At ClearPointe, we provide our managed clients a Web-based portal on which they can view detailed information regarding their servers and devices. Included on each portal is a series of weekly reports generated in Operations Manager 2007 and saved to a network share in .PDF format. The automated process works fine; however, the generated PDF files have not included any of the charts that are rendered when viewed directly from the Reporting space of the Operations Manager 2007 Console.

I spent some time today troubleshooting the problem, initially focusing on SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services as the root of the problem. I soon realized that the problem was not originating with Reporting Services but most likely a configuration issue in OpsMgr Reporting. I began researching that angle and quickly came across the following Microsoft Support article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972821

The support article states that the symptom of the problem is Event ID 108 being logged in the Application event log of the SQL Reporting Services server. The image below was taken directly from our SRS server:

The resolution of the problem involves editing the ReportingServicesService.exe.config file located in the ReportServer\bin directory on the SQL Reporting Services server. Open the file in an editor such as Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Applications and add the following code between the <assemblyBinding> and </assemblyBinding> tags:

Click to view an enlarged version

Save the changes to the file and restart the SQL Server Reporting Services service. Rerun the report in the Reporting space of the Operations Manager 2007 Console and view the generated .PDF files. The desired charts and graphs are now included in the report.

We recently received an alert in our Operations Center from the Operations Manager Exchange Management Pack stating that a client Exchange 2010 managed server did not have a test mailbox. I logged onto the server to create the test mailbox using the Exchange Management Shell. I ran the new-TestCasConnectivityUser.ps1 cmdlet and it returned an unusual error:

CreateTestUser: Mailbox could not be created. Verify that OU ‘Users’ exists and that password meets complexity requirements

The default ‘Users’ OU existed in the client’s Active Directory and I knew that the password submitted met the complexity requirements for the domain. I started researching the error and came across a blog post by Rikard Ronnkvist of Sweden. He had disected and debugged the powershell script and came up with the following command:

When he ran the command the output stated that “Multiple organizational units match identity ‘Users’. Specify a unique value.”

While reviewing the Organizational Unit structure of the client’s Active Directory, I discovered a second OU named “Users,” which was a child OU of an “SBS Users” OU. I edited the powershell script and changed the value of the $OrganizationalUnit variable to “SBS Users/Users.” I again attempted to create the test user mailbox by running the following command:

get-mailboxServer | .\new-TestCasConnectivityUser.ps1

The script completed successfully and the test user mailbox was created in the SBS Users/Users OU. If you experience the same error when attempting to create a test mailbox, look for that second “Users” OU! Thanks to Rikard Ronnkvist for sharing his solution with the Internet community.

In the almost ten years that I have been in the Information Technology industry, I had never had any trouble uninstalling an application from a Windows computer using the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel applet – at least until now — and I have used the following method twice in the past few weeks.

When you are unable to uninstall an application using the GUI provided by Windows, you can easily uninstall it using the Windows Management Instrumentation command-line interface (WMIC). This works on all current versions of Windows.

Open a command prompt and type WMIC and press [Enter]. The new prompt will now look like this:

wmic:root \cli>

At the new prompt, type the following command and press [Enter]:

product get name

This command will return a list of installed applications. At the prompt, type the following command and press [Enter], where application name is the name of the program you want to uninstall, entered exactly as it is displayed in the list returned by the previous command.

product where name=”application name” call uninstall

You will then be prompted to confirm that you want to uninstall the application. Type y at the prompt and then press [Enter]. The application will be uninstall without further user intervention.

Today I was installing an Operations Manager 2007 R2 Agent on a customer’s server. The installation had almost completed when an error dialog box appeared (shown below) stating that the installation routine failed to uninstall the SDK MOF. The installation routine then initiated a rollback action.

I did a search using the Bing search engine and quickly came across a blog posting by Kare Rude Andersen that addressed the problem and provided a solution.  The error is the result of the WMI (Windows Management Instumentation) repository being in an inconsistent state.

