Welcome to the blog of mechanised.com

This blog is mainly a technical repository of information on Virtualisation tools and management for our hosting service.

Also for HP's Bladesystem that we use at both our datacentres.

Other articles are also included on .Net development and MS SQL Server as well as other interesting things we come across.

Friday 22 October 2010

IIS7 site and file synchronisation for web farms

If like us you have web farms of several machines serving a site in a cluster you may have come across the Microsoft Web Deployment tool.

This great bit of software allows you to sync all sites and their files from a master machine to all other members of the cluster automatically.

We have come across problems when a non administrator account is used for synchronising though.

To get round this we use the Web Management Service and a slightly different command line to sync with.

First, make sure the Web Management Service is on automatic and in Server Manager expand out the Roles/Web Server (IIS)/IIS Manager and choose the server instance, in the Management panel under Management Service you can enable remote connections. Then start/restart the service.

We then use a command line in this format:

msdeploy -verb:sync -source:webServer,wmsvc=192.168.0.1,username=user1,password=password1,includeAcls=true -dest:webServer,wmsvc=192.168.0.2,username=user2,password=password2 -enableLink:AppPoolExtension -allowUntrusted=true

As you can see the wmsvc service is used to authenticate, NTLM is the default authentication and if like us you use cloned servers the -allowUntrusted just bypasses the need to have an authorised certificate on the destination servers.

Just run multiple times in a batch for all the servers in the cluster and everything is all in sync!

Wednesday 13 October 2010

Server 2008 - remove old NICs so you can rename new NICs properly

Start a command prompt as administrator

Execute the following:

SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1

START DEVMGMT.MSC

When device manager opens choose 'show hidden devices' from the 'view' menu.

You can then right click and uninstall any old NICs (shown as greyed out)

This is always a problem for us when cloning VMWare machines!