, it looks like the DPM team has finally released the Rollup package to allow for Win2k8 system state backups (among other things). Check out the news.