Victor Stodell

I am back home in the couch filled with enthusiasm from the last gathering of LEAP Sweden before the trip to Redmond in the end of May. Todays topic was the new versions of Windows (server and client) as well as the Business Intelligence product suite from Microsoft. The Business Intelligence suite basically is a really nice integration between products that already exist. With SQL Server 2012 , SharePoint 2010 and Excel 2010 tightly integrated Microsoft offers a really attractive package. Mikael Nyström showed off some of the new features in Windows Server 2012 . To say the least this is an impressive release. There is a heavy focus on virtualization, storage and terminal services which makes Microsoft a strong competitor against both VMWare and Citrix in the small to medium sized business segment. One of the coolest features has to be conditional permissions. Johan Lindfors gave a demo on Windows 8 development . He showed some samples of how easy it is to develop Met...

This week we stumbled upon some weirdness in our new 2008 R2 DNS servers. A couple of URLs, for example www.smhi.se and www.stockholm.se could not be resolved from a 2008 R2 server. The existing 2003 servers with the same configuration worked perfectly. After thorough troubleshooting we found out that there is a new default setting in Windows Server 2008 R2 regarding the  EDNS-protocol  that caused the issues. Not all of the DNS servers around the internet are able to handle  EDNS , but in 2008 R2 this protocol is enabled by default. Normally you would think there is a fallback mechanism to standard DNS protocol if an EDNS request fails, but Windows Server does not have that. The solution was simply to disable EDNS by using the command: dnscmd /config /EnableEDNSProbes 0 Scott Forsyth has written more about this issue and how he found the solution: http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2009/09/15/windows-server-2008-r2-dns-issues.aspx

Active Directory have always been a little tricky to troubleshoot and monitor. There is a wide variety of  Performance Counters and other parameters to investigate, but this is heavy work to do manually. There is also a bunch of third party tools to do this for us but usually the price tag is big  With Windows Server 2008 a new set of tools were delivered which could be very useful when troubleshooting performance in Active Directory amongst other services. And the best of all is that they are free! Data Collector Sets The role Active Directory Domain Services includes a Data Collector Set intendet for Active Directory diagnostics. This can be found in Server Manager/Diagnostics/Performance/Data Collector Sets. Run the Active Directory Diagnostics for a limited time, but do not forget to stop it. A large amount of data is collected and when the job is stopped a nice and thorough report is generated. Windows System Resource Manager The Resource Manager is installed as a f...