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I had a set of Windows 2008R2 servers today that were having trouble backing up the system state via Windows Server Backup – they would fail with the error “System writer is not found in the backup”. I scoured the ‘net and talked to colleagues, and all of the resolutions I could find involved re-registering components, re-securing things in the Cryptography Service (prompted by CAPI or CryptSvc errors in the event log), setting ownership on WinSXS folders, etc. I did not have any such errors in my logs to indicate a permissions issue – in fact, I saw no errors at all (usually good – not so much when something is broken!). However, every time I ran “vssadmin list writers”, indeed the system writer was missing. After taking a procmon, I noticed that the last thing that was searched were some setupapi.ev* files in \Windows\Inf: I decided, on a whim, to replace these files with files from another server I had that was working – I stopped the VSS and CryptSvc services (th...

The difference between a snapshot and a backup: A snapshot is, think about it as a Polaroid picture. You’re out, and you’re having fun with your friends, and somebody snaps a Polaroid or an Instagram or whatever the kids are using nowadays. It’s just that. It’s an instant point in time. This can be appropriate for certain types of data and it can be inappropriate for other types of data. The reason why is because the snapshot, it generally happens again at the storage level, so it doesn’t have that intelligence, maybe that a true backup software or backup product has where it lives inside the operating system. Maybe it can communicate with your database server or your exchange server. If you have something that’s very memory-intensive … Let’s take, for example, a SQL server, and it’s very transactional, you’re running a lot of database transactions very frequently, unless you get into some really, really specifics on storage array snapshots, you could end up in a state...

The AD replication PowerShell cmdlets that we’ll look at are available on Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 8.0 and Windows 8.1. You must install Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for AD DS on non-domain controllers to use these PowerShell cmdlets. 1. Get-ADReplicationFailure The Get-ADReplicationFailure PowerShell cmdlet can be used to check AD replication status for all or specific Active Directory domain controllers. The Get-ADReplicationFailure cmdlet helps you get the information about replication failure for a specified server, site, domain, or Active Directory forest. For example, to get the replication status for a specific domain controller, failure counts, last error, and the replication partner it failed to replicate with, execute the command below: Get-ADReplicationFailure DC1.mydomain.local You can also set the scope to see the replication status for all domain controllers in a specific site. As an example, the below command r...

I was researching how to change the Subnet Mask of a DHCP scope on a Windows 2008 server. It turns out you can’t change the subnet without deleting the scope and recreating it. If there are a lot of customizations to the scope, though, like reservations and scope options, it’s no easy task to delete and recreate the scope. Luckily   I found one page   that explains how to export the scope to a text file, make changes, and then reimport it. The whole process takes only a couple of minutes, and you end up with a deleted and rebuilt scope that has all your customizations intact. Use the below command to export the scope configuration Syntax: C:\>netsh dhcp server \\”Server name” scope “scope subnet” dump>c:\dhcp.txt Example: C:\>netsh dhcp server \\Test01 scope 192.168.1.0 dump>c:\dhcp.txt That creates a text file you can edit to change the Subnet, and whatever else you want changed. Then you have to delete the s...

Promoting the first Domain Controller that runs Windows Server 2008 R2 is not a new thing. However, there are some pre-requisites that you need to look after before promoting your new Domain Controller. In this test scenario, we already have our  itserveronline.local  domain and forest which consists of only one Windows Server 2003 R2 Domain Controller with the DNS server role in a Windows 2000 Mixed domain. This article entails the different steps needed to successfully add the first and full operational Domain Controller and DNS server that runs Windows Server 2008 R2 in our forest. Prerequisites to the new server. The first step is to  prepare  the Windows Server 2008 R2 server. To start,  we need to ensure proper  Computer Name  of the new server (as per your naming convention). The next thing to check is the  IP address  of the new server. It is to be noted that the server needs to be assigned a  static  IP address. S...

Scenario: we have a lot of DFS namespaces shared across on our domain, reachable via \\example.com\namespace1  and  \\example.com\namespace2 .  DFS namespaces has ABE enabled. After a reboot of a domain controller all namespaces are available through that server except for the content of the ABE enabled namespaces. After I import the NTFS rights again with ICACLS or FileACL  the content is available again . If we do another reboot or rest the permission the process starts over again. Cause: This issue occurs because of a logic error in the DFS Namespace service. This issue occurs when the service sets an Access Control List (ACL) to the DFS folders in a DFS version 1 namespace during the service start-up process.   Resolution: Installation of hotfix KB2464365 was carried out and the issue was no longer experienced. Hotfix Download: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2464365

In Windows 2008 R2, Windows search has Indexing in built or as a part of it with some default file\folders inclusions. Other Indexing role is for Legacy OSs. In Windows Server 2008R2 Search in file content is not enabled by default and can be enabled by installing the File Server >  Windows Search Service role. Once the Windows Search Service is installed file searches on shares hosted on Windows 2008 R2 file servers can be off-loaded to the file server thereby conserving XenApp server resources. Users App data folder, Start Menu and Internet Explorer history will be also indexed….. and this is where the trouble can start: The Search database file C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb may grow very large – a “normal” size seems to be around 40 MB and a large DB can be 4 GB. The SearchIndexer.exe process has high disk I/O We decided to only allow file searches as it seemed the main cause was inde...