ShadowProtect Saves My Butt Again
So here I am minding my own business after having just approved a slug of patch Tuesday updates, when low and behold I notice a message pop into Outlook.
Alert on 1NEKTON at 2/14/2008 6:13:15 PM
The following disk is low on free disk space. Low levels of free disk space can cause performance problems and prevent users from saving files on the disk.
Drive Letter: L:
Free Disk Space: 201.000000. MB
% Free Disk Space: 0.670089.%
You can disable this alert or change its threshold by using the Change Alert Notifications task in the Server Management Monitoring and Reporting taskpad.
I guess I better take a look and see what is up, I know that is a 32 Gb partition. All it holds is some software install shares and the WSUS updates.
Well back when I originally installed WSUS 2.0 on this server it said something about making sure you had 5 or 6 Gb of free space, so I figured 4x that would be safe. Well along came WSUS 3.o and then SP1 and more things WSUS watches and now with these current updates we see
Now of course that server is on the other side of North Carolina.
But wait, I have ShadowProtectServer installed on it, so I find some available space on one of the Online Backup Drives, Stop the Internal Database SSEE## that WSUS runs on and grab an image of the L drive.
Next I stop the Server Service (I have a number of shares on the L Drive) and then blow away the L Partition, Create a new bigger L Partition, Restore the ShadowProtect Image, Change the drive letter to L, Start the Server Service and the other services that stopped. And finally reboot the server.
Time from the E-mail warning until the reboot 1 Hour and 20 minutes, less time than I would have spent driving one way!
So Thank You StorageCraft for the wonderful Valentines Day Gift, you gave me back my evening to spend with my lovley wife!
Well it is now 7:49 and the afore mentioned lovely wife is calling me for din din,
So Long and Have a Wonderful Evening, I know I will Now :>)
February 14th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Hey, thanks, it’s nice to hear stories like this. I get kind of ho-hum about the whole backup-restore-etc capability because I work with it all day long, but I’ve had a couple of personal experiences at home when I actually, *really* have to use this stuff, and, strange as it may sound, the ease and success using these tools takes me by surprise when I’m on the user end of the equation.
February 15th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Sniff… You almost brought a tear to my eye. ;-)
Let see, V day at the Cralls…. Matthew thows up in the mini van on the way to school so we cancel special lunch plans, I forget to pick up Maci as Mom is home with Matthew, Mom gets migrain and I get home 2 hours late from the office. We are offically scheduling a make-up V day. ;-)
February 15th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Or you could Download the Microsoft WSUS Server Diagnostic Tool and purge all update files that are marked as DECLINED.
WsusDebugTool.exe /Tool:PurgeUnnneededFiles
http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/7/4/7745a34e-f563-443b-b4f8-3a289e995255/WSUS%20Server%20Debug%20Tool.EXE
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/4/2/6422b1c7-9c7b-4682-9fe0-
f56bd6ded2aa/readme.txt
Enjoy. :)
February 15th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Nice thought David, but it has already been cleaned up with that tool.
Thankx for posting the link in case others didn;t know about it.