Having backup issues with Small Business Server 2011? I was and was getting the exact error message in the title! After some digging around it appears the error was down to Sharepoint 2010 SP1!! If left not only do you not have an up-to-date backup but you run the risk of filling up your hard drive with Exchange transaction logs!! Rather than go through the steps needed to cure this individually; here is a link to the official SBS blog that details the fix. It's actually not that long winded!!
Anyway, good luck!!
http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2011/07/06/potential-issues-after-installing-sharepoint-foundation-2010-sp1.aspx
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
My first 802.1Q VLAN
The other day I had to create my first 802.1Q VLAN. Why? To stop 2 customers potentially seeing each other's networks!! At our radio mast site we have a Draytek Vigor 3300 router which our customers connect to via IPSEC VPNs. We have a VPN tunnel that we use ourselves to link our Nottingham radio trunk with our Mansfield radio triunk and we share the local IP subnet (192.168.1.x) with one customer which is fine.
However we don't want our next customer to also be on that subnet. This is where the VLAN comes into play! On the Draytek 3300, go to Advanced and then LAN VLAN setting. Select 802.1Q VLAN as in the picture below:
Make sure that all ports are ticked as active (you could lock yourself out otherwise!!!) and make sure all frames are 'untagged'. Equally important is to make sure 'enable management port for P4' is still ticked our again you could lock yourself out (not good if you already have customer's VPNs setup on there!!!).
You will then have to reboot the router as you've re-configured the LAN subnet for the router.
When the router has rebooted, click on Network and then LAN and you will now be presented with the following window:
Before:
After:
If at all possible it's worth forward planning with the subnets of the other LAN ports. As I said earlier, making a change to the local LAN address requires a reboot of the router (the more customers you have on the less desirable this is!!!).
However we don't want our next customer to also be on that subnet. This is where the VLAN comes into play! On the Draytek 3300, go to Advanced and then LAN VLAN setting. Select 802.1Q VLAN as in the picture below:
Make sure that all ports are ticked as active (you could lock yourself out otherwise!!!) and make sure all frames are 'untagged'. Equally important is to make sure 'enable management port for P4' is still ticked our again you could lock yourself out (not good if you already have customer's VPNs setup on there!!!).
You will then have to reboot the router as you've re-configured the LAN subnet for the router.
When the router has rebooted, click on Network and then LAN and you will now be presented with the following window:
You can now assign each of the 4 LAN ports their own unique subnet; therefore keeping them seperate from the other ports!
You may need to adjust any existing VPN settings to include the new subnet created on the other LAN ports.
I've whipped up a couple of Visio diagrams as a before and after which I hope better illustrates what I wanted to and have achieved. Before:
After:
If at all possible it's worth forward planning with the subnets of the other LAN ports. As I said earlier, making a change to the local LAN address requires a reboot of the router (the more customers you have on the less desirable this is!!!).
Monday, 8 August 2011
Remote Work Webplace times out for SBS2011 with a Draytek Vigor2930
Recently I migrated our companies old & tired SBS2003 server over to a nice new SBS2011 server. All went well inlcuding migrating the old sharepoint database (had to use an interim Win 2003 server running Sharepoint 3 in a VM as a staging server) as well as Exchange and all the files. One big change we had to make was how we connect to the internet. The old server had two network cards in (1 for the LAN and the other for the WAN with a public IP that connected directly to a cable modem). We also used a POP connector to collect emails.
