One error you may receive while backing up a Hyper-V VM with DPM 2007 is the generic "DPM encountered a retryable VSS error. (ID 30112 Details: Unknown error (0x800423f3) (0x800423F3))." There are a couple of different things that could cause this error. The two most common are: 1. You are running a Windows Server 2008 [...]

I ran into an interesting issue today. We use a dedicated port range for RPC connections through firewall per this Microsoft article. Doing so allows RPC to work through dedicated hardware firewalls. We also enable the local Windows firewall on several boxes as this provides a firewall for any systems not using a dedicated piece [...]

We recently began using Microsoft’s built-in SFC (System File Checker) as part of our FIM (File Integrity Monitoring) solution for PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance. This great feature will compute hashes of core system files and compare those against originals looking for differences. If any are found, it can automatically replace those files with the original. The best [...]

Nessus from Tenable Network Security is an invaluable tool for vulnerability scanning. As a windows-only shop, we were very pleased that Nessus would run on a Windows platform. For our configuration, we have a server sitting outside of our firewall with multiple public IP addresses. We configured firewall policies for the system’s primary IP address [...]

We recently completed a project to move over 300 servers from our old backup infrastructure to a brand new disk-based DPM 2007 solution. We have been very pleased with DPM 2007 thus far, but are finding that it required a fair amount of hand holding in the mornings to kick off failed jobs, increase disk allocations, [...]

Squeezing every ounce of performance out of your disk array is critical in IO intensive applications. Most times, this is simply an after-thought. However, doing a little leg-work during the implementation phase can go a long way to increasing the performance of your application. Aligning partitions is a great idea for SQL and virtualized environments [...]

Every now and then we have problems deleting or changing permissions on a file because it is open by a process. However, we often times have trouble finding that process. There is a neat sysinternals (now MS) utility called "handle" that will show you all open handles on a file, and, more importantly, let you [...]

We ran into an issue today where a customer was having problems serving content from a folder named "example.com". IIS6 was simply returning a 404 error. I immediately suspected something like URLScan but I eventually found it was due to the execute permissions configured on the parent virtual directory. When the customer configured the virtual directory, [...]

While evaluating SAN storage solutions for our VMWare environment, we found ourselves asking the question "How many systems can we fit on this system before IOPs and/or throughput become a bottleneck?" Come to find out, the answer is not a simple one. In fact, all of the vendors we posed this question to were only [...]