If you are receiving the error shown above, right-click on the Computer icon (or My Computer if running an OS prior to Windows Server 2008) and select Properties from the pop-up menu.  On the System properties dialog box (shown below), locate the processor and memory information. If a WMI repository inconsistency exists, no information will be shown for these items.

To return the WMI repository to a consistent state, open a command prompt and navigate to the C:\Windows\system32\wbem directory. Run the following command:

winmgmt /verifyrepository

If the result returned by running the above command is “WMI repository is INCONSISTENT,” run  the following command to salvage the repository:

winmgmt /salvagerepository

If the repository is salvaged successfully, the above command will complete with the result “WMI repository has been salvaged.” To complete the operation, run the following command:

for /f %s in (‘dir /b *.mof *.mfl’) do mofcomp %s

Apparently, in some cases, it might be necessary to copy *.mof files from another computer running the same OS version and type (x86/x64) and rerun the final command listed above. In my case, this was not necessary. After salvaging the WMI repository, your Operations Manager 2007 R2 Agent should install successfully.

One day I hopped in a taxi and we took off for the airport. We were driving in the right lane when suddenly a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us.

My taxi driver slammed on his brakes, skidded, and missed the other car by just inches! The driver of the other car whipped his head around and started yelling at us.

My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy. And I mean, he was really friendly. So I asked, “Why did you just do that? This guy almost ruined your car and sent us to the hospital!” This is when my taxi driver taught me what I now call “The Law of the Garbage Truck.”

He explained that many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and sometimes they’ll dump it on you. Don’t take it personally.

Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Don’t take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, home, or on the streets.

The bottom line is that successful people do not let garbage trucks take over their day. Life’s too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so…

Love the people who treat you right.
Pray for the ones who don’t.
Life is ten percent what you make it and ninety percent how you take it!
Have a great, garbage-free day!

I was first introduced to this writing when it was posted on Facebook today by rock legend Peter Frampton. A quick Internet search revealed that it was written by David J. Pollay after a real life experience in a New York City taxi cab years ago. The words really hit home with me because I know several people who “run around full of garbage!” Thanks to David J. Pollay for penning these words of inspiration and to Peter Frampton for introducing them to me.

In the wake of President Obama’s signing of the Health Care Bill today, I offer the following quote that was posted on the Internet last year by an anonymous source. Although it was originally posted prior to the passage of the Health Care Bill, all opponents of the legislation should read this before complaining about the government’s imposition into your lives!

This morning I was awakened by my alarm clock, powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door, I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After work, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to a house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshall’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log onto the Internet, which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and post on freerepublic.com and FOX News forums about how socialism in government can’t do anything right.

How many of the government-funded, government-regulated, and governmenet-developed conveniences listed above, that are already a part of your day-to-day life, are you ready to give up as well? YES WE CAN…YES WE DID!

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day (Lá Fhéile Pádraig), which is named in honor of the most commonly recognized of the patron saints of Ireland, I offer this Irish blessing to all:

May those who love us, love us
And those who don’t love us,
May God turn their hearts
And if He can’t turn their hearts,
May He turn their ankles
So we will know them by their limping.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see several people limping in the not-to-distant future!  Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all!  Éire go Brách!

Public folders are no longer mail-enabled via the graphical interface of the Exchange Management Console in Exchange 2007. This task, as well as many others, are carried out using the Exchange Management Shell command-line interface (CLI). I had to perform this task last week and had to look up the steps beforehand. I am adding them here for future reference but hope this post is of value to others as well.

The first step is to verify that the public folder that you want to mail-enable has not already been enabled. This is accomplished with the Get-MailPublicFolder cmdlet. The syntax is as follows:

Get-MailPublicFolder -Identity “YourPublicFolderName”

Next you need to disable the Email Address Policy for the public folder (the same as unchecking the Automatically update email addresses based on email address policy in the Exchange Management Console). This task is accomplished using the Set-MailPublicFolder cmdlet as follows:

Set-MailPublicFolder -Identity “YourPublicFolderName” -EmailAddressPolicyEnabled:$FALSE

Once you have confirmed that the public folder is not already mail-enabled and have excluded the folder from the Email Address Policy, you mail-enable the folder with the Enable-MailPublicFolder cmdlet:

