Backing Up to External Hard Drives from DPM

Microsoft Data Protection Manger does not support external hard drives. You’re choices are to backup to disk and copy to external later, backup to SAN/DAS, or backup to tape drive. From a Technet DPM FAQ: Storage Pool Configuration What types of storage can I use with DPM 2007? DPM 2007 supports use of any of … Read more

Sample scripts for Data Protection Manager 07

I ran across this very useful set of Powershell scripts for DPM 07 on Technet. These scripts can help you do things you can’t do via the GUI. Here is the link: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/dpm/default.mspx?mfr=true and more will be added later but here are the scripts they have currently up there: • Automatically Add New SQL Databases … Read more

DPM could not connect to SQL Reporting

I needed to pull some reports on our backup in Data Protection Manager. So I clicked on Reporting in Data Protection manager and it threw an error like this:

DPM could not connect to SQL Server Reporting Services server because of IIS

connectivity issues.

On the computer on which the DPM database was created, restart the World

Wide Web Publishing Service. On the Administrative Tools menu, select

Services. Right-click World Wide Web Publishing Service, and then click Start.

Apparently there is a permission requirement in IIS 7 for ISAPI extensions that use a wildcard script. DPM uses this.

So you have to go into IIS 7 and set the permission for script to resolve this. Here are the steps:

Open up Server Manager expand Roles, expand Web Server (IIS).

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Setup a catch all domain

I needed to setup a catch all for one of my clients domains. This is what I needed to happen:

If user typed in an incorrect sub domain for mydomain.com that did not exist I needed it
to redirect them to www.mydomain.com. 

For example: if they type in notreal.mydomain.com it will send the user
to www.mydomain.com.

Here is what I did to accomplish this: 

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Setup VNC Server on CentOS

I recently had the task of setting up VNC Server on CentOS for a client of mine. VNC is very much like remote desktop in windows. You can even use VNC on Windows servers. I found VNC to be a little bit slower then remote desktop and it kept kicking me out every once in a while. Here are the steps I took to set it up:

First I opened the necessary ports.

Path to access the firewall:

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URL Redirect in IIS7

In this post I will show you how to setup an URL redirect in IIS 7. In this post I will assume you have some working knowledge of IIS.

Open IIS (Start –> Administrative Tools –> IIS Manager)

Expand your Web Server then right click on Sites and choose Add Web Site.

Give the site a name such as domain.com redirect. Be sure to add something to the name so you will know that it is a redirect if you need to reference it later. Put in a path for the web site. Redirects don’t really use the path but IIS won’t let you add the web site without this. I created a directory in the following location: C:\inetpub\redirects. I alwyas create this and use this location to place all of my redirects in. Put in the desired IP address or leave it on all unassigned and click OK.

Now double click on “HTTP Redirect” the properties will appear.

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Setup Exchange 07 using Dynamic IP

Do you want to setup Exchange Server in your house and run your own email server? Let me guess you do not have a static IP address and do not want to get one. Well below are my steps on how to set this up.

What you will need:

  • A Windows domain and an Exchange Server setup.
  • Dynamic DNS service such as no-ip.com or dyndns.com.
  • A purchased domain name from somewhere like voxdomains or any other service. Just make sure you have full management of the DNS.

Go ahead and setup your Domain controller with AD and your Exchange server. I assume you have some working knowledge of domains and networking so I am not going to cover how to do this in this article.

Once you have your Exchange up and ready to go. Go download the no-ip client or update client from the dynamic DNS service you signed up for. This client runs in your system tray and will update your no-ip address with the public IP whenever it changes. Now install the update client on your Exchange box.

Configure your router/firewall to forward incoming traffic on port 25 (my port is different as my ISP blocks incoming port 25. I will explain further below.) to your Exchange server. Configure your router/firewall to allow outgoing traffic on port 25. (my port is different as my ISP blocks outgoing port 25. I will explain further below.)

Go to your domain host and add the address your dynamic DNS service gave you. For example your domain MX record points to test.no-ip.com. Now you should be able to receive and send mail.
Ok. above I mentioned my setup is a little bit different. This is because my ISP (Comcast) blocks outgoing and incoming SMTP traffic on port 25. This is a tactic by them to combat SPAM. They do however allow SMTP traffic in and out on port 587. Below I explain how to get around this.

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Configure Windows NTP client GPO

Some applications on my network were having issues because the workstation clocks had the wrong time. I had to fix this but did not want to manually change it on every workstation. I did not want the user to have to always update this either. What I did is checked the time server my domain controller was using to sync with. It was set to time.windows.com. I used the NET TIME /QUERYSNTP command to check the NTP server.

I then went to Microsoft’s time server list here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/262680 tracked down the correct time server. Once I found the NTP server I wanted to use I set the Configure Windows NTP client GPO to reflect this so all of the workstations would sync with this time server. Here is the GPO path:

Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Windows Time Service\Time Providers

I checked the next day and all of the computers on my network had the correct time.
If you don’t want to wait you can run the following commands to stop and start the time service on your clients:

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