Archive
Kaseya and Safe mode
One of the things that I have always loved is playing with computers, I love to fix them and figure out what is wrong with them and sometimes you need to use safe mode to do it.
Well working with Windows 7 is no different but for those of us who use Kaseya to manage our client sites that usually means a truck roll. Well thanks to a little registry magic – you don’t need to run out to the site any more (DANGER – WILL ROBINSON – DANGER, this is not for the faint at heart).
I wrote a couple of little procedures that can be used to change the boot editor on your Vista/7/2008 system to boot into safe mode. The trick was to add the remote control service to start while in safe mode (a clever little registry hack).
You can reboot your machine with the procedure to start in safe mode, do what you need to do like remove drivers, etc. and then run another procedure to run it again in normal mode.
Drop me a line and I can share how I did it with you.
HyperV 2012 R2 preview
Its been over a year now and as soon as Microsoft put out the newest version of HyperV (Windows Hyper-V 2012 R2) I decided to give it a try. There was a new WMI namespace that promised to bring a heap of features to HyperV that would rival the other virtualization platforms and I was eager to get them working in the Lab. Unfortunately it might have been a bit premature but more on that later.
After reinstalling (MS suggests it and I had an error when I tried to upgrade from my HyperV 2012 hosts so I was forced to install a fresh copy),
After I installed the RSAT for Windows 8.1 I encountered some problems connecting to the HyperV options from my Windows 8.1 workstation using the HyperV manager but I was not immediately alarmed. I also noticed that I could not connect to my older system (Windows HyperV 2012) and chalked it up to the new WMI Namespace issue (Windows deprecated the older V1 namespace in the new versions of Windows 8/2012 R2).
After following the lessons learned in the previous post here I was able to create my new Cluster using the following powershell command on one of the HyperV hosts.
‘New-Cluster -Name JSI-1 -Node HyperV1,HyperV2 –NoStorage’
I could then create my new VMs and ISO directories on the Clustered Shared Volume and start recreating my VMs.
‘New-VM -Name SW1 -Path C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\VMs –Memory 512MB –SwitchName “New Virtual Switch”’
After all my vms directories were created I uploaded my vhd files to add to my VMs. (I decided to convert them to vhdx because they continue to use this new resilient image format introduced in 2012).
‘Convert-VHD –Path C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\VMs\SW1\SW1.vhd –DestinationPath C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\VMs\SW1\SW1.vhdx’
I was now ready to add my newly created vhdx files to my existing VMs and finally to spin them up.
‘ADD-VMHardDiskDrive –VMName SW1 -Path C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\VMs\SW1\SW1.vhdx’
and finally let’s setup the dynamic memory feature like so…
‘Set-VMMemory –VMName SW1 -DynamicMemoryEnabled $True -MaximumBytes 1GB -MinimumBytes 256MB -StartupBytes 512MB’
Now let’s start that bad boy and get it back online…
‘Start-VM –name SW1’
(Here are the all of the commands for HyperV now for 8.1 and 2012 R2)
All is well again – well maybe not…
At the time of this writing there were all types of connection problems with the GUI tools. Windows 7,8,8.1 didn’t connect properly and even the Cluster Administrator with a newly installed Windows 2012 R2 server didn’t fully function. Powershell on the Hyper-V box was the only thing that worked properly – thank god for Powershell.
Maybe the GUI tools will mature after I write this article…
I mean after all it is Windows right 
Security Analyst - Jeff Soehner CISSP, GXPN,GPYC,GMOB,GCIH 