Thursday, October 29, 2009

Running Admin Tools from a non-domain joined computer

As a consultant I find myself at client sites and working from my Statera laptop that I do not join to the clients domain. So usually my only option for running admin tools is to remote into a server and run the tools from there, not too bad. Tried running with the runas command and it never worked, even though I usually have domain admin credentials in the clients domain, get an error. So a friend of mine posted a link to this blog post, http://www.jameskovacs.com/blog/TIPHowToRunProgramsAsADomainUserFromANondomainComputer.aspx
here the author talks about running SQL tools in a similar situation to me. So I tried it out for a few other admin tools and yes, it works great. The trick if you didn't already follow the link is to use the /netonly switch in the runas command line argument:
runas /netonly /user:domain\username "Path to admin tool"
works like a charm and plan to use it more at client locations. I am also toying with the idea of creating a Powershell application to automate this, if I get it going will post it as well.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

SCVMM 2008 R2 Problem with P2V from Dell Physical Server

Had a client that I upgraded to 2008 R2 Hyper-V and SCVMM 2008 R2. When they tried to P2V Dell Physical servers they received BSOD or errors on the Install Integration Services step. We tried over and over and could not successfully P2V the server. We then tested to see if a new VM build had any problems with installing Integration Services, worked perfectly. So we ended up getting Microsoft Premier Support involved. After several tests and trials later the problem was solved; the problem dealt with the physical server being build with the Dell OpenManage startup CD. Seems this method of build set a registry key that conflicts with the Integration Services install. The key in question is:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Wdf01000\Group] = Base
changing the key to "WdfLoadGroup" and rebooting the VM allowed the Integration Services to install successfully.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Exchange 2010 Code Complete

The MSExchange Team guys are reporting that the Exchange 2010 Code is complete and is on schedule for RTM in early November.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/10/08/452775.aspx