As SBS2011 only supports one network card I decided to install a Draytek Vigor 2930 router that connects to the cable modem for internet access. Whislt I was at it I changed our emails over from using a POP connector to using direct SMTP. All very straight forward stuff (or so I thought!!). On the router I forwarded the following ports to our new server:
25 - for emails
80 - for remote web access
443 - for remote web access
987 - for remote web access
3389 - for remote web access and access to the server
I then proceeded to test Remote Web Access from a computer outside our network and it timed out! Internally it worked fine but externally it didn't. My first thought was that it was the router so I double checked all the port settings and ran a GRC test as well as telnetting to each port from an external PC but it seemed fine. I also enabled UPNP on the router and ran the SBS connect wizard which detected UPNP was on and was happy with it but still nothing. To cut an already long story short I logged the case with Microsoft and gave their technician remote access to the server. He couldn't see that I did anything wrong so asked me to download a packet tracing program and to install it on both the server and the external PC. I did this and sent the traces to him. It looked as though the HTTPS requests weren't reaching the server.
This confirmed what I initially suspected about the router being at fault. To further prove this I gave the server the router's public IP address and plugged it straight into the cable modem. I ran my test from the external PC and Remote Web Workplace all worked fine!!
So back to the router. After digging around I found that someone else had had similar issues. Now at this point I hadn't enabled remote access to the router itself (this defaults to 443 for HTTPS but can be changed) but even though it wasn't configured it was interfering with HTTPS traffic and not forwarding the requests as it should do.
So to get around this I changed the HTTPS port number anyway to 4443:
I then rebooted the router and it works fine!! As a courtesy I sent my findings and solution to the Microsoft technician that was very helpful for which he was very grateful. So for what turned out to be a few hours of getting to the bottom of this problem; it could have been solved within 5 minutes by changing 2 simple settings!! Isn't that always the case though?
As SBS2011 only supports one network card I decided to install a Draytek Vigor 2930 router that connects to the cable modem for internet access. Whislt I was at it I changed our emails over from using a POP connector to using direct SMTP. All very straight forward stuff (or so I thought!!). On the router I forwarded the following ports to our new server:
25 - for emails
80 - for remote web access
443 - for remote web access
987 - for remote web access
3389 - for remote web access and access to the server
I then proceeded to test Remote Web Access from a computer outside our network and it timed out! Internally it worked fine but externally it didn't. My first thought was that it was the router so I double checked all the port settings and ran a GRC test as well as telnetting to each port from an external PC but it seemed fine. I also enabled UPNP on the router and ran the SBS connect wizard which detected UPNP was on and was happy with it but still nothing. To cut an already long story short I logged the case with Microsoft and gave their technician remote access to the server. He couldn't see that I did anything wrong so asked me to download a packet tracing program and to install it on both the server and the external PC. I did this and sent the traces to him. It looked as though the HTTPS requests weren't reaching the server.
This confirmed what I initially suspected about the router being at fault. To further prove this I gave the server the router's public IP address and plugged it straight into the cable modem. I ran my test from the external PC and Remote Web Workplace all worked fine!!
So back to the router. After digging around I found that someone else had had similar issues. Now at this point I hadn't enabled remote access to the router itself (this defaults to 443 for HTTPS but can be changed) but even though it wasn't configured it was interfering with HTTPS traffic and not forwarding the requests as it should do.
So to get around this I changed the HTTPS port number anyway to 4443:
I also read somewhere that SSL VPN defaults to 443. Again I wasn't using this but changed this anyway. On the router this can be found under: SSL VPN - General Setup & I changed the port to 8443:
I then rebooted the router and it works fine!! As a courtesy I sent my findings and solution to the Microsoft technician that was very helpful for which he was very grateful. So for what turned out to be a few hours of getting to the bottom of this problem; it could have been solved within 5 minutes by changing 2 simple settings!! Isn't that always the case though?
Monday, 25 July 2011
How to check that PTZ is working on a DVR/Codec that uses the Pelco D protocol
Sometimes if a PTZ CCTV camera doesn't PTZ (Pan, Tilt & Zoom) then it may not always be the camera that's at fault! It could be the device that controls it whether it be a DVR or a codec. To test this isn't as hard as it seems. You will need the following:
If you don't see any data then check your Realterm settings (mainly com port and baud rate) and check your connection. Another even simpler test to see if the RS485 output of your DVR/Codec is working is to put an LED on the output (making sure + goes to the anode (longer leg) of the LED and - goes to the cathode). Make sure the LED is a simple red type and not blue! Blue LEDs require a larger forward voltage to turn them on which RS485 won't provide!!
