As the title says, I'm looking for a way of determining if a given Windows server is part of a NLB cluster.
I know that it is possible to check the presence of a service with Get-Service... but NLB is a kernel driver... also how do I deal with older Windows versions such as 2003?
Thanks!
Well, for win2008+ you have possibility to use Get-NlbClusterNode cmdlet.
I believe you can also check win2003 servers via NLB WMI class, unfortunately I dont have any 2003 server to check if I'm right.
Related
Unable to do the windows update through batch patch. When I tried to check for available updates, some instances are showing the error message as “Error 1601: Failed to retrieve WMI info. The RPC server is unavailable".
I have tried the below troubleshooting steps for those instances which are showing error.
1. Windows Firewall – opened ports 135 and 445
2. Checked the RPC service to see if it is running and set to automatic
3. If the instance is stopped, we have left it alone
Followed this KB https://batchpatch.com/troubleshooting-common-errors-in-batchpatch no luck. Anyone who has experience or idea what is wrong please guide me.
It's peculiar that you would post on stackoverflow rather than contacting BatchPatch support directly (https://batchpatch.com/contact) or posting on the support forum (https://batchpatch.com/forum).
The page that you linked (batchpatch.com/troubleshooting-common-errors-in-batchpatch) contains additional links for troubleshooting the 'RPC server is unavailable' error. It specifically points to these two links:
batchpatch.com/using-batchpatch-with-windows-firewall
batchpatch.com/batchpatch-ports
It is not sufficient to just open 135 and 445 in the Windows Firewall. You must open 'File and Printer sharing' and 'Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).' In your case, probably the error is occurring because you did not open 'Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).'
The above link also further explains:
In order for WMI to work properly… The target computer must be able to
receive and process RPC (Remote Procedure Call) requests. Both the WMI
and RPC services must be running on the target computer. If you’re
using Windows Firewall on the target computer, then please follow the
instructions on this page to configure it properly: Using BatchPatch
with Windows Firewall
(batchpatch.com/using-batchpatch-with-windows-firewall).
If you are using a hardware firewall, the configuration for WMI can
potentially be a bit trickier, depending on the particular firewall
device. WMI connections, by default, are not established on a
static/fixed port. Instead WMI uses dynamic port configuration for its
connections, which means that the actual ports used for a given
connection are established on-the-fly at the time of connection. Each
connection will end up using different ports. In the context of a
classic hardware firewall, this used to be a problem because hardware
firewalls would typically require any open ports to be configured
manually. An enterprise firewall administrator could never know in
advance which ports would need to be opened. However, fortunately many
modern firewalls now implement DCE/RPC, which solves this problem and
allows the use of dynamic ports for WMI/RPC. If you have a network
level hardware firewall in place between the BatchPatch computer and
the target computers, you’ll need to configure it to allow DCE/RPC, so
that it can open the necessary ports, on-the-fly, for each WMI
connection. More info on DCE/RPC can be found at the following two
links:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE/RPC
wiki.wireshark.org/DCE/RPC
I'm developing a program using Windows 7. There are WCF services (soap, rest) that are used by currently by Silverlight but very soon I'll start development of the mobile application that would make use of these services.
On day to day basis I use Mac and Apache to host my website, but during the development of this program I would like to use IIS7 to put my services online. I have absolutely no problems to access all the services via localhost but as soon as I'm trying to connect through the internet I get "The connection has timed out".
I'm sure that my router is configured right as it works perfectly fine when I'm on Mac OS, but it looks like Windows simply blocks incoming connections from outside; I cannot even connect from another computer on the same network.
So is there a way of using Windows 7 as server with IIS7 or is it only possible with Windows Server? I know it might be like enabling/disabling one setting somewhere but I just cannot find it.
Please help.
By default, the Windows 7 firewall doesn't have a port 80 exception for IIS, you will need to either add an exception or disable the firewall to be able to connect from another machine.
