Category: Server Administration

Using CMD one uses wmic command…

1) Example to query listed applications on remote system running Windows
	wmic /NODE:RemoteHostName product get name, version
2) Example to uninstall application remotely using wmic
	wmic /NODE:RemoteHostName product where name="ApplicationName" call uninstall /nointeractive

*NOTE* these require WMI management to be allowed through the windows firewall.

That’s neat, this can be better achieved using powershell…

1) Example to query listed applications on remote system running Windows via PowerShell v2
	gwmi Win32_Product -co nb00647 | ft name, version
2) Example to uninstall application remotely using wmic
	(gwmi win32_Product -co Server1 | where {$_.Name -like '*ApplicationName*'}).Uninstall()

That’s amazing!! What’s the issue?

Well, first off, it’s not clear if this query runs agaist both known application registries (on any 64 bit based Windows system), those being… HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall (For 32 Bit Apps) HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall (For 64 Bit Apps)

At this point I wasn’t sure if this was querying both or just one of these locations..
I decided to test this with an old FireFox installation, that I had replaced a while ago (I initially used FrontMotion firefox to allow for configuring via GPO’s) This was made possible by later version of firefox via the mozilla.cfg file and this file could be pushed and enforced by GPO, anyway.

PS C:\Windows\system32> gwmi Win32_Product | where {$_.Name -like '*Fire*'}

IdentifyingNumber : {3F98D293-8219-4730-B49B-F223030021B8}
Name              : Mozilla Firefox (en-US)
Vendor            : FrontMotion
Version           : 29.0.1.0
Caption           : Mozilla Firefox (en-US)

Once I had ensured the correct object being returned, I called its uninstall function.

PS C:\Windows\system32> (gwmi Win32_Product | where {$_.Name -like '*Fire*'}).uninstall()

__GENUS          : 2
__CLASS          : __PARAMETERS
__SUPERCLASS     :
__DYNASTY        : __PARAMETERS
__RELPATH        :
__PROPERTY_COUNT : 1
__DERIVATION     : {}
__SERVER         :
__NAMESPACE      :
__PATH           :
ReturnValue      : 0
PSComputerName   :

Key thing here is the Return value, claims 0, so that be considered a success, lets check the returned value..
Sure enough, no returned objects, lets scan the registry for stale keys for that particular GUID/IdenitfierNumber

reg query HKLM /f "3F98D293-8219-4730-B49B-F223030021B8" /s
(This can take a long time, if local to the machine, searching via find in regedit can be quicker)
reg query HKCR /f "3F98D293-8219-4730-B49B-F223030021B8" /s

Both queries return no values, thus were cleanly removed from the registry..
However, I still have a firefox version 39 listed in my Programs and Features.
So, what gives? As I had mentioned before on what the wmic and qwmi commands query the Win32_Product class, from what I’ve seen so far it appears this is querying on a specific set of the registry and not all the applicable registry sections:
HKCR\Installer\Products HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
Doing a quick reg query for the word firefox sure enough displayed the listed installation of Firefox 39, and not the old 29 listed above…

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Mozilla Firefox 39.0 (x86 en-US)
    Comments    REG_SZ    Mozilla Firefox 39.0 (x86 en-US)
    DisplayIcon    REG_SZ    C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe,0
    DisplayName    REG_SZ    Mozilla Firefox 39.0 (x86 en-US)
    InstallLocation    REG_SZ    C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox
    UninstallString    REG_SZ    "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\uninstall\helper.exe"
    URLUpdateInfo    REG_SZ    https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/39.0/releasenotes

According to this stackflow post, there is no way to use wmi/qwmi to query 32 bit applications… I find this hard to believe and will update this blog should new news pop up.

Now here’s the kicker, Firefox was removed from my Program Files, but a Mozilla folder still exists in my Program files (x86), again seemingly like a lack of wmic application control for 32 bit applications. However I have no firefox in my search, and no firefox.exe avilable in the existing folder in PF(x86)… lets try to uninstall whats listed under programs and features… Would you look at that… says something happened during uninstall, and asked to remove the listing from programs list. Doing another “reg query HKLM /f “firefox” /s” shows it been removed from the keys mentioned above. However lots of plugin keys remain… oh well Deleted Profile Data, Program File Data and called it a night.

