I stumbled across an article called Install Orion products in unattended or silent mode that made me so happy because I install new Orion servers about 4 times a month. There are only so many time I want to click “Next,” “Next”, “Finish” in any given day. So, since I do this so often, I wanted to script this out. The big two takeaways from this article are that you run the installer silently and can skip the Configuration Wizard from running after installation.
Building my Orion Server [VMware Scripting Edition] – Step 1
This is part 1 of a multi-part post on updates that I’ve made to How I Build an Orion Server. Primarily, it will be three parts. If you need this for a Hyper-V environment, I’ve got that script as well.
- Building my Orion Servers in VMware
- Configuring the disks on the VM after OS install
- Configuring the VM with the new disks
DIY: Longbow Transport from PVC
So this is a little different than any of my other posts. Normally I post about something having to do with technology, but this time I’m focusing on something that is decidedly not technological. I recently took up archery as a hobby – specifically shooting the longbow. Why the longbow? Because I’m actually a closet (or maybe not so closet), Renaissance Faire geek. My close friends already know this about me, but many in the tech community do not. This is my “coming out of the 16th century closet” post.
Monitoring & Data Normalization: Clarity via a Single Pane of Glass
As technology professionals, we live in an interruption-driven world — responding to incidents is part of the job. All our other job duties go out the window when a new issue hits the desk. Having the right information and understanding the part it plays in the organization is key to handling these incidents with speed and accuracy. This is why it’s critical to have the ability to compare apples-to-apples when it comes to the all-important troubleshooting process.
Building my Orion Server [Scripting Edition] – Step 3
I’m keeping this original post active for historical reference, but you should not use the below, since I have an update: Step 3 is dead. Long live step 3.1
This is it. The endgame. Here I’ll give you the final steps in configuring my server. We started with creating the virtual machine then moved to configuring the disks. We’re at the end – where’s it’s time to do the final configurations.
In summary, we’re going to do several steps here. They pretty much follows my other guide step-by-step, so I’ll be brief in covering them here.
- Variable Declaration
- Installing Windows Features
- Enabling Disk Performance Metrics
- Installing some Utilities
- Copying the IIS Folders to a new Location
- Enable Deduplication (optional)
- Removing unnecessary IIS Websites and Application Pools
- Tweaking the IIS Settings
- Tweaking the ASP.NET Settings
- Creating a location for the TFTP and SFTP Roots (for NCM)
- Configuring Folder Redirection
- Pre-installing ODBC Drivers (for SAM Templates)
Building my Orion Server [Scripting Edition] – Step 2
In Step 1 of this series, I showed off the PowerShell scripts that I use to create a new Orion Server VM on Hyper-V. Now we are on to configuring the disks.
As before, we have a boot drive and 4 additional drives which will contain various data files. We first need to bring the disks online and initialize them.
If you installed from an ISO, you should either remove the device from your virtual machine before this point, or change the drive mounting to a letter other than D, E, F, or G. I’m generally a fan of changing it to Z:.
Building my Orion Server [Hyper-V Scripting Edition] – Step 1
This is part 1 of a multi-part post on updates that I’ve made to How I Build an Orion Server. Primarily, it will be three parts. If you have VMware, I’ve also got a script edition for that as well.
- Building my Orion Servers in Hyper-V
- Configuring the disks on the VM after OS install
- Configuring the VM with the new disks
Day 1 – Learn
Never stop learning. — twinspar I’ve tried to live by this simple core belief since I was very young. Continuing to challenge your brain is crucial to keeping happy in life (and in your career). In fact, one of my favorite hashtags to review every so often if #TIL (today I learned…). In IT, it … Read more
Getting information about MSI files
Today I ran into an interesting continuous integration-type scenario. One of the skunkworks projects that I’m looking at internally yields frequent builds of MSI files for the same product. These MSI files are automatically generated (sometimes daily) by our source control system.
