It's always the little things that get you in IT
If you are new to the Microsoft Unified Access Gateway then you really should know some of these things I ran into while trying to get my array setup and running smoothly. Sure, to find my single post among the masses is probably not going to happen, but if you do find it before you start your endeavor then I promise you will be saved time and frustration. The first major frustration, the installation….
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I ran across this in one of the documents I wrote up while doing a side by side migration of our office communication server 2007 pool to 2007 R2. It is a quick script to automate the process of creating and assigning permissions for the shares needed in the front end server installation. I wrote it pretty quickly so use at your own discretion of course. Save as a .cmd or .bat and run directly on the front end server.
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I think that commuting is starting to drive me a bit crazy. I’m going to vent a bit in the form of a dictionary of what I’ve noticed in the last 2 years working in the city. I’ll start with train types. There are a few kinds of trains that a Chicago commuter can take and I have a name for all of them. Today we are going to talk about the appropriately named “Ugly Train”.
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I’ve been really MS inundated at work lately with exchange 2010, UAG 2010, and Communicator deployments/migrations. So to balance my life a bit I better do a quick post of a linux hack 
Here is a quick one I tacked together about 6 months ago. This will generate a detailed report of all the security updates you are missing with a description of what the update will fix. You will need the yum-security package installed for this to work.
yum list-security | awk 'NR!=1 {print $1}' | sed '/list-security/d' | xargs yum info-security > security_report.txt
Sure there are better ways to mass deploy ESX servers, but this way will save the one off farm deployment person some time I took liberties in assuming you would be able to fill in the blanks for variables so <VARIABLE> or _VARIABLE_ will need to be replaced ad-lib style. Just for you my friend, served up proper on a hyper-link plate….. esx4_postinstall
I had the pleasure of doing an F5 BIG-IP load balancer upgrade recently and am happy with the way the F5 people have designed their systems for fail over. Essentially you will use different system partitions to host different versions of their product and you change which one you want to boot to after updating the inactive partition. This, theoretically, means you can always go back to a working configuration if something goes awry. I’m unhappy with how fragmented their documentation is in getting from point A to point B though. Here is a quick rundown of what I had to do…
This sly bastard wrote an excellent little .NET app for enumerating esx farm information. Any sysadmins working with VMware should definitely check this out. I really like the vHealth tab which will show possible zombie vmdks. Add the ability to export to csv and you have a nice tool for on the fly farm enumeration for the boss.
Go get RVTools now!
It was about time for me to upgrade my aging home Linux server and reinstall torrentflux-b4t with ipblock (among other things). I went back to my old post on what I did previously and found everything to be similar but slightly off. To do this reconfiguration and make ipblock work without the java user interface I had to tweak things a bit and compile another deb package. Below is how I recall doing this.
I whipped up a post install script to run on our new linux servers that drastically reduced the amount of manual effort involved with post-deployment configuration. I’m sure this could some how be integrated into the kick deployment. In any case, this script helps setup your sudo users, snmp services, and some other basic things. Modify to your environment and run directly after deployment on your headless linux servers. Save the script and change to .sh and run with sh ./centos-postinsatll.sh at a command prompt. Cheers!