In order to build a more-or-less reliable list of applications that appear in the "Programs and Feautres" in the Control Panel, you have to consider that not all applications were installed using MSI. WMI only provides the ones installed with MSI.

Here is a short summary of what I've found out:

MSI applications always have a Product Code (GUID) subkey under HKLM\...\Uninstall and/or under HKLM\...\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Products. In addition, they may have a key that looks like HKLM\...\Uninstall\NotAGuid.

Non-MSI applications do not have a product code, and therefore have keys like HKLM\...\Uninstall\NotAGuid or HKCU\...\Uninstall\NotAGuid.

Infro provided by Ilya Kogan

Jan 2018 Update

This brings back bad memories haha. I should find some time to play with this again on Windows 10, see if anythings changed since.

So I use Zenoss for centralized system monitoring, including everything from network devices, ESXi hosts, all the way to end server such as Windows VM’s using WMI.

As I receive a flood of events from SharePoint and it’s child service a terrible workflow server add on called K2 Blackpearl, I ignored my Zenoss server quite a bit. I did clean up my other servers pretty well. So when I noticed this alert on my Exchange server, I wasn’t too happy. I like clean event logs in most of the servers I manage. (I’ve made an expectation to SharePoint and K2 since there a whole mixed bag of service accounts and permissions, and web parts… so many moving parts, I simply don’t care about their events.. Given there are no issues)

So I set out to figure out what was causing this event… usual googling came up with the usual TechNet articles of those claiming it probably just re-associating to another acceptable protocol and to accept it. And as per usual whenever people can’t figure out why a event is triggering but doesn’t seem to affect production: “you can just ignore it, or disable SChannel events” This is not good enough for me, as it clearly indicates an issue going on in the back end.

Digging further I came across this tid bit of info. Using this info I knew it was a protocol version issue, with SSL and since it’s on my exchange server I had an itchy suspicion it was ActiveSync related.

Installing Wireshark onto the server and running it with the SSL filter in place, I sure enough was able to pin point the device triggering the events. My boss’s Note 4 running Android 5.01 using the native mail app. At first I simple went into his exchange settings (just to note that it would work externally but not internally) and unchecked SSL (caused Auth to fail as expected), then re-enabled SSL. At first this seemed to make his ActiveSync work and I figured the events would go away, they did not, checking Wireshark it was still from his phone.

To Paraphrase to solution:

1) Remove the corporate email account from the device. (Completely)
2) Re-add the account to the device.

So that’s it! Since doing that I haven’t received any other SChannel fatal error (70). I hope this helps other that come across the same events in their Exchange environment. Just note this was on Exchange 2010 SP3 RU 10.

Jan 2018 Update

Got to love event logging. See so much, but sometimes, so much can drown you. Just have to take care of the ones you can when you can.

Scenario: You are about to remove the final Physical Domain Controller from your infrastructure, As you’ve done this before you figure it’ll be a piece of cake and will go about you day.. Instead you’re presented with this!

After some googlings, you’ll probably comes across this. Which will tell you that you need to edit the objects attribute to an active DC role owner.

If you decided to look in the dcpromo log file, you probably noticed that the fsmroleOwner is pointing to an old Server, which was probably the PDC at one point within the domain.

Even though it took a decent amount of time to troubleshoot, I’ll keep this post short. Just check out MS tech guy: Chris Davis blog about the issue.

Grab FixFSMO.vbs from MS support articles, or Davis’s blog and run it against the object in DN notation on a PDC or the DC you wish to have as the FSMO owner.
ex. cscript fixfsmo.vbs DC=DomainDnsZones,DC=Contoso,DC=com

Jan 2018 Update

Funny I don’t recall this one all that well, but great blog post by Chris which covers the nitty gritty pretty well, considering it’s a direct MS technet blog unlikely to go down. Good job.

This blog is going to be an interesting one. The points as to how I got to a windows machine with a bad boot is as interesting as how I managed to resolve the issue.

It started on a Friday, well it technically started before that, but long story short my colleague and I were planning to do a P2V of a physical SQL machine. I prepared the new ESXi host slowly during the week to prepare for this.

