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BSOD: Vipre Premium and Citrix Tools

Filed Under: Tech Help by Dave — Leave a comment
March 27, 2012

I’ve chased, along with Citrix and Microsoft support, a bug with my Windows 2008 servers running on XenServer for months, and believe I’ve finally got the fix figured out.

First a little back story.

I switched from Symantec to Sunbelt Vipre Premium in 2010. The move went off without an issue on my then fleet of Windows 2003 32bit & 64bit servers. We moved to a new building in November of 2010 and I spun up new Windows 2008 R2 servers at the new site. Initially I didn’t notice if shutdowns took an inordinate amount of time and resulted in A BSOD. I first really noticed it when completing the December 2010 Windows updates. Most of the 2008 server updates were failing because the reboot process was taking so long.

Thinking it may be related to an old version of Desktop Authority, I began removing the service as I was moving to GP Prefs anyway. This did nothing to fix the issue. At this time I noticed that it was only my 2008 R2 servers that were affected, or so I thought. I engaged a MSP I use for additional help from time to time and they suggested that I reinstall the Citrix Tools. That worked until it was time for another round of Windows Updates.

This is when Citrix & Microsoft Support was brought in to take a look. We generated dump files, reinstalled Citrix Tools countless times, but still couldn’t nail down the cause. All they could tell was it had something to do with the network drivers. I then realized it wasn’t only my Windows 2008 R2 boxes, but all 2008 (32 & 64 bit) boxes and that they all had Vipre Premium installed. I had recently spun up some new 2008 R2 servers and installed vanilla Vipre them. These servers didn’t have the BSOD issue when shutting down.

I then began to remove the firewall enabled version of Vipre and replace it with regular Vipre. Trouble is, this didn’t fix the issue either. What the hell?

Around this time I had done a P2V on a server and was cleaning up the hidden devices when I saw that Vipre Premium had left it’s hooks in the NIC drivers. Thinking that this might be the same for the Vipre Premium to Vipre servers I took a look at device manager on an affected server. Bingo! You can see the traces left behind here.

Now I needed a good way to get rid of the offending driver. I wasn’t able to just uninstall it from device manager. Uninstalling the Citrix driver didn’t get rid of the hooks either. I ended up having to uninstall Citrix tools, reboot, uninstall the physical NIC, reboot, let Windows reinstall the physical NIC then reinstall Citrix Tools and reboot. Only then do I not see the Vipre Firewall driver.

It took nearly 10 months for this to be resolved and caused no end of head aches for me.

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HP Procurve Switch Firmware Update

Filed Under: Tech Help by Dave — Comments Off
March 23, 2012

A nice and detailed step-by-step guide can be found here.

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DHCP Options for WDS 2008 when using a separate DHCP server

Filed Under: Tech Help by Dave — Leave a comment
February 2, 2012

I installed a Windows Deployment Server today and while setting up the PXE boot options I hit a road block. No where in the MS documentation that I’ve come across is this info given. All the tutorials I’ve watched all install a DHCP server on the same servers as WDS. I was only able to find the reference here.

For future reference the DHCP settings are:

OPTION 66 = IP OF WDS Server
OPTION 67 = \boot\x86\wdsnbp.com

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Filed Under: Tech Help by Dave — Leave a comment
January 16, 2012

I came across the following error while trying to add a mail enabled group to a Public Folder:

1st I tried changing the group from distribution to security, but, I still got the same error.

Then I found this post. Turns out the GUI doesn’t completely change the object. You need to run the following command from the Exchange Management Shell (Exchange 2007 for me):

Set-Distributiongroup–identity

In my case it was:

Set-DistributionGroup -identity AmbCare

You can read the linked post for the command for Exchange 2010.

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How-to Remove Dangling Storage Repositories

Filed Under: Tech Help by Dave — Leave a comment
July 6, 2011

While building my XenServer farm I had a couple servers die on me, requiring XenServer to be re-installed. This left the local storage, DVD & removable storage from each dead server dangling in the pool. They show up in XenCenter as greyed out repositories.

To get the GUID of the dangling SR’s run this command from any host in the pool:

xe sr-list –minimal params=uuid host=”<not in database>”

Then run this command using the GUID’s from the above command to remove them:

xe sr-forget uuid=%dangling-SR-GUID%

Repeat the command to remove each of your dangling storage repositories.

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Creed of the IT Guy

Filed Under: Life by Dave — 2 Comments
April 23, 2011

This was posted on the Spiceworks Water Cooler forum recently and every word is completely true.

