Cool Video Sunday

Only one video for this weekend, but it is a video interpretation of the Holstee Manifesto that seems to be viral craze!

SCOM 2012 Quick Start Guide

We are busy deploying SCOM 2007 R2 at work – unfortunately the testing and deployment phase had started before I arrived – so I haven’t really had much input; given the strategic importance SCOM plays in running a Microsoft-heavy infrastructure, I really wish I had; amd it is a very cool product that looks very good on your CV.

SCOM 2012 is slowly starting to drum up some news, and I came across a Microsoft blog with notes on deploying SCOM 2012 quicky. I am sticking it on here for safe keeping, so I can refer back to it once the new SCOM gets the green light and enters the RTM phase.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2011/07/26/deploying-opsmgr-2012-a-quick-start-guide.aspx

Installation Procedure for SharePoint 2010 SP1

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 is a welcome relief to resolve a number of issues as well as add a number of new features. Office Web Apps SP1 also looks to bring enhancements and stability.

The real nightmare behind SP1 was a very quick release of June 2011 Cumulative Update to resolve FIM issues in SP1, and there were bugs in the update that required it to be re-released – all but making the SP1 deployment process something from a Stephen King novel.

I have done a fair amount of reading online, both from Microsoft and SharePoint MVPs, I have also done my own amount of testing on replica environments of our live system. Taking in to account my own experience with SharePoint, I will be following this process to update my 3 tier farm (1 Web Front End Server, 1 Application Server, 3 SQL Server in a mirror with a witness):

Create backups and test their restore to a test farm

• Run a full SharePoint 2010 backup
• Run a full SQL Server backup of all databases

Stop any services that could interrupt the install process:

• Disable SQL Server Maintenance plan that runs every 30 minutes to backup the transaction log for all databases
• Stop the Search Service Incremental Index crawler

Run the installs on the Application Server:

• Install SharePoint 2010 Foundation SP1
• Install SharePoint 2010 Server SP1
• Install Office Web Apps SP1
• Reboot the Server

We need to ensure all the databases are updated to the same version as the installed binaries:

• Run the SharePoint 2010 Product Configuration Wizard on the Application Server
• Run the SharePoint 2010 Product Configuration Wizard on the Web Front End Server

Run the installs on the Application Server:

• Install SharePoint 2010 Foundation June 2011 Cumulative Update
• Install SharePoint 2010 Server June 2011 Cumulative Update
• Reboot the Server

We need to ensure all the databases are updated to the same version as the installed binaries:

• Run the SharePoint 2010 Product Configuration Wizard on the Application Server
• Run the SharePoint 2010 Product Configuration Wizard on the Web Front End Server

Final Reboot

• I found that I needed to do a reboot on my second set of testing as the UPS wouldn’t run as it thought it the server was in a shutting down state
• It did have to do this a few days on the first set of testing I did

If you have the User Profile Service running, I think I read somewhere that you need to restart it:

• Open Central Administration, and go to Manage Services on this Server
• If the User Profile Synchronization Service is running, select Stop
• Start the User Profile Synchronization Service, providing your Farm Admin credentials
• Close Central Administration
• Run IISReset from a Command Prompt

Assuming all the installs and wizards have run successfully, I would recommend rerunning your backups:

• Run a full SharePoint 2010 backup
• Run a full SQL Server backup of all databases

With successful backups, you can re-enable your services:

• Enable SQL Server Maintenance plan that runs every 30 minutes to backup the transaction log for all databases
• Start the Search Service Incremental Index crawler

Run a UPS full sync:

• Run a UPS full sync, as I started to get Event ID 5555 errors. This blog post refers to some stsadm commands to run, however I found that a full sync cleaned up the errors for me

Check Upgrade status:

• I won’t print out all the checks to run, as you can verify your update success via this Microsoft Technet article.

