One of the lads in support messaged me this week, he needed to raise the size of the hard drive on a VM, and the option was greyed out (not available).
Solution
Now assuming you actually have the rights to do this, the problem is ‘nearly always‘ that the ‘disk’ in question has an active snapshot on it. Remove your snapshots first.
Now you can raise the size.
Don’t forget: In your OS you will then need to increase the volume size to accommodate the additional space!
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At his point I’m going to assume you know that there are Standard Exchange CALs/SALs, and Enterprise Exchange CALs/SALs. And you know the difference! If you’re unsuresee my comments here.
With older versions of Exchange 2010/2007 etc. You could get this information from the GUI. Now you need to use some PowerShell.
Solution
The two commands you want to use are;
Find Out How Many Exchange Standard CALs / SALs Are Required
Install-WindowsFeature : ArgumentNotValid: The role, role service, or feature name is not valid: ‘Desktop-Experience’. The name was not found. At line:1 char:1 + Install-WindowsFeature Desktop-Experience + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (Desktop-Experience:String) [Install-WindowsFeature], Exception + FullyQualifiedErrorId : NameDoesNotExist,Microsoft.Windows.ServerManager.Commands.AddWindowsFeatureCommand
Success Restart Needed Exit Code Feature Result ——- ————– ——— ————– False No InvalidArgs {}
PS C:\Users\administrator.PNL>
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Solution
Note: You need Server Datacenter version to do this.
If you o to the flash website and it (wrongly,) thinks you are using Windows 10 (we it’s the same code, I’ll let them off,) and it also says “it’s already installed just enable it”, but it’s not there?
You need to install it with the following command;
Recently my Safari browser on my MacBook updated, somehow this managed to break Microsoft Edge, a reboot fixed that. The problem was, it was now only showing a ‘reduced‘ number of bookmarks from my favourites, (only 24 bookmarks) i.e.
Even if I clicked in the navigation bar, (only 12 bookmarks) from my favourites;
Solution
A Google search didn’t turn up the answer, clicking on the setting logo on the home page didn’t offer any clues, neither could I find any settings in ‘Preferences’ that might have fixed it.
I found the answer quite by accident, there is an option to ‘show more‘, but it’s hidden unless you hover over/near it.
And
Everything is back where it belongs!
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The fact that I’m going back to re-write article 0000012, should tell you this is an omnipresent problem! Either very suddenly, or slowly over time you have a drive or a volume that’s full to bursting point. These days with laptops which have smaller SSD drives it’s a common problem.
I’ve seen literally hundreds of post in forums, most of them are answered with ‘Use WinDirStat’, or ‘Use TreeSize’. Techies seem to be a fan of one or the other, and stick with the tool that’s served them best.
What If There’s No Room To Install Either Of these?
Good point, then you can use PowerShell, I’ll cover that below also. Well I said everyone has a favourite solution, here’s mine,
WinDirStat
My weapon of choice, install it and give it the drive you want to analyse;
When it’s finished, you will see something like this;
So you get a graphical representation of the drive, and you can see TWO things straight away, firstly you can spot large files, click on them and it will tell you what they are. Secondly it groups ‘Types’ of files together, if you just look at folder sizes it can be misleading e.g. The ‘red’ files above are my MP3 Collection, I know that folder is massive and I expect it to have a lot of stuff in it. But in some cases this is great! e.g. If your IIS server is churning out logs and theres a folder with millions of them in it, you will spot it straight away.
Why Do I Prefer This? I prefer the graphical front end, I can send a screen shot to client, and they understand what’s happening, and it’s always been free. (There is a free version of TreeSize in fairness). I just like this one.
TreeSize
Once you’ve installed simply select the drive in question,
You can then drill down folders which are sized based on usage. One thing I do like about TreeSize is, it knows the difference between file size and actual size, and you can swap views accordingly. But I’ve included it here so every-time I post this article link in a forum, you can see both and make your own mind up.
PowerShell
This is really a PowerShell version of using the same approach TreeSize uses. You need a PowerShell plugin called PSFolderSize, then simply navigate to the the drive in question and run Get-FolderSize.
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Install-Module PSFoldersize
cd {Drive-Letter}:
Get-FolderSize
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You can then drill down {cd folder-name} one at a time repeating the same command.
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While replacing an Exchange Server on my test network last week, I needed to get all the mailboxes moved across to the new one. Exchange gets upset if you try and delete a mailbox database that has data in it.
Solution
1. Launch the Exchange Management Shell > Firstly lets get the names of my Databases, then I can simply copy and paste them into the move mailbox command.
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Get-MailboxDatabase
Get-Mailbox -Database Source Database Name -ResultSize Unlimited | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase Target Database Name
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2. The Mailbox moves should then be queued, depending on how many there are, this can take some time to complete.
