Monday, July 31, 2006

Today I have been mostly... installing Sophos

For several months now, one of my servers has been a little overloaded. It is a dual Opteron 248 with 4GB RAM but it has been performing the following roles:
  • Exchange 2003 Server (for 1100+ users)
  • WSUS Server
  • Sophos Enterprise Manager and Library Server
  • Print Server (including Print Manager Plus)
  • Retrospect backup
As you can imagine, it didn't like doing all this (especially the huge email database combined with the two instances of MSDE for WSUS and Sophos). I decided that the easiest thing to move was Sophos and the re-homing coincided nicely with the release of the latest release of the admin software. Having downloaded the package from the Sophos website, I unpacked the files and set about installing it my second DC. All was going very well until the installer tried to set up MSDE. No matter what I tried I could not get MSDE to install... even when I tried to install it from the redistributable fresh from MS. It was most odd; the MSI installer crept along until a couple of blocks from the end and then sort or re-wound with no explanation other than a message in the event log saying that the MSI installation had failed! After this had annoyed me for nearly an hour, I decided to approach the problem from a different angle... enter SQL Server 2005 Express. I installed this and then just told the Sophos installer to use this instance rather than installing MSDE... easy as! After then going through all the EM Library options, I left the server downloading the Sophos AV packages for 2000/XP, OS X and Linux over lunch and upon my return all was well. The new version of the EM Console works well and all the installations went flawlessly. I was particularly impressed by the new policy-based system. Time will tell how well this continues to work and I must admit not all of my machines were on.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

I officially HATE SIMS .Net!!!

Up until now, I haven't really had too many problems with SIMS - not as many as most. Admittedly, there is the usual voodoo that needs to be done to the file permissions to let it run and auto update using SOLUS... plus the strange problems that FMS seems to throw up but all these things are easily overcome.

yesterday, however, all hell broke loose. I don't usually do the updates to SIMS; leaving it to the deputy head instead... he seems to like doing it so why upset him? ;-) When the download of the new packages with SOLUS 2 went tits up it became my problem though. This was approach. 11am.

I eventually re-downloaded the packages only to find that there wasn't sufficient space on the disk partition to perform the DBUPGRADE backup... this is due to the cr@p way that our local SIMS support people installed it and is worthy of a rant in itself. After removing everything I possibly could plus compressing lesser used files I managed to have 1.84GB free... still not enough it turned out (despite the fact that the database is only 1.73GB!).

By this point it was 5.35pm and I decided enough was enough and I went home.

This morning I waited for 45mins for the support desk to open, only to be told to re-download the packages another couple of times only to prove that there wasn't enough space to do the upgrade. The support guy then told me about the '/nobackup' switch which allowed me to run the database upgrade... this eventually finished at about 1.30pm.

After the database upgrade, I then had to download the packages AGAIN and after another 45 mins the setup started to run and eventually ended successfully.

At this point I then had to go around 13 workstations to make sure that they all upgraded properly and that the permissions mentioned above were OK. Obviously they weren't and some of the machines required intervention... it was 3.40pm by the time I had all the machines finished.

All in all, it took about 13 hours of my time to do this upgrade. Ridiculous!!!

On the upside, the new GUI looks quite nice and the front-office staff like the new easy-access icons that happen to give them access directly to the areas that they use most often.

I am dreading the time when I move the database files in a couple of weeks though. I'm definitely not going to pay the local support guys £70-odd per hour to do it for me though until I know it's going to be too difficult!!!