chaoticsoul

We discovered this month that by default hibernation is enabled on all Windows 2008 installs.  Thereby potentially consuming large amounts of disk space depending on the hardware in the server.  As we discovered with our SharePoint servers, we had an 8GB hibernation file on each server.  Fortunately this is easy to fix, by simply opening an administrative command prompt and typing <powercfg.exe -h off> to disable hibernation.

Our SharePoint rollout should be complete and officially in production by the end of this month.  So with that being said I spent some time updating all of the support documentation that goes with that, and discovered it hadn’t been updated since prior to our upgrade to 2008 on all of our SharePoint servers, so all of the instructions for setting the SSL host headers were wrong.

I prepped our test SharePoint farm to do some DR/backup/restore testing via Legato, only to discover that the current version isn’t supported if your backup server is running on Linux, so that appears to have been a wasted effort.  Supposedly the next version will correct this issue, I guess we’re back to waiting for EMC to provide a viable backup and restore method for SharePoint.

I spent quite a bit of time working on ISA this month.  ITS-HCWNAP61 is now officially in production supporting our OCS deployment.  I rebuilt and prepped ITS-HCWNAP60 to join the array, and discovered several potential issues while testing the change in our test environment, and have had to defer my original change.
•    It appears the issue that caused us to rebuild our ISA servers repeatedly, where whichever node didn’t house the CSS would start to deny all incoming requests, is actually due to how NLB utilizes unicast, and most switches aren’t configured by default to allow all traffic destined for a specific MAC to be sent to multiple switch ports.  I’m currently testing a potential fix for this in our test environment.
•    In researching the previously mentioned problem, I stumbled across several things we weren’t aware of when we initially deployed ISA.  When using NLB, intra-array communication cannot pass on any interface using NLB.  Also, it is recommended that your Intra-array communication reside on a private network, a daunting challenge in our environment, since this private network also requires AD access, and is heavily used for Kerberos authentication, as well as passing configuration back and forth between all array members.