Quite a common request for working with Windows machines is to report the software installed on them. If you don’t have a centralised system for reporting on client software (many places don’t) then you may turn to some form of scripted method to obtain this information.
Most people tend to head to Add / Remove Programs when thinking about what software is installed in Windows. However, not all applications will always populate information in there, depending on how they have been installed.
OK, bit of an obscure one this, but if you have the issue then hopefully this will help you. While attemping to install KB2638806 on Windows Server 2003 Clusters I consistently received the below error:
“Unable to find a volume for file extraction. Please verify you have the proper permissions.”
The cluster node had been cleared of resources and rebooted prior to patching, however the patch would not install. After some troubleshooting it turned out that an additional step of stopping the Cluster service on the affected node allowed the patch to be installed.
Following on from the blog post Testing TCP Port Response from PowerShell which provided a means to check that servers had fully rebooted after a patching and reboot cycle, I needed to take this one step further and check that all of the Windows Services set to Automatic successfully started after the reboot.
This should be pretty straightforward since we have a Get-Service cmdlet. Unfortunately however, this cmdlet does not return a StartMode parameter, i.
To upgrade Active Directory from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 requires the usual AD schema upgrade first of all. Windows Server 2008 R2 is 64-bit only, so if you try running the usual command to upgrade the schema from a 32-bit Domain Controller:
adprep /forestprep
you get the following result, “adprep.exe is valid, but if for a machine type other than the current machine.”:
An alternative is to try running it from a 64-bit machine that is not a DC, but then you discover that this process absolutely must be run from a DC: