The Surly Admin

Random Thought Friday

Nothing much going on lately, well, except for…

Veeam 6.1

Ran into a bit of an issue last weekend with Veeam.  What triggered the whole thing was on Friday we had a user come to us with a problem with Excel.  The problem was the path and file name were too long and she was getting a DDE error when opening the spreadsheet.  Why, after all these years Microsoft hasn’t fixed the long file name issues I can’t even begin to imagine.  And I don’t want to hear any crap about legacy apps, at some point you just have to fix something and make everyone come forward with you.  They do it with things most IT Pros don’t care about (Metro) why not try the tactic on things we do care about?

Deep breath.  While troubleshooting this with our desktop guy, they managed to loose the spreadsheet so wanted a restore.  No big deal, fire up Veeam pull the directory and now I get the long file name problem too.  A little Googling revealed that upgrading to version 6.1 of Veeam should resolve this (I was on 6.0).  Fair enough, last upgrade went incredibly smoothly so I was feeling confident we could do this.  Ran the upgrade, got the file and everything seemed fine.

Flash forward to Monday and my desktop guy tells me there’s a horrendous sound coming from the server room, which I immediately know is the fans on my backup server (only it makes that noise).  Sure enough my backup server is in an infinity loop where it starts up, tries to “configure Windows” and reboots itself.  Several hours of troubleshooting and a call to Microsoft and we end up taking a registry from a week ago and putting it in place and booting the server up ok.  But now I have a week old registry and a day old upgrade of my Veeam software.  Guess how well that worked out?

Turns out, after talking to the Veeam tech, there is a known issue with Veeam Enterprise Manager (which I had installed but never use) where you have to upgrade it first and then upgrade the Backup software otherwise you get the problem I had.  I’m sure that was in a release file somewhere, but I sure missed it!

DFS Monitor With History Upgrade

Just updated DFS Monitor with History (source code here, blog here and here).  I’m a little bit better at Powershell now–a lot of thanks go to this blog for that!–and I wanted to update a few things that were bugging me about the old code.  Some improvements:

• User set variables are now parameters, so you can change things without going into the code
• Updated the IsAvailable function to use global variables
• Updated PSObject creation from using the old Powershell 1.0 style (using Add-Member) to the Powershell 2.0 style just using the @{} style
• Changed the HTML creation from using char[13]+char[10] to just using `n
• Updated the job monitoring functionality to actually work.  When using Get-Job with the .Count property if Get-Job returns $null then .Count is $null too.  Forced the Get-Job into an array now so if it comes up $null, .Count will now read 0.
• Added comment-based help
• A couple of little things here and there.

October 26, 2012 - Posted by Martin9700 | Random Thoughts, Technical | dfs monitor, Veeam