Site reliability engineering is treating your operations/production environment like a software problem. Monitoring performance and other metrics are key. It's what makes an outage of Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, and other Google products so rare. You can learn from the folks at Google with a free O'Reilly book Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production … [Read more...]
Setup your DFS namespace with DNS for compatibility in a mixed environment
I recently created a DFS namespace for tying multiple file servers into the same path structure with the hope that this would make it easier for people to remember where to find files and to give flexibility on the back-end to change out servers or spread out files across multiple servers as needed. Once in place, I tested accessibility from Windows and Mac which worked fine. … [Read more...]
Access-based enumeration for DFS folder targets
Moving to a Distributed File System required testing for a few parity features. One of those was Access-Based Enumeration. This simplifies an end-user's navigation experience because they only see the folders that they have access to. This was in place in our current file servers and would be a tough sell without the feature. Access-based enumeration is easy to turn on for … [Read more...]
DFS PowerShell cmdlet leaves a .DFSFolderLink entry
When populating your Distributed File System (DFS) namespace using PowerShell, you might notice a tiny quirk as I did. A .DFSFolderLink file gets left behind when using PowerShell. Using the GUI for DFS Management, this file gets deleted when a folder is created at that same level. You can see the file in the image above. The other folder targets work fine (and have … [Read more...]
Microsoft Update Catalog now compatible with other browsers besides Internet Explorer
The change to Windows Updates getting the headlines this month has to do with the bundled quality updates. You can no longer choose individual patches for Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, or Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, or Server 2012 R2. These operating systems will follow the model employed by Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 with one quality update, one monthly quality rollup, … [Read more...]