Enable-MailPublicFolder -Identity “\YourPublicFolderName”

Now you are ready to assign the email address(es) to the public folder.  Again, we use the Set-MailPublicFolder cmdlet:

Set-MailPublicFolder -Identity “YourPublicFolderName” -EmailAddresses address1@contoso.com,address2@contoso.com,address3@contoso.com

The first address listed in the above cmdlet is automatically designated as the Primary SMTP address for the folder. If needed, you can change the primary address as follows:

Set-MailPublicFolder -Identity “YourPublicFolderName” -PrimarySmtpAddress PrimaryAddress@contoso.com

If you want to grant Send As permissions in Exchange 2010, you can use the Manage Send As Permission Wizard. In the Exchange Management Console, right-click the desired mailbox and then select Manage Send As Permission from the pop-up menu. In the Manage Send As Permission Wizard, click Add, and then use the Select Recipient dialog box to choose the user or users who should have this permission. To revoke this permission, select an existing user name in the Security Principal list box and then click Remove. Click Manage to set the desired Send As permissions.

An option to the Manage Send As Permission Wizard is the Exchange Management Shell. In the Exchange Management Shell, you can use the Add-ADPermission and Remove-ADPermission cmdlets to manage Send As permissions. The syntax of the Add-ADPermission cmdlet is as follows:

Add-ADPermission -Identity UserBeingGrantedPermission -User UserWhoseMailboxIsBeingConfigured -ExtendedRights ‘Send-As’

The following example of the Add-ADPermission cmdlet grants my user account Send As permissions to John Public’s mailbox:

Add-ADPermission -Identity ‘CN=Jim Doyle,OU=Engineering,DC=contoso,DC=com’ -User ‘CONTOSO\jpublic’ -ExtendedRights ‘Send-As’

The permissions granted above are removed using the Remove-ADPermission cmdlet.  The syntax of this cmdlet is listed below:

Remove-ADPermission -Identity UserBeingRevokedPermission -User UserWhoseMailboxIsBeingConfigured -ExtendedRights ‘Send-As’
-InheritanceType ‘All’ -ChildObjectTypes $null -InheritedObjectType $null -Properties $null

The following example of the Remove-ADPermission cmdlet revokes the permission assigned above with the Add-ADPermission cmdlet:

Remove-ADPermission -Identity ‘CN=Jim Doyle,OU=Engineering, DC=contoso,DC=com’ -User ‘CONTOSO\jpublic’ -ExtendedRights ‘Send-As’
-InheritanceType ‘All’ -ChildObjectTypes $null -InheritedObjectTypes $null -Properties $null

In my previous post, I concluded by saying that my next post would cover Send As permissions in Exchange 2010; however, I am going to slip this one in first.

Recently we discovered that we were not collecting disk performance data from one of the remote servers we manage with Operations Manager 2007.  Disk performance counters are enabled by default on all Windows operation systems after Windows 2000.  As this particular server is running Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server, I initially assumed that the counters were enabled.  I attempted to rebuild the performance counters from an elevated command prompt by running lodctr /R from the C:\WINDOWS\System32 directory.  Still no disk performance counters in Operations Manager 2007.

After a bit of research using my new best friend Bing, I was led to check the following registry key on the remote server:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PerfDisk\Performance

If present, locate the Disable Performance Counters value in the details pane.  If the data value is 0, the counters are enabled and if the value is 1, the counters are disabled.  In our instance, this value was set to 1 as shown below.

After changing the value, a reboot of the server was necessary for the operating system to reload the registry and pick up the change.  Our Network Operations Center (NOC) rebooted the server during the overnight maintenance period.  The following morning I check the Operations Manager 2007 Console and still had no disk performance counters.  I logged back onto the remote server and attempted to rebuild the performance counters from an elevated command prompt as outlined above.  Back in the Operations Manager Console, there were now ten performance counters available for each logical disk.

The moral of this story – first check the registry for the existence and setting of the key listed above, reboot the server, and then rebuild the performance counters.  Hopefully, this information will save someone else some troubleshooting and research time.