3. To check on progress issue the following command;
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Get-MoveRequestStatistics -MoveRequestQueue Target Database Name
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4. When complete you should remove the movement requests like so;
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Get-MoveRequest | where {$_.status -eq “Completed”} | Remove-MoveRequest
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5. That’s all the ‘user’ mailboxes, but your source database server may have system mailboxes in it. These will be either Arbitration mailboxes, or Archive Mailboxes (or both). I don’t have any archive mailboxes, but I do have Arbitration mailboxes. To find out for your databases, use the following commands;
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Get-Mailbox -Database Source Database Name -Arbitration
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6. To move Arbitration and Archive mailboxes, use the following commands;
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Get-Mailbox -Database Source Database Name -Arbitration | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase Target Database Name
Get-Mailbox -Database Source Database Name -Archive | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase Target Database Name
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7. You can monitor progress with the same command you used in step 3, and remove the move requests with the same command you used in step 4.
8. In addition you may also have some Auditlogmailboxes like so;
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Get-Mailbox -Database Source Database Name -Auditlog | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase Target Database Name
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9. Also you may have Monitoring Mailboxes, (In the screenshot below you can see I don’t have any archive mailboxes, as the command returns no results)
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Get-Mailbox -Database Source Database Name -Monitoring | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase Target Database Name
Normally if I were deploying Duo 2FA with AnyConnect I’d deploy a Cisco RADIUSVPN on my LAN, (usually on my Duo Authentication Proxy). See the following article;
However, last time I set this up, a colleague said ‘Oh by the way, you don’t need to do that, you can just point the firewall directly at Duo‘. I was initially skeptical but I tried it, and it worked. I thought no more about it until this week when another colleague asked me to help him setup Duo for AnyConnect.
As you can see the firewall queries Duo using LDAPS, but the Duo product I’m using is called ‘Cisco RADIUS VPN’. This makes my networking OCD itch tremendously! (RADIUS and LDAPS are completely different protocols!) But it works, so here we go.
Solution
Note: For this solution you don’t even need to sync your users to Duo, (but it’s OK if you do)! As long as the users exist there.
With Duo, you need to select ‘protect an application‘ and select ‘Cisco RADIUS VPN‘. If you are unfamiliar with Duo you need to take a copy of the Integration Key, the Secret Key and the API Hostname. (Note: Don’t try using these ones, they have been changed!)
On the Firewall > Configuration > Device Management > Users/AAA > AAA Server Groups > AAA Server Groups > Add > Call it ‘DUO-EXTERNAL’ > Select LDAPS > OK.
With your DUO-EXTERNAL group selected > In the bottom window > Add.
TO TEST: Press Test > Select Authentication > Use the username displayed in Duo > Type push into the password box, and your phone should then prompt for 2fa authentication. (If it fails: Make sure the time is correct on the ASA, and at least do some debugging before posting below!)
Now either create a new AnyConnect profile, and use this new AAA method, or simply change the AAA method for an existing AnyConnect profile, (like below).
A word of warning, when I did this, (both in production and on my test ASA,) I got a strange error, I’ve documented that and the fix, below.
In the previous post, we deployed a web load balanced solution with three web servers. Out of the box the BIG-IP solution will use Round Robin load balancing and it will treat all Nodes or Pool Members the same, (it assigns a RATIO OF 1).
Everything gets weighted the same, and the F5 will send requests to the Nodes or Pool members one at a time.
But what if one of those web servers was a beast of a machine, with much better CPU/RAM than all the others? How do you ensure that gets sent the ‘Lions share’ of the traffic?
Solution
Well you can simply alter the Ratio for that server, you can do that directly on the Node, or you can do it within the Pool on a Pool Member. (That’s why you can see 6 ratios in the examples I’ve posted).
What if I change the Ratios on Nodes AND Pool Members: You can do that, but the load balancing method uses one or the other. So they wont conflict.
So let’s say 10.2.0.11 is a brand new server and has ten times the processing power of the other two nodes like so;
Local Traffic > Nodes > Select the node in question > Change the Ratio accordingly > Update.
Nothing will happen until you change the load balancing method of the Pool. On the properties of the Pool, change the Load Balancing Method to Ratio (node) > Update.
If you reset the counters and wait a while, you can see now that the server is getting (more or less*) 10 times the amount of traffic.
*Note: The maths will never be perfect, and my web pages are all ‘very slightly’ different, which is amplified over time.
Changing F5 Pool Member Ratios
The process is similar, (if you are following along, you might want to change your Node value back to ‘1, not that it will affect anything, it’s just if you are like me you will forget!) So now let’s say we’ve got a new server and its 10.2.0.13, and we want to change the ratio on the Pool Member like so;
Open the Pool > Select the Node from here.
Change there ratio here > Update.
Now change the Load Balancing Method to Node (member) > Update >Note: Here, ratios are shown on the Pool page.
Reset your counters, and wait a while, you will see the other server is now getting most of the traffic.
In large production environments, you will probably want to use Dynamic Load Balancing methods, so I’ll look at those next.
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