Lack of entries and my absence

Just wanted to let those of you who visit this space from time to time in on my lack of entries and activity in the MOM community for this past year.  Late last year I started divorce proceedings.  Through much of this year I was trying to do my own divorce, but had conflicts with time, work, shared custody of my kids, etc.  Going through a divorce is not a fun process and you really start to understand how much money and time it requires.  Local governments must love divorce (read cash cow).  I can’t believe all the fees and charges just to go through the process without lawyers.  Anyway, my divorce wasn’t bad, but it was a distraction.  Just before Thanksgiving I got notice from the court that my divorce is final.  So now with that behind me, I think I will be able to get back into what it is that I do (MOM) and publish more information to this blog (as well as be a little more active in newsgroups and communities).

 

See you in the newsgroups.

 

 

Exchange SLA Scorecard 2.0 – Outage collection fixed

As you may recall we wanted to implement the Exchange SLA scorecard.  The primary reason we couldn’t use it was because we have clustered Exchange.  We arranged our MSFT engagement to get the 2.0 version of the scorecard installed.  After it was installed and configured we noticed we were not collecting all of our outages.

 

I did some searching and noticed that MOM was not collecting the events for STORE going offline when a node failed it’s Exchange resources over to another node in the cluster.  So I presented this theory to MSFT and they did some testing to see if they could recreate it.  They were able to recreate it, and so we just had to add the Windows Clusters computer groups to the SLA scorecard rule groups.

 

After we did this MOM was able to collect all the instances of a store going offline and so we could measure our outages.  You see, once Exchange moves from one node to another (the Exchange Virtual Server instance and all of the other cluster resources for Exchange), the Exchange Management Pack (and the SLA Scorecard for Exchange MP) will ignore the node that doesn’t have the Exchange resources.

 

So, if you were in cluster manager and MOVED the Exchange group to another node, these events in the application log (store is going offline) would be ignored because the MOM agent would start to process against the new node that is getting the Exchange resources. 

 

This might not be exactly what is going on, but it’s a theory I have since even the Exchange management pack that looks for store offline wasn’t collecting these events if a cluster failed resources over from one node to another.

 

HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!

MAPI logon error – Case Closed!

So for about a year we have been having a MAPI logon issue on one of our public folder servers.  This is part of the Exchange Management Pack – MAPI logon script.

 

The hard part for me was to get console access to this Windows 2000 server.  After finally getting permission to use a tool called DSView we were able to have console access so as to debug the script.

 

I was working the case with James Caudill from MSFT (sharp guy).  He came back and told me from the debug that we were missing a critical MAPI dll in the Windows\System32 folder.  I copied that over from another server and the MAPI logon issue was resolved! 

 

MSFT had a similar case to this issue, but the client never finished working with them to resolve it.  Now I suspect there might be a KB created detailing the steps we took to resolve this.  If one is created, and you find it, then think of me and all the bogus alerts we had to put up with for so long to get this issue resolved.  The length of the case had nothing to do with the level of service from MSFT, it had to do with co-operation at my workplace.

 

Thanks James.

Back in the saddle

I finally got around to rebuilding my home PC.  I was going to put a RC of Vista on it, but decided not to.  Instead I reinstalled XP and updated it.  Now I am running with IE 7 and Windows Media Player 11!  WOOO HOOO!

 

I also got my news reader to work again, so I have tried to be a little more active in the MOM newsgroups, despite being out of the game for a while.

 

One thing I plan on doing is finally downloading SCOM and running through the next version of Mommy.  I doubt we will implement it at my workplace until the first SP, but I would like to take a look at it and get familiar with MONAD.

 

So I am getting back to the newsgroups, and will be building out some VM’s to play with the next version of MOM.  How exciting…

 

If I discover anything interesting, I will be sure to post it here of course.

HP EVA MP 2.0

We installed the next version of the HP management pack for HP EVA.  It does not get rid of the older computer groups or rule groups, so you will have to delete those, or disable them.

 

From what I can see there are some differences, but I am not sure it’s enough for us to implement it 100%.

 

One thing I want to verify is if WEBES can be set up to send alerts to a primary and secondary MOM server (for redundancy).  We were told this feature would be available.

 

I’ll keep you posted.