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April 29, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Don't do this in Windows

Our own Test Center guru Brian Chee encountered quite a few setbacks in a recent installation of Office Communications Server. His blog, Geeks in Paradise, often offers insight -- both amusing and useful -- into the working life of an IT professional. We're posting an example of those insights here in Off the Record this week not only to give you a taste of Brian's candor but also to provide some tips in case you're planning your own foray into Office Communications Server land.

As Windows ages and evolves, it's sometimes too easy to forget those little gotchas that creep up and become the bane of sysadmins. My scenario is working on the Interop iLabs (technology demonstration areas) on Unified Communication. I'm responsible for bringing up Office Communications Server so that our group can get both voice and presence status to transit a gateway to a Jabber server through a federation interface. But I lost a bunch of time on little nit-picky issues as I burned the midnight oil rushing to meet our ship deadline....

So for the newbies, take note and save some bookmarks. For the old timers, have a good chuckle and remember the pain you went through when you first got bitten.

• Are your machines all in the same time zone?
• Especially in Active Directory (or just about any directory service) the computers need to get at least within spitting distance of each other. My sin was accidentally not checking the daylight saving box during the unattended installation section. So all my new servers were a day off from the AD box.
• The dead giveaway for this issue is when machines can't join the domain but others can. Did you forget to set the date? The machines can't be too far apart or AD Logins no workie since it uses Kerberos...
• The security of the protocol relies heavily on participants maintaining loosely synchronized time and on short-lived assertions of authenticity called Kerberos tickets.
• OCS and quite a few other Microsoft programs like storing all their info in SQL databases. After a while, however, you realize the SQL Express isn't going to cut it anymore and you move to a full version. Then you start getting SQL login errors. Use OSQL /L to list out network instances of SQL servers. This way you know if you fat-fingered the instance name during the install.
• Don't be a bonehead like I was; OCS currently doesn't run under x64 so the lesson here is to check the system requirements first.
• Too bad the OCS install Wizard doesn't check this before it starts populating the Active Directory and does a forest prep. I ended up re-genning my AD for the demo. This would be a BIG problem in a production environment, but this wasn't...
• Hmmm....this also sounds like I didn't pay attention to "best practices" and in my mad rush to get this demo built I forgot to backup my AD. STUPID STUPID STUPID!!!!
• Maybe next time I'll just forget about performance issues and go virtual for my demos...that way I could have just have done snap shots of everything.
• Read up first. I missed the 32bit-only portion in the planning guide and regret it now.

Yeah, not terribly revealing, but the Google ranking on these subjects has fallen over the years and finding the fixes, late at night while sleep deprived, wasn't much fun. Maybe this little refresher will bring the results higher in the list?

Posted by Anonymous on April 29, 2008 03:00 AM

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