dhoward_westexetc

Yeah our server is Enterprise. I was going to put some light use VMs on that server to give some resources free for AD etc.

We have a Server 2008 R2 domain controller, running the DHCP and DNS roles as well. It is the primary DC emulator and is infrastructure master. It is also a global catalog server. I was thinking of installing Hyper-V on it. Has anyone managed to install hyper-v onto such a configuration? Are there any issues I should be aware of? Thanks.

Nothing definite yet but I have some idea of what is causing it, in our case it may be due to the setting in McAfee VirusScan 'block the connection when a threat is detected in shared folder' that may be interfering with SMB on the 2008 servers. I think its only consequence is occasional latency issues, I had originally thought it was causing issues with loss of data in Word 2003 on save but I think now the two are unconnected, and that Word itself is the cause of that. I'm waiting until all of our McAfee clients are 8.7i before I really see for certain if it has resolved it. Take special note on whether the Srv 2012 errors are happening in the holidays. In our case they are not, indicating that it is an error originating from clients. From looking just now, I think the number of errors is starting to decline slowly after we replaced most of our 8.5i installs with 8.7i. Performance is improving all the time.

Yay! Someone else with the same issue as me! I've never worked this one out, but I discovered recently that a similar issue occurs with Lego Mindstorms Programming. You can't save to the root of My Documents, but you can to U:. Looks like there is some policy that trips these two programs up, but try taking a Student policy apart with the number of policies that have to be set! The issue is OS independent, it happens on Windows 7 as well as XP.

Just an update on this, I probably won't know if this has fixed it for a few days yet, since machines will gradually pick up the settings as they are rebooted. I've just rolled this updated file now to our older staff laptops as they will still have the setting enabled. The other niggle is that the 8.7i CFG files aren't applying to 8.5i installs, access protection blocks them, so that check box is still ticked, so potentially the 8.5i installs are now the ones causing the problem. However all 8.7i installs on both Windows 7 and XP are having these settings applied successfully. I'm planning anyway to accelerate the phasing out of our older McAfee VirusScan 8.5i installations and replace them with 8.7i so that every machine is on the same level, which is something that I was going to do anyway, and will be inevitable when we move all of our client machines to Windows 7 as 8.5i does not work on that platform. Fingers crossed.

Well I have the updated config now distributed across our network so I will let you know how that goes! If you have a Terminal/Remote desktop server for remote access with McAfee installed on it you will have to apply the setting to that as well. Forgot about that so was getting the srv 2012 errors in the evening! Obviously there will be some machines that won't have been rebooted, so there will still be some that haven't had the McAfee config file applied yet so still have this enabled. What i'm looking for is a reduction in them, not at this stage a total elimination of the issue.

May well do if your clients are Windows 7, since in that case you would apply the fix to the client side.

We're phasing ours in - staff laptops ongoing after we had new ones delivered, staff desktops when we roll them out in Easter time, and student machines during the summer holidays hopefully. What helped was I spent months developing policies to work on both XP and Vista, the latter we never rolled out, in a separate test environment, which we rolled out over the summer of 2008. Thus we already have GPOs that roughly work on both XP and Windows 7, but with some tweaking obviously for IE 8. Try your clients with Windows 7 SP1 RC, since you'll be rolling out your machines with Windows 7 SP1. Use the EduGeek ADM template to disable things like Control Panel on the desktop, and deny students access to the Public User folder on each client (do this in your base image); this stops the Public documents being added to their libraries, and makes it more responsive.

Check you don't have 'Prohibit Make Available offline' enabled for your H drive. Other than that the user's H drive may already be synced. If its already synced 'Make available offline' won't appear as an option. Highlight each folder on the H drive of the affected user and you should see on the status bar below 'Always Available' for Offline availability. Remember that Offline files syncs My Documents offline automatically by default, so if H: is also My Documents, that will be made offline.

Easiest way I found to do this is to add the gadgets to the default user profile. You do this through Sysprep, the Microsoft KB has instructions on how to do this. We did this so we can deploy the clock gadget to all our Windows 7 machines.

No but I am closing in. My attention now is drawn to a setting in McAfee VirusScan On Access scanner called 'block connections when a threat is detected in a shared folder', on client McAfee plus the fix for Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 described above. I found before I did this setting that I would get a delay every now and again when trying to access the shares on the affected server. I did get access eventually, but during that hang it would also generate srv 2012 errors on the file server at the same time. If I take this check box off I don't get the hang and hence I never generate the srv 2012 errors from my machine. I'm going to distribute the CFG file from McAfee Installation Designer to the clients via startup script GPO to reconfig the clients to take this off. Then I will see if any more srv 2012 errors are generated. Very intriguing. Make sure you install the August 2010 Hyper-V rollup on your Hyper-V servers. There are some networking fixes in that. Srv 2012 errors can be caused by all sorts of things in a network environment, but it seems to be mainly file and print sharing related in our particlar case.

