SCAPaoT

After having a lot of trouble with Microsoft Server 2008 R2 Standard and very slow transfer rates in a WAN environment,
I wrote about it here: http://www.scapaot.de/blog/?p=311,
today Microsoft came back with a good answer.

The network support team is aware of that error and will bring up a hotfix and kb article in September.
It will be published under ID 2634907.

Nice one! Many thanks Microsoft!

CU

benedikt

Today we where asked to have a view on some servers where the network performance is really poor.

All servers with this issue are placed in branches using 4mbit MPLS connection.

The network perfomance was round about 4 – 8 KB/s.
Supected where 200 – 250 KB/s.

Also the poor perfomance was shown only using TCP/IP.
On UDP/IP the transfer rate was ok.

So we tested every TCP setting you can ever think of:

• TCP Offload,
• Chimeny
• Caching
• Jumbo Frames
• MTU
• and so on

But nothing changed the poor performance.

Since we stumbled over a blog, written on January 2011:
 http://exchangemaster.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/windows-7-windows-2008-r2-slow-download

And yes, the servers with the issue are all on Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition (RTM or SP1) and have 48GB of RAM.

—–

It’s not a joke:

We removed 16GB of RAM form a server and the traffic was fast.

We remounted the RAM again, and the network performance was poor again…

—–

After that we decided to ask Microsoft about that “Feature”.

I will post a answer as soon as we have an answer.

Cheers
benedikt

At @teched they spoke about some nice features in the upcoming service pack of SCCM 2012.

These features are things like Linux and Mac management, sending emails on error or pin support for bitlocker.

But my personal favorite is the, that there will be a powershell provider for SCCM.
Perhaps you remember my post written in earlier days (Mai 2010): http://www.scapaot.de/blog/?p=57 and http://www.scapaot.de/blog/?p=69

I can’t wait to get the wmi scripts gone.

So, hopefully SP1 will come soon!

CU
benedikt

We have released a new version of our bitlocker pin tool.
You can get it here: http://blpintool.codeplex.com/

The tool is a compiled version of the bitlocker WMI methods to get a bitlocker startup pin set by a user.

This version is asking for admin credentials if UAC is enabled.

Also we have started a new discussion for “Feature Request”.

http://blpintool.codeplex.com/discussions/287612

If you have any suggestion or wish you can enter it here.

We stumbled over the following error while trying to push out agents:

Failed Agent Push/Repair – Could not remotely verify agent operating system version

Full Event Description:

The Operations Manager Server cannot process the install/uninstall request for computer IAUSYDIN0004.network.zz due to failure of operating system version verification.

Operation: Agent Install
Install account: NETWORK\systemservice
Error Code: 80070035
Error Description: The network path was not found.

Sure, there is a blog from Kevin Holeman with error-numbers (http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2009/01/27/console-based-agent-deployment-troubleshooting-table.aspx). But the error didn’t match with ours.

In our case, the firewall was turned off. Also we could remotely manage the server. And we where able to connect throug RDP. And the default action account had enought rights.

So, we did a second look at DNS and saw, that there was a second, a private, IP was registered.