UPDATE: When you run the installs, somewhere along the line (probably SP1), the CEIP Data Collection Timer Job is enabled. This can kick up errors if it wasn’t previosuly enabled due to DCOM permissions. You will need to go to Central Administration, then under Monitoring and select Job Definitions to find CEIP Data Collection, and to Disable it if you continue in not wanting to send SharePoint reports off to Microsoft. I found that CEIP had been enabled on the SharePoint Central Administration Web Application, so under Manage Web Applications in Central Administration, select the Central Administration Web Application and select General Settings and at very bottom of the list, you can turn off CEIP without having to disable the Timer job. I also noticed that I hadn’t set the Time Zone and was wondering why (all of a sudden), the UPS log file showed the import results 2 hours behind the current time here in Cape Town.

UPDATE: I wouldn’t run any backups after the SP1 installations if you intend to apply the Cumulative Updates straight after – it seems to cause a little mess with the UPS (as the backups stop the UPS services and restarts them and the backup failed).

UPDATE: According to this blog post, the user runs the updates on the Web Front End first and then the Application servers – I was going to do it the other way round, but have updated by order above to conform with theirs.

UPDATE: This Microsoft Technet article also recommends upgrading your Web Front End servers first. It also confirms that you should run the SharePoint 2010 Product Configuration Wizard on the Application Servers first, then the Web Front End servers.

The above blog post also provides at the very least a base checklist of items to test after SP1 and the Cumulative Update are applied:

1. Edit and View Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents in the browser
2. View My Sites
3. Test User Profile Synchronization
4. Tag Pages and check for tags in Newsfeed
5. View a Visio Web Access Drawing in the Browser
6. Work in an Access Web Database site
7. Add an obscure word to a page or document, do an incremental search crawl, and search for the word
8. Add terms and/or term sets to the Managed Metadata store
9. View Reporting Services Reports (or Access Web Database Reports)

Depending on how successful the above went, how clean your Event Logs are, and generally how brave you are, you can now install the June 2011 Cumulative Update following the same process as above – backup, install the Foundation update followed by the Server update, reboot, run PSConfig, re-provision the User Profile Service, backup and then re-enabled disabled services.

Microsoft seem to recommend installing the SP1 and Cumulative Update at the same time – I would prefer to get a stable backup in between the installation of the updates so if something fails, you only have to go back halfway and not end up starting from the very beginning.

My advice is do this on a weekend, preferably a Saturday if you can, then you have an extra day in case something goes wrong. Secondly. you won’t be rushed if doing this on a weekday. I will be doing mine next weekend as long as no mishaps show up between now and then. I will let you know if I go with the Cumulative Update.

UPDATE: Since applying the updates, SharePoint does seem snappier and more stable - I havent tested Google Chrome support but I have played with Sub Site Recycle Bin restores and that works aplomb!

National Lottery Numbers

I don’t follow star signs religiously or have a major belief in them, but there are coincidences between the stereotype personalities of each sign.

Each star sign has its own set of lucky numbers, and my Capricorn numbers are used for a weekly play on the National Lottery, here they are for safe keeping:

08 17 23 26 35 44

…a nice even spread across the board. Fingers crossed.

Heavy Chef: Rich Mulholland

I love this guy, and we seem to share the same way of thinking. It was only the other day that I had a similiar discussion with a guy at work about how there needs to be some sort of underlying authentication system that ties all the social networks together, whereby the user decides what personal information is available to networks/businesses – Rich’s point is about how it would benefit us in a social context.

The problem is, who runs this? Who is trusted to run this? Can we feel safe that all of our personal information is centralised in one place? Sony shows they can’t be trusted after their PlayStation Network was hacked. Can Google be trusted, especially when all that information will be indexed by them (i.e. how they scanned people’s emails in Gmail and provided ads based on the content of the emails, or pretty much why they started Google+).

ID Cards in the UK was a very touchy subject with regards to trust and Government-managed projects. Can we trust 3rd party systems anymore that Government systems?

