At work I was bouncing my head of the desk for about a day and a half on converting a Windows 2008 R2 server sitting on a Dell Power Edge M610 over to XenServer 5.6 SP2.  Here is what I used to finally get everything working.

1. Ran Disk2VHD from SysInternals (Link) Make sure to take both the OS and the System partition are selected and Hit convert

2.  Used XenConvert 2.3.1 x64 (I have tried 2.4.1 x64 but it doesn’t have the option to take a VHD to XenServer) Select Source as VHD and Select XenServer as your destination. Fill out the rest of the information.

3. Booted the Server with the windows 2008 R2 CD

4. Select the Repair option

5. Select CMD

6. Change the Directory to ‘recovery’

7. Run ‘StartRep.exe’

8. Reboot

This resolved my issues and we were then able to use this server after everything was done.

Today we had an issue where we seemed to hit a limit in our sharepoint environment.   Pages were disappearing from the navigation and from the quick launch as well.  I found this blog post that all you need to do is edit the webconfig file and add  DynamicChildLimit=”0″.  This fixed our problem.

Only other thing we had to was clear our cache on our NetScaler. 🙂

So today marks my first Microsoft Certification, although it was not the fist time that I have taken a Microsoft Test.  What I have to say about passing is that I give everyone credit that attempts a Microsoft Cert.  I feel that they are still very wordy and leaves out some important details.  I will say that this cert, 70-640 TS: Windows Server 2008 Active Directory, Configuration was a lot better then 70-290 Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003.  I have to say that now comes a very hard choice, how far do I want to go with Microsoft Certs?  I have taken 2 of them and I am batting .500.  I will say that I have taken a Citrix Cert along with help write another Citrix Cert and they are alot easier on the mind then Microsoft ones.  Now the question is what Cert is next…

So about a month or so ago I saw a post that Citrix was looking for Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to write the next XenServer 5.6 Exam.  I decided to sign up and see how everything went cause I was looking to start taking some Certifications again.  I went through the entire process and finally got an email that said I was accepted.  After clearing everything with my employer I was allowed to go and participate in this.  So everything Started on September 12th when I flew from Philly to Atlanta. Once I landed in Atlanta I had a drive that picked me up and drove me to the hotel little did I know that this was going to be the start of a very long week. We got a late start due to one of the facilitators needing medical attention (dont worry she is fine).  After we got our late start we started writing questions between the 9 of us plus the help of Citrix Education. We needed to come up with 210 questions with in less then 2 work days.  After lunch on Wednesday we had finished all 210 questions plus 10 extras.  Now started technical review.

On Wednesday afternoon we started reviewing questions that we wrote and wow did we have some corrections to do.  After that we got through about 30 questions and we broke for the day.  We came back in on Thursday and broke into two groups. Once in those groups we then had to each go over about 90 questions by the end of the day Friday.  If you have never done this process or looking to do this process it will defiantly drain you mentally.  After going over each question and finding issues with each one we finally ended up finishing by 3:30 pm on Friday.

Over all I met a great group of people and learned a lot.  I would recommend this to someone that is looking to see what goes into making a test along with getting to collaborate with people and learn from them please do it.

Today we had an issue with our Moss 2007 environment.  What was happing was one of our servers had a messed up DOCICON.XML file. (C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions12TEMPLATEXML)  We were able to copy that file from one of our other servers and this fixed our issue.

One day at work I was asked by one of our VPs to automatically subscribe people to alerts so that when he made a new post to his blog it would alert people that he did.  So we set everything up so they get one email on friday with all the new postings.  Anyway after friday came and some of the alerts went out while others did not.  So I did some digging in the Sharepoint SchedSubscriptions DB and saw everyone that was subscribed to the list.  Then I went back and looked in Exchange to see if the mail went out.  After looking over what mail went out I discovered that mail didnt go out to any distrubition lists but did go out to people that were listed by name.

So I did a little digging on the internet and came acrossed this post.

http://blog.gavin-adams.com/2007/10/26/sending-alerts-to-groups-in-sharepoint-2007/

In the third paragraph I read that the group has to be explicitly added to the Site Collection, Site, List, etc…

After testing I was able to add the add the distrubition list to the library and emails started flowing.