Monday, March 21, 2011

Xp32x Fax Clients connecting to Server 2008R2 Fax Server

When I think of electronic faxing I always think of Microsoft Small Business Server's built in faxing or Zeta Fax or GFI.

Zeta Fax & GFI Faxmaker work really well and integrate really well into Exchange but can cost a bit as user counts increase.So I had to setup Server2008R2 Fax Server recently which is FREE and heres how I did it.

1.Install the Fax Server Role.
2.Ensure Firewall Rules are correct.
3.Share Fax Printer out to relevant security group or domain\users
4.Add x86 driver to fax printer. Download driver HERE
5.Change the Fax Service "LOGON AS" from NETWORK SERVICE to LOCAL SYSTEM also tick "interact with desktop"

Now here is the bit that got me! When I logged on as an administrator xp x86 client I could connect to the fax server via the the fax console without any problems.But it kept saying connection errors when connecting with a standard user.So i tried adding permissions to the fax printer but that was not correct.

6.Open up Fax Service Manager, Right Click on Fax , Properties, Security add in relevant users , security group.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Hyper-v failed to open attachment C:\clusterstorage\volume

I recently installed a 2 node Hyper-V cluster soon to be a 3 node and all was working really well until I added a DPM 2010 Agent.When I was trying to do a live migration it would move 100% but fail to start. So if I shutdown the vm and move to another host and try and start it. It still wont start!!!!! :(

It was also affecting SCVMM , I could not push templates to my cluster.

I was starting to panic at this stage and was thinking I needed to rebuild my cluster, but the fix was really simple and required a few steps.

1) Start Registry Editor.
2) Visit the following registry key: “HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\FsDepends”
3) Under the “FsDepends” key, change REG_DWORD value “Start” from “3” to “0”
4) Restart the computer

Another culprit was SOPHOS, I excluded cluster.exe , c:\clusterstorage and it still would fail. So I also excluded the volumes C:\Clusterstorage\volume1 , C:\Clusterstorage\volume2 etc.. and it all worked fine.

Also to remove any ISO images attached to any VM , Like exchange 2010SP1 iso, after the iso has been removed , go into cluster manager , right click on the virtual machine, click on more actions and refresh virtual machine configuration.

My live migration is working perfectly again.