Author: Jeff Miles

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Dell PowerEdge BIOS failed due to IPMI driver

Jeff Miles 7 Comments

I was updating the BIOS on a couple of Dell PowerEdge R620’s today and was presented with an error I hadn’t heard of before:

IPMI driver is disabled. Please enable or load the driver and then reboot the system.

This was very odd. A little bit of searching showed that there should be an IPMI driver service running in Windows, so I checked that:

Service 'ipmidrv (IPMIDRV)' cannot be started due to the following error: Cannot start service IPMIDRV on computer '.

Knowing this was a driver, I went to look in Device Manager, and was quite surprised to find this IPMI driver listed:

This is a Dell PowerEdge, I have no idea how this HP driver got installed – I’m not even convinced it wasn’t there prior to the other driver updates I was performing. In any case, this device wasn’t starting properly, and was preventing the service from starting. I uninstalled it and the driver:

Following this, the appropriate device appeared under “System Devices”:

Now I could start the service, and the BIOS update proceeded properly.

Powershell command as scheduled task

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

Here’s the syntax to use a PowerShell command in Task Schedule action, rather than a script:

Program/script:

powershell.exe

Add Arguments:

-noninteractive -executionpolicy bypass -command &{Checkpoint-VM -Name pxetest -SnapshotName 2018-06-23-PreMaintenance}

 

The key here is the ampersand before the command – when I was missing that it would not run.

 

 

SharePoint library column missing

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I’ve been working on migrating documents between document libraries in a SharePoint site, and have randomly struggled with an odd issue.

In the new destination library, I’ve configured a managed metadata column based on a term store, and made it mandatory. This column does not exist on the source library.

For the majority of my documents this has been working well – after moving or copying the document I set the column value with the quick-edit info pane. However, some of the documents have a blank value rather than showing “Required Information”:

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When I view the properties of the document on the quick-edit pane, the column doesn’t appear at all!

The root cause is that these problem documents carried over their Content Type with them into the new library, and this content type does not have the managed metadata column added to it. However, it isn’t immediately clear this is what happened because the default setting on this library is to not manage Content Types individually.

To fix this, I went into the advanced library settings, and chose Yes for “Allow management of content types”:

Once I did this, the extra content type appeared in the settings page:

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Now when I go back to my document and open the quick-edit pane, there is a new option to select Content Type, and I can set it back to the default:

This then updates the list and puts a “Required Information” block in that column, and allows me to fill it in.

 

ASR Deployment Planner throughput test failure

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I’m preparing an environment for the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner tool, and ran into a problem with one of the tests. With this tool, you can run a few different tests independently:

  • GetVMList – generate a list of VMs from specified hosts
  • StartProfiling – run a profile job on the generated list of VMs, over a specified period of time
  • GenerateReport – generate output report of results based on dataset collected in the “StartProfiling” job
  • GetThroughput – run an upload test to an Azure Storage Account to get measurements of viable throughput for your environment (optionally done in the “StartProfiling” job too)

When I ran the StartProfiling job, I encountered a bunch of errors at the end which indicated it was related to the throughput test. So then I independently ran that, and encountered the following errors:

Output not in a definite format
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UploadTest.exe has stopped working

 

There isn’t any other mentions online of this error that I could find, but I went back to the tool requirements and realized that I had missed a prerequisite.

Once I installed the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 as identified from the ASR doc, the throughput test succeeded without further errors.

Install Windows Feature from Source

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

Here’s the syntax to use when trying to use Install-WindowsFeature cmdlet with source as ISO mounted as DVD:

Install-WindowsFeature -Name "Web-App-Dev" -source wim:f:\sources\install.wim:4

Interestingly, when I tried to do this with the feature “Web-Net-Ext” for the .net 3.5 extensibility, it failed with a download error.

Even trying to install .net 3.5 through Install-WindowsFeature or the Server Manager failed with a similar error.

I had to install it through DISM, and then the rest of the command worked:

Dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFX3 /All /Source:F:\sources\sxs