Geek projects, tidbits and things I'm working on at the moment…

This one bit me in the behind a while back. Essentially, the AD server was restored from a snapshot but had USN numbers that were younger than another servers’ USN numbers which was trying to connect to the AD server. This put the AD server into “disabled” mode so it wasn’t being used for AD stuff. The only way I could permanently fix my USN rollback issue was by keeping the other server off and restoring it to a previous snapshot as well. Long story short, this sucked to fix.

Couple of links:

http://exchangeserverpro.com/recovering-a-single-domain-controller-from-a-usn-rollback

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/zh/winserverDS/thread/8d287ba9-fff8-4a93-998a-86e64e4b85f8

So I’m playing around w/ a SAN for home use. We’ve virtualized about 80% of our infrastructure at work but most of our VM hosts are standalone with local storage only. So, I’m spending a lot of time at home recently building a SAN on OpenSUSE 11.3 with high hopes of getting iSCSI to play nice. Part of this equation is getting another box to run vCenter Server which will need access to the iSCSI LUNs the VM hosts see.

Hence the title. Windows has a utility called Diskpart.exe which will allow you to turn off auto mount BEFORE you connect your Windows’ iSCSI initiator to your iSCSI target.

Open up a command prompt and type:

C:\Users\yournamehere>diskpart


Once you’re in the diskpart tool, type ‘automount’.

DISKPART> automount
Automatic mounting of new volumes enabled.

Then finally, ‘automount disable’.


DISKPART> automount disable
Automatic mounting of new volumes disabled.

This will keep your OS from trying to mount your iSCSI volume and mess with your VMFS partition!

Keep in mind, this means any new volumes your system sees will need to be mounted manually w/in the disk partitioning tool.

While you’re in there, type just a ‘?’ and see the whole list of commands you can play with. See the Microsoft KB article below for a more thorough introduction!

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415