2010 September :: Third Tier

Archive for September 2010

Sep
30

Registration Filling Fast for the Pre-Day Event!

by Third Tier

We’re down to just a few seats left for our SMB Nation Pre-day Technical Event in Las Vegas. The full agenda has been posted for the event over on the Registration Page, and we know of at least three people who will be completing their registration before the end of the week this week. That will leave fewer than 10 seats available for this event, and we cannot add any more! Registration will close as soon as we hit the cap, so don’t be left on the other side of that door. If you’ll be in Vegas for SMB Nation, why not stop in a day early and spend it with us!

We’d especially like to thank our corporate sponsors, HP, Symform, and StorageCraft for their assistance in making this event possible!

0 Categories : Announcement, Events, SMB Nation

Sep
21

Trend Micro WFBS – Excessive Policy Violation Detected Notification

by steve

Users of Trend Micro Worry Free Business Security Standard and Advanced (SP1 and SP2) ran into a bit of a surprise over the last 24 hours or so. If you are getting messages of
"Unauthorized changes blocked" for the TMBSRV.exe process (Unauthorized changes blocked! Client/Server Security Agent has blocked the following programs to protect your computer. To unblock the programs, contact your administrator), then you need to run the hotfix provided this afternoon (9/21/2010) from Trend Micro:

Details are at http://esupport.trendmicro.com/4/Behavior-Monitoring-blocks-the-TMBMSRVexe-process.aspx.
To address the problem, please apply Critical Patch Build 3221. You can download it from the following links.
• Critical Patch Build 3221 for Worry-Free Business Security Standard/Advanced 6.0 SP1 or SP2
• Readme

A workaround that appears to be working according to Kevin Royalty is:

Disabling Behavior Monitoring in the Trend console, then updating the client machines either by update now or let them auto update. Turn Behavior Monitoring back on after they have updated.

http://community.trendmicro.com/t5/Business-Security-Forum/Mass-Policy-Violations-from-TMBMSRV-exe/td-p/14038/page/8

Categories : Uncategorized

Sep
16

What’s all this about Windows Intune?

by steve

Come find out tonight as Paul Bourgeau, the lead for Microsoft's Windows Intune project (www.windowsintune.com) will be speaking with the Puget Sound Small Business Server (PSSBS) group, followed by a general group discussion.

6 PM at Microsoft's Lincoln Square offices in Bellevue, WA. We'll be serving up pizza tonight, so bring $5 to help cover the cost. Soft drinks, juice, and coffee (and the room) will be provided by Microsoft.

Our meetings are the third Thursday of each month and are held at Microsoft’s Lincoln Square offices in downtown Bellevue (700 Bellevue Way NE - Lincoln Square, Bellevue, WA 98004).
Park in the Lincoln Square garage and meet at the elevators on the first floor by 6 PM to head up to the meeting (take a ticket when you enter the garage, but parking will be free for the evening).
Meeting times are 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM.

Check out PSSBS online at our various hangouts:

http://www.pssbs.org

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pssbs/join

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2145158

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=103175053982

Categories : Uncategorized

Sep
14

Hewlett Packard MicroServer Review

by amy

Time again for some disclosure. In the spring I was attending SMBNation when I got snatched from the evening beerfest, literally being tugged by the back of my shirt and a “you need to go to this dinner now. But I already ate! You need to go to this dinner now.” OK, so I went. Far be it from me to miss an opportunity. At this meal we discussed SBS Aurora, how it was designed for smaller companies than traditional SBS, how the influence of the cloud was going to change on premise hardware and we brainstormed what this future hardware might look like. Fast forward about 5 months and a box arrived at my office. HP sent me one of the units we dreamed up that night hoping I would like it. How cool is that?

Now I’m not much of a hardware geek. I don’t keep up with motherboard and processor models. I don’t do performance testing. I trust that my hardware manufacturer has engineered a good box and I outfit it with enough memory, drive space and redundancy to match my clients need. That’s my level of hardware expertise. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

So first thing first: Is it sexy? No way. This is one of the ugliest desktop boxes you’ve seen in a long time. It’s close to square and flat black. The only light is the HP logo. Boring and made to not draw attention. Geeks might think the interior has some appeal. 4 swappable drive bays, RAID0, RAID1, 2 empty PCI slots, 6 USB ports and an external Sata port. It’s heavy but best of all it’s quiet, really quiet like laptop quiet. Ready made to sit IN the office with workers. I would see it sitting on a table next to the network printer in a small office. It’s not pretty but it’s right.

