Amazing WSUS v3 Cleanup Wizard Time Now Into Days!

We started the cleanup wizard on our managed SBS 2003 boxes three days ago.

All of the boxes finished in anywhere from 18 hours to 36 hours later.

We have however, one box that is _still_ running its cleanup process.

Now, this is not one of our normally crusty boxes as it is under 2 years old and is running a quad core Xeon X3220 with 4GB of RAM. Its reports normally come in every morning on time.

Since starting the wizard the reports have stopped, but we left the wizard alone just in case.

It took _two full days_ for the wizard to gain and hold just one pip on the progress bar.

So, here we are three mornings later:

We now have a number of pips in the progress bar but the process is still moving quite slow.

On the other boxes, the SQL process handling the cleanup usually pins a core on the server. In this case the SQL process has barely taken any additional headroom on the CPU.

Judging by the CPU time allotment shown in the above Task Manager Processes tab new the cleanup process is running however slowly.

If we have not seen at least three or four additional pips on the progress bar we will reboot this box tonight and restart the process.

We track the progress by setting a Notepad window above the progress bar and noting the advances of the progress bar:

The WSUS V3 Cleanup Wizard may look like it is not working even when checking the SQL Process CPU usage in the Task Manager, but in this case we let it ride and things started to move after a day!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

So, just how stable is SBS 2008?

Here we are at day 86:

This particular client is just coming out of their peak season. We were not able to touch the server during business hours which for them were quite extended.

We will have a DRAC (Dell) remote management module installed on the server very soon so as to have out-of-band access to the box just in case there is any problems with updates.

We will also have the SBS OS DVD 1 in the optical drive so that we can recover the OS to the backup point we created just before running any updates.

With the DRAC, or its equivalent, we can do all of that from anywhere we have an Internet connection.

So, just how stable is SBS 2008?

In this case, the built-in SBS 2008 backup started showing a bit of strange behaviour as the server would bog down when it was initializing. We moved the backup to outside of their working hours and stepped up the Volume Shadow Copy frequency to compensate.

The server has been rock solid to date. We guesstimate that a reboot will be happening this coming weekend or the following one depending on the slow-down period for our client.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

SBS 2008 – Failed Logon Custom Event Viewer Filter XML Updated to Include RDP Attempts

We updated the XML for the Custom Event Viewer filter to include failed logon attempts via RDP.

You can find the XML code along with instructions for creating the custom filter in the Event Viewer here: SBS CodePlex Custom Event Viewer Filter for Failed Logons.

Note that there are other XML files for Event Viewer custom filters along with the XML code to flag the failed logons in the SBS Console among other server events.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac!

Windows Live Writer

SBS 2008 and Custom Reports - Share yours ...

Looking for a small way to help the greater SBS community?

Then the SBS Code Plex is for you.

The site has been put together for people to share their custom report queries they have created for SBS 2008. Susan Bradley has left an email address on the site to get in touch with her so that you too can contribute code.

You will need to register with the site and include your CodePlex username in the email to Susan in order for her to add you to the group of contributors.

For SBS 2008 reporting, a lot has changed. And, one of the most significant changes is the ability to really work those reports to put out information that is very relevant to our particular client environment.

Links:

• CodePlex
• MSDN: SBS 2008: Creating a Custom Alert
• MSDN: SBS 2008 SDK
• MSDN: SBS 2008 API Reference

For those of us who are not into coding, this new development on the SBS front will be a little daunting. So, check out the code that has been shared on the site so that you can get familiar with the code structure.

After creating a few custom queries, they should come fairly easy.

Also, this is a good way to get comfortable with getting introduced to PowerShell if you have not seen it yet!

And, of course, feel free to download the code and implement it on your SBS 2008 installations as you require!

Way to go SBSers!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

SBS 2008 - The Daily and Weekly Reports

There are two types of reports in SBS 2008 by default:

1. Daily Summary Report
2. Weekly Detailed Report

This is what the SBS 2008 Daily Summary looks like:

SBS Summary Network Report

The weekly report has a Details hyperlink on the right hand side that would break out all of the items under each heading:

Detailed Network Report

After clicking on the Details link:

Security Details

We will now have a lot more information given to us via the built-in SBS reports. Also, the Reports section in the SBS console also gives us the ability to generate any number of report types at a moment's notice. As a result, it will be a lot easier to get to know a particular SBS box and its regular behaviours.

The new reports will also give those of us who have not taken the step into Managed Services the ability to at least bill on a monthly basis for the reports monitoring ... if we are not already doing so! They can also provide the foundation from which to build a case for a product like System Center Essentials to provide a more detailed monitoring setup ... and thus more revenue.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

SBS is Happy Today

This particular SBS installation is SBS 2003 SP1 Premium Edition running on an Intel 2U SR2400 with dual Xeon 3.0 GHz. processors. It has two hot swap RAID arrays, one RAID 1 pair for the OS, backup files, and VSS images; and a RAID 5 array of 4 drives for their data. During peak season for them, they can grow at close to 1 GB a month, so we have a rather large RAID 5 array, with archiving of older data to keep things under control.

This SBS box is up to date, and running a large USB 2.0 external hard drive for backups. We come in every couple of weeks to swap out that drive and provide an archiving service for them if need be.

I find that this box is the one that we see the most happy reports from.

It runs very stable, and other than the occasional reboot for updates, it has never been shut down.

It is serving 14 desktops as well as a number of outside employees via RWW and some dedicated RDP boxes.

Configuration:

• Intel SR2400 2U chassis with SATA backplane option


• Redundant power and fan option - LX chassis model


• 2 x 3.0 GHz. Xeon 800 FSB CPUs


• 4 GB Kingston ECC DDR


• 2 x 500 GB Seagate SATA in RAID 1


• 4 x 400 GB Seagate SATA in RAID 5 (1.2 TB total use)

There is till room to grow for this particular client.

Advice: If the system is dual processor capable ... always try and plug in the second proc at build time. Have fun matching the existing one two or three years down the road otherwise. And, it will be twice the cost, and at a higher CPU stepping point that your existing board may not have a BIOS flash to support!

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt and burnt it! :D

UPDATE: It is one of those days, 1 GB a month is not a whole heck of a lot! :D

Looking over the logs, they can grow at well over that in one month, coming close to 1 GB every couple of days!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists