How to kill a VM through ESX CLI

If you got an ESX that has a VM that’s stuck which means you can’t shut it down, and it’s non-responsive but it’s running like a phantom vm on the ESX host then follow these instructions. First off understand this will kill the vm process for that VM. Note this is not considered a graceful shutdown, it’s what I call a “Fat finger” the server. 1. Find the...

Exchange 2010: The Active Directory Schema is not up-to-date

If you get this error,  ”The Active Directory Schema is not up-to-date and Ldifde.exe is not installed on this computer.”. Just run ServerManagerCmd -i RSAT-ADDS in windows...

Exchange 2010 Installation: Unable to read from the metabase

Let me guess you are installing Exchange 2010 and you landed here because you keep getting this error, “Unable to read from the Metabase. Ensure that Microsoft Internet Information Services is installed”. However you’ve installed IIS on your Windows 2008 box, so what gives? You are missing just missing the IIS 6 compatibility feature. It’s a simple fix, go to your web...

How to stop some vm’s from turning on during an HA event in vmware

Okay let’s say you have 2 ESX servers running both at 70% utilization. If one server goes out, and VMware HA turns up the vm’s on the surviving ESX server you’ll get a major performace degradation on your critical servers. However you realize some of those vm’s are test machines or non-critical servers and you don’t care to have VMware HA turn on those machines. How...

How to enable root access in ESX 4.1

You have to love vmware if you are into virtualization as much as I am. ESX comes with high security and most user accessible ports either blocked or the port is closed on the firewall side. If you need to SSH into your ESX box you will need to open a port on your firewall. We are not talking about the firewall on your router, or ASA. ESX comes with a built-in firewall, you need to open a port on...

Save RDP connection with username and password for all users

I needed to create a citrix published application that would login using a RDP connection to another server with a saved username and password. Well I thought all you needed to do was create a RDP file, save the username and password and then run mstsc.exe with the RDP file. Yeah that only works for the person who created the file, but won’t work with all users, because the password is...

Create ICA files with Citrix Quick Launch Tool

Creating ICA files is usually pretty easy, but not all the time. I had an instance where I couldn’t create an ICA file with the access management console. So I used the ICA file creator from citrix, however it kept throwing up errors, and generic errors at that. I was fed up trying to find a solution. Then I found this Citrix Quick Launch tool, which allows you to directly connect to a...

How to backup WSS 3.0 automatically

So how do you backup WSS 3.0 automatically? Well you know you can go into the operations center and backup manually, by setting the destination. However this will not automatically backup your sharepoint farm on a daily basis. There is a simple command to backup your sharepoint farm via command line. Once you have a command line then you can create a batch file and backup however your...

How to start a full crawl on sharepoint

If you trying to get sharepoint to start a full crawl of your site, or you need to diagnose a problem you have to wait for sharepoint to start it’s full crawl interval. However with the below command you have it start immediately. Stsadm -o spsearch -action...

How to access embedded SQL on WSS 3.0

I wanted to access the SQL databases on my WSS 3.0 server, however I was using the embedded edition of SQL. So I downloaded SQL Management Server studio, but I couldn’t still access the databases. It kept saying it can’t make a remote connection to the server though I was trying to access it via local to the machine. Then I found this.  Type it in as the server name, and...