well, you’d think that upgrading windows server to the next release wouldn’t be too much trouble. the windows 2008 upgrade install just happens to have a problem with powershell being installed though.

and most likely everyone has applied service packs or windows updates to 2003 so that powershell has snuck onto the system some way or another. the problem is there is no add/remove programs entry for powershell…and microsoft’s kb article that lists hot fixes that install powershell weren’t listed (at least for me). so…i decided to just remove SP2 entirely. this step seemed to get me closer to success, but instead of the compatibility report listing powershell as a problem it now just showed up blank.

turns out you need to uninstall “windows management framework core” and then proceed with the upgrade. the compatibility report will still show up blank, but now you can at least click Next to proceed with the upgrade install.

found the solution in the comments on this blog (not in the actual blog entry itself):
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2007/03/19/windows-server-2003-sp2-upgrade.aspx

quick update 9/18/2014:
show updates must be enabled for “windows management framework core” to be visible in add/remove programs

update 5/7/2015:
encountered an instance where i could not get powershell to uninstall cleanly and thus was prevented from starting the 2008 upgrade. the technique of renaming c:\windows\system32\windowspowershell to something else worked for me.
source: http://williamfaulkner.co.uk/2013/02/server-2003-to-server-2008-upgrade-powershell-compatibility-error/

plus…if you have old hardware drivers on a system (on a P2V for example) they’ll need to be removed. i removed the “afamgt.sys” file as mentioned in this article for dell hardware drivers: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/941024

1. on the drive or folder–>properties->security->advanced->auditing then add an auditing entry for the local system’s Everyone group. then choose specifically which auditing events you want to log. both “deletes” would be a good one to start out with.

2. then on the local machine–>local security policy->advanced audit policy configuration->system audit policies->object access. here you can choose just to enable file system auditing.

if you choose to enable local policies->audit policy->audit object access then every type of object access will be logged and the logs will essentially fill with junk data.

source:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/2008/03/use-auditing-to-track-who-deleted-your-files/

previously i believe i’d had to mess around with co-existing net-snmp (snmpd) along with the newer ESX snmp agent to get dell openmanage to work. specifically for vsphere 4.0…but i don’t think that is necessary anymore. correction: it is still necessary to get openmanage working properly, but the ESX snmp agent is fine for monitoring solutions such as orion.

quick way to setup snmp with just the new agent (from vMA):
vicfg-snmp –server <esxhost> –username root –password <password> -p 161 -c <SNMP community string> -t <destinationhost>@162/<community string>

to specify multiple destinations with -t use commas in between destinations

to enable, use the above command up to the –password portion and then use -E
to list current settings do the same, but use a -s

if you were messing around with net-snmp previously (like i was), you’ll need to stop the snmpd service and then run “chkconfig snmpd off” to insure the service does not auto-startup. otherwise you’ll have conflicts with the two services tying to run on port 161 udp. another option is making the ESX snmp agent run on a port other than 161.

for some reason “chkconfig” was not working for me to disable the service startup. i ended up taking off execute rights to /etc/init.d/snmpd.

confirmed working. whether genuine or not it has the correct layout and looked brand new. sold thru gadget-mart.

http://www.amazon.com/Genuine-new-Dell-Inspiron-notebook/dp/B0043CG3QG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328194690&sr=8-1

a couple of weeks ago i began experiencing a seemingly unending nightmare. it all began like so….
i was attempting to update the BIOS to the latest release on a dell poweredge R710. the server was running vsphere 4.x. this is a pretty routine thing to do, that i’ve done several times before with no problems. i use the dell update packages (DUPs) for red hat linux when i update firmware in ESX. sometimes i push out the updates with IT assistant, other times i do it manually. i was trying to update the BIOS manually on this occasion and the update simply refused to work. it basically just crapped out and exited. so i was like okay…maybe something is just wrong with this particular release so i downloaded the release prior and the same thing happened. also of note is that i just used the same exact DUP file to upgrade another R710 a week prior. at this point i was perplexed and did some searching around. i found some articles that gave a howto on deconstructing the DUP and then _really_ manually upgrading the BIOS. the instructions seemed very specific and i eventually decided this wasn’t a path i wanted to go down.

plan B involved using the lifecycle controller – unified server configurator (USC). which i had just found out about. so i got the server hooked back up to the internet and booted into USC then did the platform update using ftp.dell.com as a source. by default USC wants to update the firmware to everything. when i first saw this i was like wow that’s really cool…basically take care of everything all at once. even though i was originally interested in updating the BIOS only…i decided to pull the trigger and update everything.

and that’s when i was transported straight to hell. the firmware updates all succeeded except failure on 2 very expensive 10Gb NICs. the failure error was “nicwrapper.efi error” and the only dell docs i could find that referenced the error said to make sure you have the latest BIOS and iDRAC updates applied. well i had the latest iDRAC update and i was attempting to install the latest BIOS update. if the NIC firmware update couldn’t be applied it shouldn’t have been checkbox’d by default . 🙁 anyways, at this point vsphere would boot up and during driver loading the server would reboot. at the time, it wasn’t plainly obvious to me what the problem was. i figured the NIC update failure wouldn’t have caused any real damage. system logs were showing a PCI bus error and a CPU IERR. i was still thinking it was a problem with the BIOS… like maybe it didn’t apply correctly. of course, if that was the issue the system probably wouldn’t have been booting at all. it eventually became clear to me that the NICs were the problem when the system would boot fine with both NICs removed.

