IT Knowledge

Archive for July, 2009

A realy serious issue one can have is having to ensure that you can make disaster recoveries even if your employer won’t allow you to buy the disaster recovery plugins from your supplier. We are using netvault from bakbone. A nice backup suite but with fearly expensive licenses. However the technical support is good and they tought us this little trick.

The native filesystem plugin allows you to make backups of the system state, now you need to ensure that you do make those backups.

So the requirements are :

at least 1 full backup of all filesystems
at least 1 full system state backup of the same date as the filesystem backup

differentials or incrementals are possible but not required. However if you want to restore to the most recent you must also use the differential or incremental filesystem and system state backups.

now here we go :

1. Reinstall windows. Use the same version as that the server was running. Also ensure that you patch it up to the patchlevel it was. The closer you come to the patchlevel the older server was the more chance of succes.
2. Install the backup client software
3. From your backup server, do a full filesystem recovery, ensure that you tell it to overwrite any newer file. Depending on your device speed and the backup size this might take some time. DO NOT RECOVER A SYSTEM STATE!
4. Recover any filesystem differentials or incremental backups. Again DO NOT RECOVER A SYSTEM STATE!
5. Now for the tricky part, reboot the server, if the server boots up good, your in the clear!
6. Now go back to your backup server and recover the full system state backup, followed by any differential or incremental system state backups.
7. Restart the server again, i never had an issue with this backup so i’m never really scared on this point
8. Log on to the server and remove it from the domain, immediately after you removed it from the domain, put it back in the domain.
9. If the server was a SQL or Exchange box, restore the databases from your backups now. If not goto step 10.
10. Now reboot again and your server is back up and running. All data is recovered and your in the clear with your boss

Now i’ve tested this procedure with bare-metal and virtual machines. Using WDS, Template deployments and just manual installations with a cdrom.
It works for Windows 2003 and 2008 all 32bit editions, i never tried it with 64bit, but i don’t really see why it shouldn’t work.

Do one of the following:

• To lay out an entire page, make sure no shapes are selected.
• To lay out part of a page, select those shapes.

1. On the Shape menu, click Lay Out Shapes.
2. Under Apply settings to, click either Selection or Current page.
3. In the Style, Direction, and Depth lists, click the options that you want.
4. To specify connector routing style, direction, or appearance, select the Apply routing style to connectors check box and click the options you want in the Style, Direction, and Appearance lists.
5. To change the spacing for shapes and connectors, click Spacing, select the spacing options that you want, and then click OK twice.

1. Select a shape.
2. On the Format menu, click Behavior, and then click the Placement tab.
3. In the Placement behavior list, click one of the following:

• To let Microsoft Office Visio determine when to route connectors around the shape, click Let Visio decide. Routing then depends on the type of connector.
• To allow the connector to route around the shape, click Lay out and route around. The shape is now placeable.
• To prevent the connector from routing around the shape, click Do not lay out and route around. The shape is now unplaceable.

First you need to find the interface you want to change, use

netsh interface ipv4 show subinterfaces

to find the correct interface. Then to change the MTU of interface 1 use

netsh interface ipv4 set subinterface “1″ mtu=1500 store=persistent

This changes the MTU instant and without loosing network connection, so this can be done on the fly.