The official specs are these:

Processor family AMD Athlon™ II 1 Processor cores available 2

Maximum memory 8 GB Memory slots 2 DIMM slots Memory type PC3 DDR3

Expansion slots 1 half-height, half-length PCIe x16 Gen 2, 1 half-height, half-length PCIe x1 Gen 2

Network Controller 1GbE NC107i 1 Port

Maximum drive bays (4) LFF SATA Non-hot plug 3.5-inch SATA
Integrated 4 port SATA RAID

The unit I was sent has two 1TB drives and 8GB of ram. I think that might represent a pretty typical configuration for small company. I’m thinking of this box as a good one for say a 10 user company running Aurora and subscribing to BPOS or another hosted Exchange product. Information worker type company – small accounting, insurance, financial service, legal, engineering, property management, construction, etc. It would be enough to take advantage of the PC backup feature in SBS Aurora and run a small LOB, host a printer and store some files. I think it’s going to fit the bill for a lot of small companies.

So what am I running on it right now? I’ve got SBS Aurora RC0, GFI MAX (for monitoring) and GFI Vipre (for anti-virus). Runs like a champ. I might just keep this baby in production in my office as our new server. I’m tired of listening to fans hum and right now with this server sitting on the table next to me the fan in my laptop is louder. I like that and so will be very small business clients.

I see this server deployed with SBS Aurora, GFI MAX, GFI Vipre, a PCI card and an external High-Rely sata for backup. I’ve got the GFI software loaded on it now and I’m fine tuning MAX to get the best monitoring situation. I’ll post more on what I’ve decided upon for monitoring, Aurora add-in’s and backup later.

—–

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2 Categories : Amy Babinchak, Hardware

Sep
13

Did you know there’s an SBS 2008 Build Wiki?

by amy

TechNet offers Wiki now and there’s an SBS 2008 build Wiki over there. It’s really more than a simple build. It is section A-V on all of the tweaks you need to make after installation to make that SBS 2008 server hum. It is complete with links to more in-depth information found across the web.

Honestly, it’s a remarkable document. Great work contributors.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/small-business-server-2008-build-document.aspx

Check it out and contribute!

0 Categories : SBS 2008

Sep
9

Training Content MythBusters: Hyper-V Things Not to Try…EVER!

by amy

Wayne Small, SBS, Hyper-V, Trend, Storagecraft and all-around SBS-FAQ guy says…

Hyper-V is the best solution for SMB clients wanting to have their servers virtualised. However there are a lot of myths about how to configure it and how not to configure it. Come to this session to learn about not only the basics of good Hyper-V configuration, but how to get the best performance out of your Hyper-V solutions for your clients. We’ll bust myths such as “Is RAID 10 really better than RAID 5?” and “What’s the best way to configure my CPUs in Hyper-V”.

If you attended Wayne’s Third Tier webinar on Hyper-V you’ll have a leg up because his content here will build and expand upon that webinar.

Join Third Tier in Las Vegas for an all day training on the day prior to SMBNation. See other content details elsewhere in our blog. Thanks to our sponsors, Hewlett Packard, Symform and Storagecraft we are able to keep the cost down to only $50. So head on over to the store and reserve your space for this all-day training session! Seats are limited for this event and we expect to sell out. So register early. http://www.thirdtier.net/store Training takes place October 21st.

0 Categories : Announcement, Events, Hyper-V, SBS 2008, Virtualization, Wayne

Sep
9

Understanding Symform Bandwidth Requirements

by amy

I’ve been interested in Symform’s concept of cooperative storage since I first saw it scribbled on a napkin and a couple of powerpoint slides. When I saw it I knew immediately that it was the Eureka! moment that business continuity had been waiting for. I got in on a very early beta, experienced some early beta type snafu’s and then the product released and I started some of my clients on it. It worked and cooperative storage was born.

Of course it was a 1.0 product and so the feature set was pretty basic and one of the glaring things that was needed was bandwidth control because if your data set was large or your Internet use heavy people felt the tug as they wrestled for bandwidth. Now the product has expanded a couple of times and we have full bandwidth control over incoming and outgoing data flows.

Unfortunately for me, this brought forth the glaring reality that we didn’t understand the relationship between contribution, synchronization, cloud folders and how they impact one another based upon our choices with the bandwidth sliders and the backup software we were using. Symform gave us all rope we asked for and hang ourselves we did. How did we know we hung ourselves?

If the Symform Synchronization Service doesn’t stay started, you have problem.