As I was destined to go camping that weekend and still needed a bit of work to be done to get ready for the progress, I’ll admit I was a bit rushed in telling my colleague the appropriate steps to take. Now at this point the host was ready, albeit was a bit on the small side when it came to the local datastore, (3 x 6Gb/s sata discs in a RAID 5 (I really wanted RAID 1 with a hot spare, but this was the best suitable option this HBA/RAID controller provided me)). Anyway while I was away camping, go figure in a location with no cell service, my colleague completed the P2V. Turns out it didn’t go 100% perfectly as planned, as he emailed me a bunch of error noted by the host ESXi. Turns out he had provisioned Thick Provision lazy zeroed discs normally I wouldn’t deny its a good choice under certain circumstances, however, in this case with the limited datastore space it wasn’t the greatest choice cause there wasn’t really room to spare on empty “zeroed” data.

So after I was informed of the situation I began to attempt to fix the issue, which happened to be that the host was unable to remove/consolidate snapshot due to the lmited space left on the datatstore. I began by adding the host into our SAN network and connecting it to our SAN storage. I did a svMotion after I had initially shutdown the guest OS. Shutting down the guest OS took over 20 minutes with the slowness it had been brought to by the issue, while it was still specifying shutting down I had got impatient and forced the system down.

After the initial svMotion, I checked the datastore and noticed that there was still a VM folder in there and all the space had not yet cleared, which I found a bit strange considering it should have migrated all the data to the new store.

I figured well lets see how the VM reacts now… and whomp whomp waaaaaaa was presented with this! (Imagine Source was removed, I can’t remember what it was lol)

At this point I wasn’t sure if this was realated to the snapshots and the VM folder set being not all in one place.. So I decided to delete all the snapshots. Even after completion and noting that all Data had indeed migrated to the SAN, I was still presented with the error shown above.
At this point I was starting to worry that I might have ruined 20 hours of P2V work, I was too tired to carry on for the day and decided to boot the physical back up to handle DB requests for the following work day.

The next day I jumped on fixing the issue at hand to recover this VM and save the 20 hours it took to P2V this thing. I initially started by mounting the Windows Server 2008 R2 installation DVD to the guest VM and adjusting the boot time to allow me to load the boot order and boot from the disc. Even though selecting repair my computer did see all the local discs including the installed OS, it would only give me the option of recovering from a system image (which I didn’t have), run diag tools (doesn’t help in this case) and command prompt. So I loaded command prompt. Now everything I tried in bootrec.exe options had failed:

/FixMBR (didn’t work)
/FixBoot (didn’t work)
/ScanOS (Found 0 installed instances)
/RebuildBCD (Found 0 installed instances)

At this point I felt it was pretty shot and unrecoverable, but like usual I felt to give one last google search on the issue of 0 found instances. Which lead me to this MS answers post, with the same question. To paraphrase the solution from Vijay B

To Paraphrase to solution:

1) bcdedit /export c:\bcdbackup (Backup the existing bcd)
2) attrib c:\boot\bcd -h -r -s  (Allow write/modify of the BCD file)
3) ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old      (rename the BCD file, can also just be deleted, this is a backup solution)
4) bootrec /rebuildbcd

At this point it will catch the windows install and actually rebuild the BCD (/Rebuild BCD), believe it or not after that I was able to successfully boot the VM, and saved a 20 hour P2V. I can now freely vMotion and move this VM as required in my hypervised system!
Thanks ViJay!

Jan 2018 Update

Another good post, but sad didn’t write out the error message as clearly the outsourced image has been lost from the interwebs.

It’s a beautiful Monday morning. I get up shower and get dressed for work. Hop on the bus, that happens to be crowded to the tits! As I stand silently enjoying the sun shine through the bus windows, I hear the annoying sounds of a child’s educational video game. Have you ever heard the sound FX from those things…. so repetitive it’ll drive you crazy!

I silently tough out my nightmarish bus ride, and walk into work. Pull up on my new standing desk, and begin to check on Backup status, and server updates. Then go to grab a coffee from the lunch room.

As I return to my office, I notice a Lync/Skype for Business communication from a colleague that works on another floor stating another user there can’t log into their system.