Windows has a built-in firewall that is probably blocking the connections. Type "firewall" into the control panel search box to find the settings to allow stuff through/turn it off completely.
Situation
I have a windows service which I would like to make highly available.
I have two unclustered servers (Windows server 2003 standard edition).
The question is:
What options do I have to make my service highly available in an automated way?
I can think of the asymmetric master-slave option which consists of keeping the service running on both machines with a communication heartbeat between them so one acts as the master and the slave takes over automatically whenever the master does not respond.
Do you know any other ways to implement this?
note: Please don't point me to this answer, I do NOT/won't/can't have clusters.
If you're windows service is hosting a web/wcf service, you can configure your client to have a primary service url and a secondary service url. Then you can modify the client connection logic to use the secondary service when connection to the primary service fails.
You can do this transparently by adding a router service which will do the logic above. Basically proxying the operations for whichever service it is connected to. But this adds another point of failure, the router service.
The simplest i cant think of is to make sure to set the service recovery options on your windows service/s. Something like this http://code.google.com/p/daemoniq/wiki/WindowsServiceRecoveryOptions
HTH
I suggest checking MS Patterns and Practices web site, there you could find advice on this topic (for example http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998414.aspx)
I have a program consisting of a server and a client processes. Both run on Windows systems - Windows 2000 or later versions. The two processes can run on the same machine or on two different machines.
How can the client determine if it is run on the same machine as the server? If the server is not running the client can't work anyway and doesn't care where the server possibly is - so this case is out of the question. I've heard that each Windows machine has an UUID - can I obtain it and use for that purpose?
Windows networking requires computer names to be unique, so calling the GetComputerName api and having the client and server swap names (and compare the received name to the name they see) should suffice. If the client and server can start up independently of one another then you'll need some sort of protocol for this process. It seems logical for the client to initiate the exchange, and the server to only send its name when it has received a name from a client. The client can then abort the connection if it sees the same name.
I believe most virtual machine systems will allow the virtual machine to have its own name, so it should still be possible for you to test on virtual machines. However I don't have extensive experience of all the virtualisation technologies out there, so can't say for sure.
Previous question about generating a unique machine id that might help.
Link to previous answer which mentions MachineGUID
It is straightforward to add an API to the server that reports its machine name. The environment variable is COMPUTERNAME. The client could check that, right?
Do you need to deal with any of these cases?
The client is running, but the server is not responding, and you want to know whether the unresponsive server is on a remote machine.
The client and the server are running in two distinct virtual machines on the same host machine, and you want to report that as "running on the same machine."
The client is running in a virtual machine hosted by the same machine as the server is running on, and you want to report that as "running on the same machine."
The client and the server are running on uncoordinated networks and both might have been assigned the same name.
The server is possibly hostile, and will attempt to deceive the client.
The network card will have a unique MAC. If both server and client report the same MAC then they are using the same network card. If both client and server are running in different virtual machines but using the same network card, do you consider them running on the same machine or different machines?
how about trying to establish a loopback tcp connection? or maybe checking for some lock file created by the server in a predefined folder...
I don't know exactly how, but there's for sure something equivalent in Win32 to the /proc filesystem in Unix (I think there are free replacements for the windows taskmanager, maybe you could look at their sources) where you could search for your server process.
I'm in need of setting up cron-based VPN connectivity from Ubuntu "Jaunty" to a Windows-based VPN over PPTP for incremental DB synchronization. Using the default Network Manager and PPTP module everything seems to work fine. However, I have 2 issues:
1) Despite checking "Use this only for resources", I still lose my local internet connection and am routed through their servers.
2) As a result of 1 I have need to automate connecting to and disconnecting from the VPN in order to perform various tasks as the machine is at the office and I am not.
Much of the information I'm finding on PPTPing from Linux to Windows involves the use of GUI Network Manager, etc. However, I need to perform these steps from the command line for the sake of automation. Can anyone point me to a quality bit of documentation for this specific case?
Best.
http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/
I think this site has everything that you need :)