If you have a lot of pending files, you have a problem

We had a problem. We weren’t sure exactly what the problem was, so we called up the guys at Symform and got ourselves a lesson in bandwidth management, Symform style. So here’s what we now know:

Synchronization uses upload bandwidth
Contribution uses download bandwidth
Contribution also uses upload bandwidth
Synchronization service requires a certain amount of bandwidth be present to function at all
Dedicating small amounts of bandwidth during the day will not help things
Symform application has an awesome log file to help you figure out your bandwidth requirements
Storagecraft, our backup software of choice changes the blocks, so Symform can’t always de-duplicate our files.

Let’s start with the log and work backwards. The log file you want is found at C:\Program Files (x86)\Symform\Node Service and is called symformsync.log. If the Symform Synchronization Service is not running then this log will show why it stopped. There will be a bandwidth requirement listed there for successful upload. Wish I could show you one but ours are all working now and the logs have over written. But look at the bottom of your log file, if you’re in this situation and you’ll see what I mean. You will need to set your minimum bandwidth to this number, even during business hours.

Now the thing that had us confused was not taking in account that the contribution service used both upload and download bandwidth. Our simple brains said – incoming traffic. Completely forgetting that if those files turn out to be needed by someone they will need upload bandwidth. But the other thing that caught us was that Storagecraft moves blocks, because when that happens Symform’s de-duplication technology sees them as new files and so the whole thing gets uploaded. We had really hoped that our full backup could be deduplicated so that after the first one, it wouldn’t take so long but that is not going to be the case. This changes things dramatically.

Here’s a sample of what our backup looks like. You get the idea that it’s a lot and it sometimes has some pretty big changes.

A quick search on the Internet comes up with a lot of references for upload calculators. That first full image looks like this in the calculator. Good thing we have more bandwidth than that.

We’re allowing 800K for 9 hours a day (business hours) and 1.8MB for 15 hours a day. This is a story problem…It’s about 21 hours at 800K or 9.6 hours at 1.8MB. In reality its going to be somewhere in between because we have contribution taking some of that bandwidth. It’s going to be a while for that full backup to get to the cloud. But not so long that we can’t get one up there over a weekend. Which means we can do a full weekly backup. In an average week day we have a total of 5GB of hourly incremental data to upload. Which is about 3 hours at 1.8MB and bit over 6 hours at the slower speed. That is probably stretching the bandwidth about as far as it can go, so we may find that we need to reduce those incrementals to every 2 hours instead. Time will tell.

Now one final point of knowledge. Understanding the Symform Cloud folder in relation to your Backup folder. Say you’ve goofed up as we did, you’ve got a lot of pending files waiting to upload and you realize that you need to make some changes. So you setup a new backup strategy, change the bandwidth sliders and the new files start populating into the folder. The files that never uploaded are so old by now anyway that you clean out the backup folder for a fresh start at this. What happens now? Not a thing. Symform is confused, looking for those files that you removed that were in a pending state and so it waits for their return and none of your new files get uploaded.

Here’s where we learned the relationship between the cloud folder and our local backup folder. The cloud folder is a list of files that Symform is going to pull into the cloud and their status. The local backup folder contains the files that you want Symform to upload. The distinction is important.

To get Symform to let go of the idea of backing up the pending files that no longer exist, you need to delete your cloud folder. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? Then create a new cloud folder and point it at your local backup folder for a fresh start. It’s at this moment, just when you thnk that you’ve deleted files in the cloud and will have to wait for the files that already backed up successfully to upload again, that the magic of Symform kicks in. The new cloud folder populates itself with the fresh list of files to be uploaded. The Symform control service now takes a look at the files and <insert angelic LAAAA> discovers that it already has these files uploaded and marks
them as such, saving you hours and hours of upload time. How? Because of two nifty features, de-duplication (do I have this block – yes I do) and recycle bin. In the recycle bin, (at the control center) they will hold your files (or more accurately the location of your files) for 15 days before giving the order to destroy them. So provided you create your new cloud folder within that time frame, you’re golden. Your files that had uploaded previously will all quickly reset to uploaded status.

Get the sliders and your backup schedule set just right in relation to the bandwidth you have access to and Symform will perform like a champ giving your clients business continuity options they couldn’t afford before.