Linux Integration Services 3.1 for Hyper-V

For all my skeptism for Twitter, I did come across this announcement on Twitter: the release of Linux Integration Services 3.1 for Hyper-V.

The updates primarily add support for:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 and 6.1 x86 and x64 (Up to 4 vCPU)
• CentOS 6.0 x86 and x64 (Up to 4 vCPU)

The features of V3.1 of the Linux Integration Services are:

• “Driver support: Linux Integration Services supports the network controller and the IDE and SCSI storage controllers that were developed specifically for Hyper-V.
• Fastpath Boot Support for Hyper-V: Boot devices now take advantage of the block Virtualization Service Client (VSC) to provide enhanced performance.
• Timesync: The clock inside the virtual machine will remain synchronized with the clock on the virtualization server with the help of the pluggable time source device.
• Integrated Shutdown: Virtual machines running Linux can be shut down from either Hyper-V Manager or System Center Virtual Machine Manager by using the “Shut Down” command.
• Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) Support: Supported Linux distributions can use up to 4 virtual processors (VP) per virtual machine.  SMP support is not available for 32-bit Linux guest operating systems running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008.
• Heartbeat: Allows the virtualization server to detect whether the virtual machine is running and responsive.
• KVP (Key Value Pair) Exchange: Information about the running Linux virtual machine can be obtained by using the Key Value Pair exchange functionality on the Windows Server 2008 virtualization server”.

…and something else that I have long wished for…the ability to install the drivers using rpm! No more Perl scripts to run! The benefit of this (I think?) is that it should allow a far easier deployment of Linux VMs.

There is a PDF ReadMe to accompany the installer (containing an ISO of the drivers), that has details on how to do the install. It mentions how Linux VMs must have static MAC addresses set in the VM settings for each NIC if used in a Hyper-V cluster, because of the way Linux handles MAC addresses. From a automation perspective, this could be an issue – certainly something I need to look in to.

I am glad this came out now, as I wanted to build a CentOS VM to act as a proxy/firewall, and was going to use CentOS v6.0 x64, but reverted back to v5.6 because the 2.1 version of the Integration Components wasn’t supported.

I am very encouraged by the speed at which these drivers came out, as CentOS v6.0 was realised only a few weeks ago, so this is very promising. I think the next step for Microsoft is to get the drivers built in to the OS, much like Ubuntu. I did an Ubuntu 11.04 install yesterday on Hyper-V, and enabling the drivers is done by simply adding four lines of code to a file and running an update command afterwards!

SharePoint is…

I have been catching up on my blog reading, and came across this post with had the image below – and it is far too engaging to not share!

Replacing Custom Intranets & Extranets with SharePoint

Although residing in Cape Town, I am the IT Manager for Special Ambulance Transfer Service (SATS). The website will give a better synopsis of what they do:

Special Ambulance Transfer Service Ltd (SATS) provide a comprehensive critical care service to both the public and private health sectors. We can provide fully equipped mobile “ITU” units, with highly trained and appropriate staff, 24 hours a day, to anywhere in the UK mainland and Europe.

Since day one, I have provided all their IT needs, from the logo design to the office network. I have developed two hosted systems for SATS, a website and an extranet. Both systems are custom ASP applications, built on the .NET 2.0 Framework. The website fulfils the usual business criteria, but it makes use of AJAX to provide dynamic forms for transfer and event booking with NHS hospitals and private clients; it even has a fancy recruitment application form which I am very proud of.

The Extranet was a much bigger project and was also a real nightmare at times. It offers User Profile accounts to each staff member, as well as access to all company policies, forms, and training documents. It allows management to post Staff Announcements via email to all staff members as well as write Company News articles for the website.