      1. If you ask me technical questions please don’t argue with me because you don’t like my answer. If you think you know more about the topic, why ask? And if I’m arguing with you…it’s because I am positive that I am correct, otherwise I’d just say “I don’t know” or give you some tips on where to look it up, I don’t have the time to just argue for the sake of it.
      2. Starting a conversation by insulting yourself (i.e. “I’m such an idiot”) will not make me laugh, or feel sorry for you; all it will do is remind me that yes, you are an idiot and that I am going to hate having to talk to you. Trust me; you don’t want to start a call that way.
      3. I am ok with you making mistakes, fixing them is my job. I am not ok with you lying to me about a mistake you made. It makes it much harder to resolve and thus makes my job more difficult. Be honest and we can get the problem resolved and continue on with our business.
      4. There is no magic “Fix it” button. Everything takes some amount of work to fix, and not everything is worth fixing or even possible to fix. If I say that you just need to re-do a document that you accidentally deleted 2 months ago, please don’t get mad at me. I’m not ignoring your problem, and it’s not that I don’t like you, I just can’t always fix everything.
      5. Not everything you ask me to do is “urgent”. In fact, by marking things as “urgent” every time, you almost ensure that I treat none of it as a priority.
      6. You are not the only one who needs help, and you usually don’t have the most urgent issue. Give me some time to get to your problem, it will get fixed.
      7. Emailing me several times about the same issue in the same day is not only unnecessary, it’s highly annoying. Emails will stay until I delete them, I won’t delete them until I’m done with them. I will typically respond as soon as I have a useful update. If it is an urgent issue, let me know (see number 5).
      8. Yes, I prefer email over telephone calls. It has nothing to do with being friendly, it’s about efficiency. It is much faster and easier for me to list out a set of questions that I need you to answer than it is for me to call and ask you them one by one. You can find the answers at your leisure and while I’m waiting I can work on other problems.
      9. Yes, I seem blunt and rude. It’s not that I mean to, I just don’t have the time to sugar coat things for you. I assume we are both adults and can handle the reality of a problem. If you did something wrong, I will tell you. I don’t care that it was a mistake, because it really makes no difference to me. Don’t take it personal, I just don’t want it to happen again.
      10. And finally, yes, I can read your email, I can see what web pages you look at while you are at work, yes, I can access every file on your work computer, and I can tell if you are chatting with people on an instant messenger or chat room (and can also read what you are typing). But no, I don’t do it. It’s unethical, I’m busy, and in all reality you aren’t all that interesting. So unless I am instructed to specifically monitor or investigate your actions, I don’t. There really are much more interesting things on the internet than you.

Your friendly neighbourhood IT Guy

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Winter 2010-2011

Filed Under: Life by Dave — Comments Off
February 20, 2011
Winter 2010-11
241 photos
 


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Stop The Meter On Your Internet Use

Filed Under: Tech News by Dave — 2 Comments
February 3, 2011



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Move a Single Virtual Disk to a New Storage Repository

Filed Under: Tech Help by Dave — 1 Comment
January 4, 2011

I needed to quickly add a second disk to a VM during our recent facility move and didn’t have time to create a new Storage Repository (SR). Now with some time to clean things up in my XenServer farm I wanted to move the disk to its own SR. I ended up being stumped when using the XenCenter console and needed to use the xe CLI. This page had the commands that I required to make the copy to the new SR. Just remember to use the vdi-uuid of the vdisk you want to move.

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Roll Your Own Xmarks Server

Filed Under: Tech Help by Dave — 11 Comments
September 28, 2010

With the impending closure of Xmarks this January I decided to look for a way to keep using the service. Since I still used Firefox as my primary browser and I remembered that you could host your own bookmarks with the Xmarks BYOS Edition I decided to head down that path. Xmarks BYOS is only available as a Firefox add-on. I don’t expect development to extend to Chrome, IE or Safari.

You will need to have access to a FTP server to host your own Xmarks files. You can host your own FTP server with Filezilla Server or use space on a web server if you have FTP access to it. (Setup of Filezilla is beyond the scope of this post. I may add a tutorial on this in the future.)

Here are the steps we will follow to use Xmarks BYOS:

  1. uninstall Xmarks
  2. create a folder on your FTP server
  3. install Xmarks BYOS
  4. configure Xmarks to use your FTP site

Step 1: Uninstall Xmarks

  • Open Firefox
  • Click on Tools
  • Click on Ad-Ons
  • Highlight Xmarks
  • Click Uninstall
  • Reboot Firefox

Step 2: Setup your FTP server

  • Create a folder on your FTP server called “Xmarks”

Wow that was easy wasn’t it?

Step 3: Install Xmarks BYOS

  • Head here for the installer
  • Click on the Continue to Download button
  • Click the Download button
  • Accept all prompts and reboot Firefox to complete the install

Step 4: Configure Xmarks BYOS

  • Enter your FTP site username and password in the appropriate fields.
  • Enter the URL to your FTP site
    • i.e. ftp://ftp-server-address/xmarks/bookmarks.json
    • i.e. ftp://ftp-server-address/xmarks/passwords.json
  • Click Synchronize now
    • If you want to sync your passwords click on the Sync tab and check the passwords check box
    • Enter the password you want for your passwords file. This cannot be the same as your Xmarks BYOC password.
  • Click OK to finish

You can repeat steps 3 & 4 on as many computers are you require. Just make sure the settings are exactly the same or sync will not work.

If you’re using your own FTP server make sure to make backup copies of your .json files.

UPDATE 29/09/10:

Thanks to Jonathan & Alicia we see that BYOS will not work with Firefox 4.0, whenever it is released. However, Alicia reports that these instructions do work with the latest Xmarks release, which you can find info on here.

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