what did you learn today? (part 2)

[Rick25]

We shutdown a two Host vSphere cluster to do some memory upgrades along with a network update.
All of the VMs were shutdown while on HostA.....HostB came back up fine and predictably HostA did not.

All the VMs still tied to HostA and in a disconnected state. No obvious way to get them onto HostB
Restart of vpxa service for HA didn't help.

Found the following command that let's the VM register on the working host without have to remove from inventory etc etc

ssh into working host
Find the path to the .vmx file and then run
vim-cmd solo/registervm

Syntax should be like vim-cmd solo/registervm /vmfs/volumes/9a21a847-635042f7/VMName/VMName.vmx

Worked like a charm

 

[Rick25]

That for vacation picks next year I'm tempted to take all Mondays that I can

 

[Rick25]

That powering down and moving a Cisco router down a few U in the rack will cause it to spend the night rebooting itself. On the positive, it's the secondary router and the rack redesign and cable cleanup went really well.

 

[Rick25]

We've got the VMs restart order set so the Domain Controllers all come up first, critical servers right after that etc etc until everything is up.

 

[Rick25]

If its’s the old 2800 or 2900 series chassis, had a few die because there wasn’t a long enough time between power off and power on.

The RAM dying was a very common issue.

The newer 3800 and 3700 series didn’t have the same problem.

Haven’t seen any issues with the 4400 series.

Nah it was a newer 4400 series. CIMC had somehow reset and was trying to boot into something other then the vSphere drive

 

[Rick25]

That a server that was happily running and being rebooted (patches) for 5 years decides to grind to a halt once it's in the surplus pool and you try to reuse it.

 

[Rick25]

For AD we've got DisplayName as Lastname, Firstname

Teams (in Teams) show initials correctly FirstLast. Outlook on the othername is showing it LastFirst

You'd think they'd have written Outlook 2019 and above to be able to recognize FirstName and LastName as separate data

We see it with emails from Dell too.

No easy way to fix it. Apparently you can adjust the AD to Azure Sync so that it transforms the displayname but such a hassle

 

[Rick25]

To fix a application authenticating against a 3rd party iDP shim Azure into the middle (with no real config)

 

[Rick25]

It's not like your users were not already sending proprietary data to other random unvetted services.

We had users shocked that we refused to let them use Grammerly etc because we didn't want the data/presentation etc being put up in the Cloud where "no one" would ever have access to them

 

[Rick25]

Also, I have found a massive uncorrectable flaw in vShpere. When it comes time to decommission hardware, right clicking on a VM and hitting delete from disk is nowhere near as satisfying as yeeting some pain in the ass server into the dumpster physically.

Copy the VM to the local disk of the host and then toss the Host too ;-)

 

[Rick25]

Forgiveness not permission

 

[Rick25]

Windows key + CTRL + Shift + B will restart your graphics driver

 

[Rick25]

TIL (thankfully not the hard way) that the Windows 11 ADMX files apparently aren't fully backwards-compatible with Windows 10? How is everyone else handling this?

Planning on skipping and going to 12. Here's to LTSC and Enterprise SKUs

 

[Rick25]

Has anyone tried upgrading a 2012r2 DC directly to 2019? May need to upgrade a pair directly as building a new VM is a long, ardous process due to #reasons.

This is a never ever task. Provisioning a new DC is so straightforward it's just not worth the risk in something going wrong.

 

[Rick25]

May windows updates seems to have broken the ability for the Ivanti Mobile Iron Doc@Work app to connect to a Server 2012 r2 file share.

 

[Rick25]

Apparently Symantec or one of the other CAs has revoked some of Intuit’s certificates. Which has completely fucked 3rd party plug-ins and webconnector plug-ins.

Also we’re apparently having a run of dead UPSes today.

Ars Article on issue

 

[Rick25]

If you haven't taken prod down at least once, are you really working?

We've said you're not really part of the team till you've broken something in production and recovered from it

 

[Rick25]

This is what we call the Microsoft Support Cha-Cha.

You tell them your preferred method of communication is email, and invariably they will push for phone calls even if there's no merit to the request.
Then when you have to accept the phone call appointment to get your ticket moving forward, they routinely "have technical difficulties" during the appointment window.

My favorites lately is when they tell you that they are not allowed to use Teams for troubleshooting sessions.

 

[Rick25]

rofl. That thought has crossed my mind.
Seems someone messed with some of the delegation of rights. oh yay.

My guess was that the AD object had "protect from accidental deletion" enabled