Thursday, October 29

***Updated*** Dell PowerConnect 6200 Stack

***Update***

A colleague of mine has tested this and verified that it in fact does work. He did note that you cannot enable flow control on a per interface basis it has to be done for the entire switch. This is a little bit of an issue because it is recommended that this is enabled on the NetApp interfaces but not for VMWARE hosts. So it's a bummer if you have your storage and virtualization systems connected to the same stack.

Apparently Dell makes a stackable switch that provides functionality close to Cisco's Stackwise.


Like the Cisco 3750 series switches, with the Dell PowerConnect 6200 series you can have a Port-Channel span multiple physical switches. Cisco calls this Cross-Stack EtherChannel, I haven't quite figured out what Dell calls it yet.

While the performance isn't as robust as some of the 3750 switches, the price is way lower.

From Dell's site it was hard to determine whether or not the PowerConnect did support this type of configuration. I confirmed with two different people at Dell that it did. I am waiting on a couple to test.


Symantec Endpoint Protection Migration and Deployment Wizard SBS 2008

I was unable to use the Migration and Deployment wizard with SBS 2008. When I got to "Specify the name of a new group that you wish to deploy clients to" the wizard would go to "Loading" for a second and then return to the previous screen. The Built in Administrator account is disabled in SBS 2008 by default. There are to ways around this issue:

1) Enable the Built in Administrator account, log on, and run the Wizard from that account.

OR

2) Go to the Start Menu, Right click the command Prompt and Select "Run as Administrator"

Command Prompt:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Symantec\Symantec Endpoint Protect
ion Manager\bin

C:\Program Files (x86)\Symantec\Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager\bin>firstuse.bat

Sunday, October 4

SQL Server 2008 Setup requires Microsoft .Net framework 3.5 to be installed

I was installing SQL 2008 the other day and kept getting the following error:

"SQL Server 2008 Setup requires Microsoft .Net framework 3.5 to be installed"

I tried running the .NET Cleanup and reinstalling with no luck. It turns out that this error was being cause by a bad download of the SQL 2008 Standard Media from the MS Site. I downloaded the product again without issue.