—–

1 Categories : Amy Babinchak, Backup, StorageCraft, Symform

Sep
8

Manually uninstalling the Worry-Free Remote Manager (WFRM) 1.0 / 2.0 Agent

by steve

When upgrading to WFBS and WFBSA 6.x from previous versions of Trend Micro WFBS and CSM for SMB, I've had multiple times where the Worry-Free Remote Manager Agent install fails and gives the following pop-up error:

Unable to load Library C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\{43F8CF32-15B7-44DD-A01D-A3372DD2856E}\zlib1.dll.

If you run across this, Trend has a great KB that will walk you through doing a manual removal. If you keep the GUID in your Worry Free Remote Management Console, then you can do a copy and paste into the new install of the agent and you'll be set.

If you don't feel like clicking through to the KB, here's a copy of it as of 9/8/2010:

Manually uninstalling the Worry-Free Remote Manager (WFRM) 1.0 / 2.0 Agent

Solution ID: EN-1035023
Product: Client Server Messaging Security for SMB - 3.5, 3.6; Client Server Security for SMB - 3.5, 3.6; Worry-Free Remote Manager - 1.0
Operating System: Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition - SP1; Windows 2000 Server - SP4
Published: 4/3/2009 1:00 AM

Solution: Public

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please do the following:

1. Stop the Trend Micro Worry-Free Remote Manager Agent service.

   a. Click Start > Run.

   b. Type "cmd" on the command line and then press the Enter key.

      Run this command:
      net stop Trend Micro Worry-Free Remote Manager Agent


2. Remove the Trend Micro Worry-Free Remote Manager Agent service.

   a. On the command line, use the change directory (cd) command to go to the WFRM Agent directory.

   b. Run this command:

      TMICAgent -u

3. Remove the program files.

   Delete [agent install directory] – WFRMAgentForCSM

4. Open the Registry Editor (regedit.exe) and then remove these registry keys:

   Important:Always create a backup before modifying the registry. Incorrect registry changes may cause serious issues. Should this occur, restore it by referring to the "Restoring the Registry" Help topic in Regedit.exe or the "Restoring a Registry Key" Help topic in Regedt32.exe.

   • HKEY_OCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\TrendMicro\TMIC4CSM\Agent\...

   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Products\ 23FC8F347B51DD440AD13A73D13A73D22D58E6

   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Products\23FC8F347B51DD440AD13A73D13A73D22D58E6

   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{43F8CF32-15B7-44DD-A01D-A3372DD2856E}

   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\InstallShield Uninstall Information\{43F8CF32-15B7-44DD-A01D-A3372DD2856E}

   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\InstallShield_\{43F8CF32-15B7-44DD-A01D-A3372DD2856E}

5. Remove the WFRM Agent shortcut from the Start menu.

   a. On the desktop, click My Computer.
   b. Change the current directory to ..\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs.
   c. Delete the Worry-Free Remote Manager Agent folder.

Categories : SBS 2003, SBS 2008

Sep
8

Did you hear the news? It’s all over town…

by amy

StorageCraft snares Microsoft expert as technical services manager

"This is a major coup for us," StorageCraft Asia-Pacific vice-president Richard Giddey said. "Wayne brings with him a wealth of diverse knowledge and is a highly respected industry expert who will be instrumental in helping us to accelerate our expansion in the Asia-Pacific market."

Wayne will be presenting at our brain exploding all day training event in Las Vegas. He’s presenting Hyper-V Mythbusters: Don’t Try This…EVER! I have a feeling that along side the his disk and CPU performance studies that there might be a little bit about disaster recovery and back scenarios. You can register at www.thirdtier.net/store.

Third Tier is really proud of Wayne, we know just how lucky Storagecraft is to land him. He’s brings a lot more to the table than technical expertise.

—
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0 Categories : Events, Hyper-V, SMB Nation, Virtualization, Wayne

Sep
7

Training Content Details: It’s Only Plug & Play if you Know THESE Ninja Moves

by amy

Cliff Galiher SBS, DNS and Exchange guru says…

The mobile landscape has changed. What was in the office, is now in the hands of your clients. They expect it to work and they expect you to make it secure. Mobile devices communicate with Exchange in their own unique way. We’ll take a deep look at how devices communicate with Exchange and get technical about the protocols. This will cover activesync AND autodiscover at a protocol level. Then we’ll walk through the process of setting up different devices and visually tie the steps back to the theory. So now the mobile device works and you understand why it works, how are you going to secure it? Cliff will cover controls IT can have on activesync devices such as remote encryption and remote wipe, how to use and how to configure it.

0 Categories : Cliff Galiher, Events, Exchange, SBS 2008, SMB Nation

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