Monthly Archives: July 2008

Forefront Console Oddness – Warning: The join order has been enforced because a local join hint is used.

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Ran in to an odd problem with my Forefront console.

On shutting down my Forefront SQL server, it hung and needed a hard reboot. Server came up cleanly and seemed to be fine. That was until I attempted to start the Forefront console. It looked like it was trying to load, but nothing did and after a few minutes, pop up an error:

No go on loading the Forefront Console

No go on loading the Forefront Console

An error occurred during view refreshing. Verify that you have successfully completed the Configuration wizard and have permission to access the management server.

Further details:

Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

Warning: The join order has been enforced because a local join hint is used.

Well, not what I wanted. After much searching the web, i found a number of unhelpful links talking about checking permissions and re-installing. I focused on the last statement

Warning: The join order has been enforced because a local join hint is used.

This is a SQL warning, so trotted over to our SQL guru for some guidance. Jim checked the SQL logs and found nothing but saw some jobs hanging. So as good practice suggested I run DBCC CHECKDB against the Onepoint and SystemCenterReporting databases.

The checks both came up clean, but the console was working again!

File Server Resource Manager Demo for Windows 2008

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Manged to finally cut together a video of the material I used for the Windows user group.
This is under the ten minutes allocated unlike the real talk which was closer to 20 – Oops.

Doing the talk was excellent fun and (I think) I managed to answer all the questions put to me.

Here’s the Ms Silverlight video version of the talk I’ve just published for the Heroes Happen Challenge

SANS Sydney 2008 on it’s way!

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Six tracks of security goodness to kick off on the 27th of October 2008 in Sydney!

Early booking deals are now avaliable and these course are worth their weight in any IT budget as the premiere , vender agnostic, security training.

Since discovering SANS trainning, I haven’t missed going to one yet. The instructors talkfrom real world and current experiences adding in value and insight comments. Everytime I come back from a SANS conference, I realise how much more there is to learn.

The courses I’d love to take are:

SEC502: Perimeter Protection In-Depth

SEC560: Network Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking

SEC542: Web Application Pen Testing In-Depth
Push your security skills to the next level book NOW!

Forefront and DFS don’t play nice

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Got my first real slap from Forefront and it was a nasty shock.

Forefront has been deployed and working merrily on the network with only a few hiccups*

Then one of the team noticed that a DFS point for our file replication was acting oddly and files weren’t replicating properly. If you deleted a file, it would pop back up seconds later. Forefront was the only recent change to the systems, so we disabled it on the three DFS servers and the problem stopped. As soon as Forefront was started the problem re-appeared. One of the DFS servers had also been reporting a unusual high CPU reading, which disappeared as soon as Forefront was restarted.

I’d already put in all the exceptions from Ms KB822158 and was disappointed to find a bunch of posting to forums saying this was a know problem. Bizarrely, KB815263 has a number of AV venders’ products that work with DFS and Forefront isn’t one of them!

KB284947 recommends putting in excetpions for the folders that DFS replicates. Excellent, now I have a express malware delivery system via AD!

The DFS team had this to say on DFS and AV testing. Interesting, but not massively useful for the problem at hand.

Posting from Forums:

DFS and Forefront warning

DFS-R takes hours to replicate large file changes

More on this after further testing!

UPDATE

Nope, Ms have a hotfix for Forefront and DFS

It appears that Hotfix 944804 will address these reported symptoms but is an update to NTFS.SYS.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944804

Further what not to scan KB:

943556 Recommended Forefront Client Security file and folder exclusions for Microsoft products

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;943556

Giving a Presentation at a user group – preparing for it

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Well, though I’d better put my money where my mouth is..

On Tuesday the 15th of July I’ll be give a quick under ten minute talk on File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) which is a funky component of Windows 2008 and Windows 2003 R2. This is in response to Jeff Alexander – Oz Ms Guy challenge to get up and present to the user group in the Heroes Happen 2008 launch.

I don’t give presentations as part of my job very frequently, so this is something I have to do a bit of practicing on.

This is how I’m attempting to give a reasonable presentation to a group of my peers

Have a plan and break it in to steps

Write out what I’m talking about, a start middle and end. Just like essays at school. Then break it in to bite size chunks and give them headings for cues during the talk.

Recording my own voice giving the talk

Sounds silly, but have to get use to hearing me say what I’m talking about. Attempt to ditch the um, er and ahs or at least reduce the amount of them.

Never trust technology

Live demos can go horrible wrong. I’ve seen some phenomenal speakers have their demos die mid-point through a talk (Mr Gates’ and Jobs’ failed demos are prominent U Tube clips, for example) I’ll take a live lab on Vmware in with me but will try to record the whole thing with a screen capture tool first.

Have a bit of fun

Technology can be a bit dull, and talking about managing files and folder isn’t high on the adrenaline list. I have to avoid talking in a monotone for 10 minutes and attempt to engage the interest of the crowd. Possible? Yes. Likely? Well I’ll find out on Tuesday night.

Windows 2008 exam passing tips talk in Sydney 15th July

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This Tuesday at Sydney Windows Infrastructure User Group Ken Schaefer is giving a talk on tips for the Windows 2008 exams.

Since I’ve got two left to go, I’ll be there with notepad and pen and if he shares any pure gold tips, I’ll post them up.

Ken’s an IIS guru, amongst other things, so looking forward to what he’s got to say on the topic.

See you all on Tuesday.

Be part of the Sydney IT community!

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Join a user group, any user group and get involved!

Why?

Meet your peers with common goals, interests and don’t have any market guys trying to push their lastest product down your throat.

Get to hear others points of view, whether they be like minded or totally insane.

Socialise with people doing the same type of work in different companies Newtorking in real life is much better than have half a million facebook “friends”, especially if they can help with your job and career.

Get ideas or get an a heads up on problems that could happen to you with technology

What if you don’t like what you hear?

Step up and contribute.

It’s a community effort and it takes passionate people to bring life to talks, discussions and plain ol’ arguements. If you think some more could be brought to the meetings, talk with the people running the group and suggest it.

Where to go in Sydney

For the Windows folks:

Sydney Windows Infrastructure User Group

For the Open Source crew:

Sydney Linux Users Group