I quickly open cmd prompt to verify the workstation has network connectivity, it sure does. I remote in using our remote software, and watch the users login attempt, sure enough it fails.

As this was something I had not seen before, although I had a real good assumption it was user profile based, I quickly googled the error as seen on the screen. Where would we be without google!? My first investigation brought me to this MS support page but it’s offered suggestions were a bit outlandish for me, considering it basically wanted me to manually re-create the profile and migrate the data. I don’t think so, as I went to go see how large the profile was via Advanced System Settings, I noticed the profile status was set to “backup”. Googling this issue brought me to this awesome blog page.

 To Paraphrase to solution:
	1) Open Regedit (�HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList)
	2) Find the profile SID with the .bak
	3) Rename SID profile (with ProfileImagePath = c:\users\temp) to ***.ba
	4) Rename SID profile with .bak by removing the .bak
	5) Set DWROD State and RefCount to 0
	6) Rename or delete (haven't tested) ***.ba to ***.bak
	7) Reboot and enjoy

Jan 2018 Update

Sourced links, paraphrased solutions in case links die, good story and to the point. Well done.

I use my own blog once in a while to remind myself how to do a specific task, and sometimes I forget to document every step along the way.
I did my basic steps of using psexec with admin creds and elevated permissions, and came across the two useual problems I forgot to mention in my previous posts!

The first one being; Access Denied – unable to create directory.
That’s funny considering I have full admin permissions, this is another one of those erroneous error messages. This one was really due to junctions aka linked files in linux.
After hurdling that issue using the switches /d /s /y /h /i /z I discovered the next erroneous error message of insufficient memory. Gosh Darn it xcopy can you do anything right? Like usual google to the rescue and you sure enough discover that this event happens due the limit of 256 characters on the NTFS file format most windows use (unless you are on Win 8.1 or above and use the new file table, but that’s a blog post for another day.) So the total directory path turns out to be longer than NTFS allows and cause this “insufficient memory” error. As you can imagine google and others blogs have pointed me to Robocopy!.

Robocopy what a nice command tool! Anyway at first I attempt normal robocopy without switchs, well that didn’t work, then I saw the /MIR, MASSIVE CAUTION!
Robocopy by default attempts to copy junction links, and by doing so (I’m not sure exactly how it attempts to accomplish this) it will spiral into the junction creating folder parents of children deeply into itself leaving with a structer similar to:
c:\user\username\Application Data\Application Data\Application Data”
to the point where it gets so deep it managed to crash saying it can’t read the file and attempting to break out of it using ctrl+c, won’t really work.
If you did run Robocopy with the /MIR on a users profile or any parent directory with junction folders, you’ll have to manually clean up the mess left behind. When you attempt to deleted the parent folder it will prompt an error stating the file is too large for the file system it resides on or something similar. These events are full of erroneous error messages. But go as far into the folder as you can then cut the folder where you end and paste it all the way into its parent folder shrinking the complete path name allowing you to work with the deeper child directories, after a couple cut n paste it should be short enough for you to delete the folders and all files.
The proper way is to use “Robocopy /MIR /XJ SourceDir TargetDir”. This way junctions will be skipped. Hope this helps someone else experiencing troubles with Xcopy and Robocopy.

Jan 2018 Update

I remember this. 🙂 2014 was a good year.

If you manage a Lync 2013 server, you probably have looked through event viewer to find this little bugger; Event 21054.

You’ll notice this event is generated whenever the address book is updated with Update-CsAddressBook cmdlet or after the maintenacne that is run every day.

The following is a sample of the event log information details:

Users are not indexed in the database that should be.

Expected indexed user count: 0

Actual indexed user count: 136

Cause: User replication issue.

Resolution:

Run Update-CsAddressBook to synchronize all accounts.

How lovely, it didn’t resolve the issue. All googling will state run “debug-csaddressbookreplication” and if not indexed objects and Abandonded objects are 0 then…..
You guessed it! MS favorite quote “You can safely ignore it.”
Better yet MS fix this already!

Jan 2018 Update

I have no clue if this is still a problem, I generally don’t look in event viewer unless somethings broken. However if you are running Zenos, PRTG or some other monitoring software that ties into some windows servers event viewer, you’d have to filter it there.