Multiple CPUs not being used in virtual server
Had quite an interesting problem with this one.
One of the windows 2003 based shared hosting servers is being migrated from physical hardware to a virtual server running on xen hyperviser. All looked to be good, with the snapshot running reasonably well, and having the option of moving the physical box that it runs on, should hardware problems happen.
However, after migrating a couple of sites onto it, the server seemed to be running slower and slower, which seemed strange, as it was assigned 4 cores, like the original box. Once I managed to log in, and pull up task manager, it only showed 1 single core, and the poor thing was running flat out, as it tried to serve the various webservers and database service with processing time.
Creating Pidgin MSI
The main office IM tool is currently msn messenger. With its shutdown forthcoming, alternatives were needed. A jabber service has been set up, but a client still needed to be deployed to all the end users. We already deploy updates for flash, adobe reader, java etc via msi files. Currently, there are no official pidgin msi files, but it is my preferred client.
 Pidgin WXS file | [Download my installer for pidgin 2.10.7 which this article is based on] | 436 kB |
Creating additional volumes on Readynas
When I fired up my Readynas nv+ v2, I didnt have a copy of the RAIDar admin tool running, so it defaulted to creating an xraid2 volume. This was fine, apart from after the 2x 1TB disks were initialised, I couldnt add the 2 500GB disks from my old box. This is my account of how I (hopefully) create a 2nd volume
Recovering Bitlocker partition
The Problem:
During the week, one of the work laptops had its HD fail. I got called through as the machine was trying to to a system recovery / restore, and my colleague was worried.
After disabling the auto reboot on system crash, I got a nice BSOD, and figured that it was going to need some work. After providing a pool laptop so he could get emails and such like I got to work on the broken one
Server 2008 Event viewer not starting
Yep, although I like using linux, here's another windows related techie article.
On one of the DCs at work, I'd noticed errors on startup for the windows Server Manager window, but not really looked into it, as I'd not needed to use it for anything.
Today while trying to update the xen server tools on it, they wouldn't run, so I tried to open event viewer, only to get a nice error saying that:
MMC could not create the snap-in.
Name: Event Viewer
CLSID: FX:{b05566ad-fe9c-7a4cbb7cb510}
A quick google showed a few people with the same problem, with various suggestions, including using windows feature control to remove .net framework. This wasnt an option, as this also was having the same problem of loading up. However, a bit more looking around, and on the microsoft social.technet I found the suggestion to reset the machine.config file to defaults in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\ I did this by renaming machine.config to machine.config.old, then copying machine.config.default to machine.config.
There was no need to reboot, as the event viewer mmc opened up without problems. The xen tools install I was trying to do also worked fine, so I wonder if both problems were related