The advanced part of the Extranet is the online management of the transfer and event bookings. As bookings are made, managers can dynamically update the status and details of each booking, i.e. time of crew dispatch, arrivals and finishes. This information is then able to give managers a daily/weekly/monthly assessment of the jobs and their types that the company does. This level of reporting can then be passed back to the individual hospitals that SATS work with, so that they can review the jobs being done.

The Extranet does have a social aspect with a simple custom Message Board, however it is quite primitive and not of much use.

The Extranet is one of those projects that just will never end and the cost of custom work is always an issue when reviewing the list of the latest changes, additions and bug fixes.

The past six months has seen me work extensively on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise, and I have been able to work on a number of its features that are beginning to make me wonder whether it is time to scrap the Extranet and rather migrate it to a SharePoint farm.

The idea would be to create an Intranet, and extend it to an Extranet. SATS do not currently make use of SharePoint internally for their document management, which is something I have always wanted to get round to doing, as it would allow us to scrap endless duplicate files and structured spread sheets that can be turned in to lists. It would also allow the company to allow document access to off site workers without the need to send out emails with attachments (and running the risk of increasing document duplication).

The Extranet does a lot of document management that is duplicated from the office network (files exported to PDF and uploaded to the Extranet), so by extending the Intranet online, it would allow office workers to publish documents instead of waiting for me to do it (which involves creating the PDFs, uploading them to the web server and manually inserting HTML). The permissions on the Extranet are not as granular as I would like, so tying in AD user accounts would enable a much finer permissions structure, which can be managed by the office workers themselves.

By utilising the Business Connectivity Service (BCS) in SharePoint, I can use InfoPath forms and lists to allow the managers to work on the Transfer booking data, and then use PerformancePoint to create dashboards based on the data and publish them to managers and clients.

The Portal may need to remain around for some tasks such as Staff Announcements, however I could use the site Announcements and Alert Me feature to get around this. I can integrate the updating of Company News in SharePoint too.

I think the most important point to consider here, is cost. Extranet development is a costly exercise both financially and in time. Developing new features requires my time to design and build them. They are also limited by budget constraints. Time is also an issue by the amount of manual work I currently do updating the data on the Extranet; work which can be automated or done by office workers. By migrating to SharePoint, we would essentially be able to offload the development time and cost on to Microsoft, and that would allow me to apply my time to more useful projects over repetitive exercises.

The more I think about it, the more I really want to get cracking on my current SharePoint project so that I can learn as much as possible and take this information back to SATS. SharePoint is a user-managed tool and that’s exactly what SATS need. I have Lync 2010 on my project roadmap as well, and this will be something I really want to see how I can integrate at SATS as communication is a big part of their business.

Building a Redundant Web Farm

I am working on a Windows Shared Hosting project at the moment, utilising WebsitePanel in a redundant IIS web farm configuration to load balance the application processing as well as make the configs and content redundant.

I have written about it a little so far, but came across Scott Forsyth’s blog yesterday which I wish I had found these videos earlier! They pretty much cover everything I have learnt so far, but also go in to storage replication with DFS (which I was going to use a horrible robocopy script to do) and more details on how everything works.

I will only be posting the videos most useful for me, but you can view the whole series on dotnetslackers.com, or via his blog.

Securing IIS. Thwarting the Hacker (Week 23)

Why You Shouldn’t Use Web Gardens in IIS (Week 24)

How to Setup an Active Directory Domain (Week 26)

DFS-R for Web Server Replication (Week 27)

IIS 7.x Shared Configuration – Advanced Tips and Tricks (Week 29)

The Facebook Book

I did write in the past about a business idea that allowed people to have their Facebook profiles turned in to a book…well it seems that someone has beaten me to it!

Jason Dunn at DigitialHomeThoughts.com had one printed, and to be honest, it looks pretty tacky. It is such a great idea, however it do think it needs a little work. I suppose I could do Twitter instead, although that doesn’t have the same collage of images in it – however it would mean that it wouldn’t allow someone to give access to their account so you could do it as a gift.