Restoring Exchange 2003 database [ August 22nd, 2009 ] Posted in » Uncategorized

We had a number of issues on an SBS 2003 server where a server was hard shut off (Battery backup was accidentally shutoff by the client) during an automatic RAID rebuild.  The main issue was Exchange failed to come back up when the server was turned back on.

It looked like the failure was due to the latest Exchange log not existing. Using eseutil it showed that both the private and public databases were in a Dirty Shutdown state.  I figured it would not work, but I first tried a soft recovery.  It failed because the log was missing.

I was not sure which process would be faster among a database repair or a database restore, but we chose the repair first, unfortunately.  After it appeared the database recovery would be about 16-20 of more downtime, we cancelled the repair and began restoring the backup from the previous night.  We had Backup Exec 10d at this client and can happily report that the restore was successful.  A 30GB private store took about 4.5 hours to restore off a USB-based backup.  One issue why it took so long is that this server does not have USB 2.0 ports. 

Big UGH, but we were back up and running the next day.  Another big reason to have something like Backup Exec System Recovery, the restore would have been a lot quicker.

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Spoolsv.exe with 100% CPU Usage

We had an issue recently where there was a cpu lock on spoolsv.exe.  At first I figured it was related to some new drivers being installed (Trying to get an All in One printer to work in terminal services). 

The ultimate fix was to delete some temporary spool files that had not automatically been deleted.  These are found at

C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS

Thanks to http://torque.oncloud8.com/archives/000384.html for the information

August 26th, 2008 | Leave a Comment

VMWare Server with Broadcom NICs

Last week we were attempting to install a brand new SBS 2003 server for a new client, then have a terminal server running in a VMWare environment with Windows 2008.  We only had the onboard Broadcom NICs.  I’ve had so many problems with both VMWare and Virtual Server when using these NICs, so we typically configure an additional Intel NIC when we know we are going to virtualize, but there was a mistake in the order. 

Once we had the virtual server up and running, we found that we had a problem where it could not get to the Internet.  At first it seemed related to some frustrating firewall issue, it was showing that it was on the Domain Profile, but was local only.  We even went as far as installing Windows 2003 instead, but no luck.  I did every possible VMWare configuration option with regards to the network, and nothing worked at all. 

Since we’ve had trouble with the Broadcom cards before, I was skeptical about them from the beginning.  Sure enough, I found other people with similar problems.

In the properties of the adapter, the following need to be turned off:

Checksum Offload

Large Send Offload

 

Also, I did not need to do the following to fix the problem, but I did turn off Automatic choosing of available physical network adapter and forced VMnet0 to the adapter of my choosing.

I found the information here: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/151036?tstart=0&start=15.

August 26th, 2008 | Leave a Comment

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