Archive for June 15th, 2009
Increase Virtual Hard Disk
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, troubleshooting on June 15, 2009
We’ve started with virtualization, I’ll talk about this beautiful sexy technology some other time. My hands are all over it.
When creating virtual machines, each seems to have it’s own hard disk and partitions, but in fact they all share a single storage to which the virtual server that manages the virtual machines points to.
I got one v-machine with 20 GB of hard disk space and I want to increase it. Through the setting of the machines you can increase the hard disk space. Back to the v-machine, go to computer management -> disk management, you’ll see the newly unallocated space, to partition and format.
I couldn’t extend my single primary partition with the tools available in windows, I think I’ll need third party softwares.
What I did, is clone my v-machine and as I was creating the new settings, increased the C volume space. of course, you’ll need enough space to be able to create this replica machine.
Don’t forget to, tick off the connected box in network settings, if you added a network, because you don’t want conflict issues, when powering on the new machine.
Will test it fully tomorrow, to make sure all is good. Give the same settings, IP, computer name, etc, to the newly created v-machine and shut down the original one. If all goes well after some time, delete the original one to free up some space.
IT Diaries
Posted by Bloggylife in thoughts on June 15, 2009
All the servers are black
Stacked up in multiple racks
They all look the same
Driving me insane!
I go to the one
It’s off, I turn it on
I get a call, “the website is down”
Shit, reverse action, wrong server, DAMN!
I try to bring it back on,
I can’t press that white button, come on
My finger is too big
It’s doesn’t seem to fit!
I need something pointy
Nothing near comes in handy
Don’t freak out
You know what it’s all about
Enough with the sadness
The daily dosage of sweet addictive blackness
Your coffee, still filled up to the top
In that humongous steel mug
Take a break, breathe and sip away
Then definitely you’ll figure out the right way 
And off you go, trotting through the rest of the day 
Cont. Deploying Application Packages
Posted by Bloggylife in troubleshooting, windows on June 15, 2009
I’ll share some of the issues we faced along the way, we already deployed WSUS into our network that pushes Microsoft updates according to your GPO settings on the domain level.
I came across another product, Microsoft System Center Essentials (link), which also includes WSUS technology but adds to that updates of third parties software, how cool is that
If you have problems installing the management software from a media, go to Microsoft website and download it from there along with SP1 (link). That solved the first problem I faced.
Upon the configuration, it’ll ask you if you want to automatically create a domain policy, you’ll need administrative privileges and then go ahead search for computers and add manually or in a bulk.
One advice, when choosing the server, take care it has enough hard disk space, for all the software updates and deployment packages it needs to store.
Pushing agents to computers, is through the management console, where you select a computer and provide administrator credentials. You can create package from .exe or .msi files.
You can group computers and approve package installation. For msi packages you can provide installation properties, The executable program that interprets packages and installs products is Msiexec.exe. To see the list of parameters, run this on a command prompt window Msiexec, the below should appear.
On a single domain, you can have only one Microsoft System Center, it’ll give you an error if you try to install another System Center on a network already managed by one.
You can force end computers to communicate with the system center to check for updates or software that needs to be downloaded through running this command on end machines.
wuauclt.exe /detectnow
If indeed there is something to be downloaded, the yellow shield will appear next to the time and date, machines may face problems downloading, check this out:
- Windows update service is running
- All antivirus applications are up to date, because if they are not, they will block such activities. Check if windows defender is installed, that was one of the problems that caused download to fail
After the download is complete and according to your global setting the installation should start, to check the time of installation, check your local windows update settings, which can be access through the control panel or on the domain level settings.
This product offers so much more, details about the machines it managing through their agents, it triggers alerts, and generates reports.
But for now, I was really glad to be able to push third party packages silently to end machines and check the status as successful
References:
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