When you do have Hex on your screen in Realterm you can now see if it's outputting what it should.
The first thing to look at is that each command starts with FF. This is fixed and cannot be changed so if this is wrong you've found your fault. The next byte is the camera number; again if this number is different (i.e. says 2 when you know the camera ID is 1) then again you've found a fault. They are the two main items I check when troubleshooting.
- Laptop with either a serial port or a USB-serial converter
- An RS-232 to RS-485 converter (preferably 4 wire for full duplex communication) I use a device that uses the USB port so it is bus powered: http://www.easysync-ltd.com/product/542/es-u-3001-m.html
- Realterm installed on the laptop (http://realterm.sourceforge.net/index.html#downloads_Download)
- You'll need to know the baud rate that the controller works at and set it in real term
- On the Display tab (under Display as) select Hex (space)
- Next to this on Data Frames change the Bytes to 7 and click single
- Make sure to click Change which will save these settings
- Now click on the Port tab and select the Com port you have your 232-485 converter on and select the correct Baud Rate (the cameras we install are usually on 2400 baud).
If you don't see any data then check your Realterm settings (mainly com port and baud rate) and check your connection. Another even simpler test to see if the RS485 output of your DVR/Codec is working is to put an LED on the output (making sure + goes to the anode (longer leg) of the LED and - goes to the cathode). Make sure the LED is a simple red type and not blue! Blue LEDs require a larger forward voltage to turn them on which RS485 won't provide!!
When you do have Hex on your screen in Realterm you can now see if it's outputting what it should.
The first thing to look at is that each command starts with FF. This is fixed and cannot be changed so if this is wrong you've found your fault. The next byte is the camera number; again if this number is different (i.e. says 2 when you know the camera ID is 1) then again you've found a fault. They are the two main items I check when troubleshooting.
| Pelco-D consists of 7 hexadecimal bytes (all byte data used in this page are in Hexadecimal format unless otherwise noted) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Command 1 and 2 details | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Example (Command 2): | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Pan Left - 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0, which equals to 04 (both hexadecimal and decimal) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Some other commands | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Tuesday, 19 July 2011
TV with an IP!!!!
10 years ago, I was living with my folks still (took a while to cut the apron strings I know).
My humble PIII computer with it's HUGE 17" CRT monitor connected to the world wide web via a Elsa 56k USB modem (which I thought was cool as it was bus powered and sat on top of my tower looking sweet!!).
So my PC was the only device in the house to have an IP address when connected to the internet (well I did have some other PCs that I setup as servers when I was playing with Novell Netware and Windows NT4 server.
A couple of years later and I finally have my own place!! But still I have a PC in the spare room with a BT (manta ray horrible looking) ADSL modem (512k downloading pleasure) and again my PC is the only thing in the house with an IP address.
Today the following devices in my house have an IP address:
My humble PIII computer with it's HUGE 17" CRT monitor connected to the world wide web via a Elsa 56k USB modem (which I thought was cool as it was bus powered and sat on top of my tower looking sweet!!).
So my PC was the only device in the house to have an IP address when connected to the internet (well I did have some other PCs that I setup as servers when I was playing with Novell Netware and Windows NT4 server.
A couple of years later and I finally have my own place!! But still I have a PC in the spare room with a BT (manta ray horrible looking) ADSL modem (512k downloading pleasure) and again my PC is the only thing in the house with an IP address.
Today the following devices in my house have an IP address:
- My laptop that I'm writing this ramble on
- My media centre PC that stores all my DVDs
- My Wii console
- My router (goes without saying really)
- My mobile phone (wireless and 3G)
- My TV!!!!!!!
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