Now that is an interesting one. I just had a delay in response when I tried to access a file share on our file server from a Windows 7 client when I tried to change from cable connection to wireless. At the same time, an srv error appeared on our File server! Only trouble is it only applies to Windows 7/Server 2008 R2, and we were getting the error before we deployed Windows 7 to many people. Mind you, we still had Windows 7 on our technician PCs. I'm still curious as to why it affects a Server 2008 SP2 on the other end OS though...maybe its a throwback. It seems to make sense in some ways, but not others. I'll try it nonetheless.

That's for Windows 2000. There's nothing there on that article that will help to resolve it on Windows 2008 from what I can see?

Yeah we only ever get it on accessing file shares from what I can see. But what I am fairly certain of in our case is: - It's not printer drivers, since it's not a print server. - The drivers are fully up to date. - The cables are brand new. Cat 5e, but we've never known issues with Cat5e on servers. Nevertheless, I have to see what the switch config is from our support company. I should hear soon.

That's what I am attempting to figure out...except we have up to 30-60 events a day, which is a humongous amount. I'm trialling disabling Receive side scaling, Large send offload, and Rx checksum offload, and have correspondence with out support company for our switches to try and find the optimum configuration. After those changes (and having to restart our DNS server!) we have not had an srv error for 45 minutes. The problem with these is the cause seems to vary depending on the network environment. Different things work for different environments it seems. While the error code is useful, the information around it isn't. That's why it seems to be such a hard error to pinpoint.

I am going to reverse the teaming as that does not seem to have fixed the issue. I am also going to disable Large send offload and some other offloading. I'm also enquiring with our support company who manage our switches to check the config of the ports and ensure that the settings are in sync, before I contact Dell for their assistance. I will inform how this goes for us.

I had our file server drop out again just now, on the Rx side. I had to reset the virtual network adapter to be able to get it back online again. It's the 4th time I have had it do this after we enabled teaming. I fear I may have to reverse this if this carries on. In all the cases I had this happen it works fine on Tx, but not Rx. I've disabled temporarily the Windows Firewall and McAfee on-access scan to see how it performs on the 2012 side. I will report back.

OK, after half a day the number of srv errors has massively reduced over this time yesterday in the same period. We still get one or two every hour or so, but nothing like it was before, so I am gaining confidence. It is an improvement, which is what I have not seen for a long time. However, what I am finding is that every now and again (probably 1 or two times a day), clients cannot connect into the PowerVault, but I can connect out from the PowerVault server. This will happen for about a minute, then suddenly all will be well again. This is accompanied by a series of about 4-5 consecutive srv errors. After that, there will be none for ages. Do you know what may be causing this? I am also finding on the Broadcom control panel statistics is that the number of dropped receive packets, while still a tiny percentage of the total number of receive packets, is increasing constantly. The dropped packet percentage is around 0.2% for both adapters in the team, is that around normal? From what I have read, AV does seem to play a role in this. Most of our client machines have McAfee 8.7i, but some have 8.5i. I'll be replacing most of the 8.5i installs with 8.7i, so I will see if that makes any difference to the number of errors. The new servers have 8.7i.

Actually from monitoring they have reduced, quite substantially. we had two instances in 30 minutes, in that time there would normally be several. It's tricky to be able to span across multiple switches in our case because we have a single passport chassis, and most of our switches are 100Mbps only, so if we were to put it onto another adapters they would both run at 100Mbps and not 1Gbps. So both are on our 1Gbps switch, its not ideal but it is the best we can do. I have my colleague doing some load testing on it, copying 8GB of data to and from it during lesson time to try and put it under some load. I'll keep tabs on it.

Teaming doesn't seem to have done the trick, still getting them. I'll have to keep on monitoring the NIC event logs and gather more information. Still, getting new information every time!

I didn't have to reboot our 2003 DCs when I added our 2008 R2 DC to the domain. I just updated the AD schema and bolted the 2008 R2 DC onto the existing 2003 DCs to allow it to run side by side. The function level is still 2003. If you have 2003 DCs in your domain the function level must be 2003, but 2008 R2 works fine with this. Only when you retire all 2003 DCs can you raise function level (to 2008 if you have 2008 SP2 DCs, or 2008 R2 level if all your DCs are 2008 R2). In both cases for 2008 and 2008 R2 function levels, you can have 2003 servers (or XP clients for that matter) as domain members, just not as domain controllers.

OK, I have now enabled teaming on the PowerVault server, where the problem is most concerning, using both NICs in smart load balance and failover mode. There haven't been any unexpected consequences, and network connectivity was restored far faster than I expected. Performance after school is, as I expected, very good now. Internal testing is good, but the acid test comes tomorrow! I will let you know how it goes.

I'm only thinking of having a load balance of two in our case, due to the fact that we do not have that many ports on our Gigabit switch. Plus our PowerVault server, which also has these errors, only has two NICs anyway, only our PowerEdge R710s have four NICs. I guess once we retire our older servers and the network cables come back we could do a team of three. I'm just trying to find some redundant switch ports on our 100Mbps blades that I can move some devices into that don't need to be on our Gigabit switch, so that we have the maximum available on our Gigabit switch for our servers.

Presumably this will have to be in load balancing mode then? Does this still bind both network adapters to a single IP address?

How do you team network adapters together in Server 2008 R2? I've heard that mentioned several times but never understood how that is actually done. Our servers are on a separate VLAN from the other devices.