Wednesday 27 April 2005

Building an MS Cluster with VMWare Workstation 4.5.2

I used to be able to build clusters in VMWare Workstation 4, I'm sure, but when I recently tried it didn't seem to work any more. I found someone (sorry - lost the URL) on the VMWare forums who claimed to have created one on VMWare workstation 5. I tried thier suggestions on VMWare 4.5.2 and with a few changes it worked for me. I created the quorum (100MB) and shared disk (2GB) as fixed size SCSI devices.

Here are the important lines from my node_1.vmx file:

diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize = "0"
diskLib.dataCacheMaxReadAheadSize = "0"
diskLib.dataCacheMinReadAheadSize = "0"
diskLib.dataCachePageSize = "4096"
diskLib.maxUnsyncedWrites = "0"

disk.locking=FALSE

scsi0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi0:0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:0.fileName = "Disk1.vmdk"
scsi1.present = "TRUE"
scsi1.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi1.sharedBus = "virtual"

scsi1:1.present = "TRUE"
scsi1:1.fileName = "..\shared\quorum.vmdk"
scsi1:1.redo = ""
scsi1:1.mode = "independent-persistent"
scsi1:1.deviceType = "plainDisk"

scsi2.present = "TRUE"
scsi2.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi2.sharedBus = "virtual"
scsi2:1.present = "TRUE"
scsi2:1.fileName = "..\shared\shared.vmdk"
scsi2:1.redo = ""
scsi2:1.mode = "independent-persistent"
scsi2:1.deviceType = "plainDisk"

Wednesday 6 April 2005

Remove non-existant DFS root

I had to rebuild a DFS root but the 2000/2003 Servers and AD insisted the old one was there though it wasn't! I eventually found this KB article at Microsoft to fix it:
Article ID: 224384

Quickly reset users home directory permissions

This is not my work but that of Shawn Hopkins that I found on Google Groups.

I faced a situation where my users home and profile directories were ok but the users had simply lost their permissions (importing foreign disk, long story....). Shawn's scripts were written for NT but they worked fine with Server 2003. I did the following:

Gave Administrators full access to d:\home and d:\profiles.

Ran this:
net user /domain >> users.txt

Then ran this script:
for /f "eol=; tokens=1,2*" %%i in (users.txt) do cacls d:\home\%%i /T /E /G %%i:C
for /f "eol=; tokens=1,2*" %%j in (users.txt) do cacls c:\home\%%j /T /E /G %%j:C
for /f "eol=; tokens=1,2*" %%k in (users.txt) do cacls c:\home\%%k /T /E /G %%k:C

Then this script:
for /f "eol=; tokens=1,2*" %%i in (users.txt) do cacls d:\profiles\%%i /T /E /G %%i:C
for /f "eol=; tokens=1,2*" %%j in (users.txt) do cacls d:\profiles\%%j /T /E /G %%j:C
for /f "eol=; tokens=1,2*" %%k in (users.txt) do cacls d:\profiles%%k /T /E /G %%k:C