if i had been more familiar with USC at the time i probably would have tried an update rollback on the NICs and maybe would have saved myself all kinds of trouble. instead, i tried to apply the firmware update to both NICs again with the same unsuccessful result. so then i saw there was a DUP for a newer NIC firmware update and tried that which also ended in failure. then i wanted to try that newer update and run it from USC…well you can’t just do that with DUPs you have to download another utility called the dell repository manager. then with the repository manager export the update as SUU. i did all that and tried to apply the update with USC…still no luck.

this basically goes on forever…i tried with an dell server update utility (SUU) bootcd. i even put the NICs in a windows server and tried to apply the windows DUP and received a “bmapi error”. at this point i gave up…the NICs were obviously shot. they were in a state that was beyond my knowledge on how to repair.

what did i learn from all of this: don’t ever try to update the firmware on broadcom NICs. unless for some reason you really really have to.

something i wrote up in the early 2000’s. includes some binary and octal info as well…

hexadecimal
hexadecimal is most commonly used to represent large amounts of binary (machine code 01010011..etc) in a small amount of characters. it’s also used for numbering memory and physical addresses (C800:5). hex, which it is more often called, is a base-16 number system that uses the characters 0-F (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F) to represent the numbers 0-15. 0=0, F=15

converting between binary and hex is very simple, like so:

1101 0011 1001 0110 (1101001110010110, binary word shown in nibbles to go easy on the eyes)
13      3        9        6
^above you see what these nibbles equal. now here is the hex representation D396.

that shouldn’t be too hard to follow the ‘396’ is very straight forward. ‘D’ may seem odd though. all D represents is the number 13..no mystery to it. A=10, B=11, C=12, D=13, E=14, F=15. therefore D396. now you could convert in other ways, but by far, breaking the binary word into nibbles first is the easiest approach. obviously it is much more convenient to write long binary words in hex.

here is the opposite, converting hex to binary:

AB0C
A=10 B=11 0=0 C=12
1010 1011 0000 1100

now the more difficult conversion between hex and decimal:

the base-10 (decimal) numbers 0-15 are already taken care of  ‘0-F’. what happens when 16+ must be represented?..16 in hex becomes ’10’ and 17 ’11’ and 18 ’12’

a closer look: ’10’ to the farthest left is the “10’s column” in decimal. so here it is (1 *16) + (0 *1) = 16

powers of 16:
0 – 1
1 – 16
2 – 256
3 – 4096
4 – 65,536
5 – 1,048,576
6 – 16,777,216

binary
0,1
powers of 2:
0 – 1
1 – 2
2 – 4
3 – 8
4 – 16
5 – 32
6 – 64
7 – 128
8 – 256
9 – 512
10 – 1024

octal
0-7
each octal digit represents 3 bits
powers of 8:
0 – 1
1 – 8
2 – 64
3 – 512
4 – 4096

links:
decimal/binary converter (including fractions) – http://www.exploringbinary.com/binary-converter/
binary addition/subtraction calculator – http://www.csgnetwork.com/binaddsubcalc.html
binary multiplication/division calculator – http://www.csgnetwork.com/binmultdivcalc.html
base2 to base20 calculator – http://www.cleavebooks.co.uk/scol/calnumba.htm
base conversions 2-36 to decimal (including fractions) – http://www.easysurf.cc/cnver17.htm#batob10
2’s complement calculator – http://easycalculation.com/twos-complement.php
BCD converter – http://ncalculators.com/digital-computation/bcd-decimal-converter.htm

a checklist of sorts:

1. extension mobility service must be enabled on ucm server
2. create a phone service for extension mobility under device settings->phone services
3. create a device profile under device settings->device profile
4. on the device profile, subscribe the profile to the extension mobility service
5. on the end user, add the extension mobility profile under controlled profiles
6. on individual phones, enable extension mobility. then subscribe phones to extension mobility service
7. login to phone with username and PIN

notes:
a mobility user can only be actively logged into one phone at a time.
if a mobility user has multiple device profiles associated with it, the user will be able to choose which profile they would like to use.
device profiles should be interchangeable across most phone models (despite differences in # of lines). however, i was unable to get a 7942 profile working properly on a 7940 and ended up having to create a separate 7940 device profile.

source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M50sykfNe5I

run the command: dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Hyper-V

to manage a hyper-v server with an mmc snap-in, the latest RSAT tools will need to be installed on a management workstation. as of right now the newest version is RSAT for windows 7 sp1. from windows features->RSAT, install the hyper-v tools snap-ins.

on the core server enable all the remote management features with sconfig and then you’ll be able to connect remotely via the hyper-v snap-in.