Mixing 64 and 32 bit applications pools on OWA website

May 23, 2009

If you need to create and run a 32-bit application pool on the same website you are running Exchange OWA, usually the Default Web Site, you need to make a couple changes. For example, you want to run an old ASP component that only runs in 32 bit mode.

1. Register the DLL - copy it to \Windows\SysWOW64 and run regsvr32 your.dll
2. Create a 32 bit application pool in IIS 7 - On the advanced settings, set Enable 32-bit applications = True
3. Create a subfolder and assign your 32-bit app pool to it.
4. Modify \Windows\system32\inetsrv\config\applicationhost.config:

   <location path="Default Web Site">
           <system.webServer>
               isapiFilters>
                   <clear />
                   <filter name="Exchange OWA Cookie Authentication ISAPI Filter" path="D:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\owa\auth\owaauth.dll" enabled="true" preCondition="bitness64" />
                   <filter name="Exchange ActiveSync ISAPI Filter" path="D:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\sync\bin\AirFilter.dll" enabled="true" preCondition="bitness64" />
               </isapiFilters>

   Notice the added preCondition=”bitness64″. This tells those filters to only run on 64 bit app pools.

Filed under: Microsoft, Windows | Comments (2)

How to Thin Provision on VMware ESXi 3.5 Free version

April 29, 2009

VMware does not offer a supported method to create a thin disk on the free version of ESXi 3.5. Thin = only allocate space as the guest OS demands. The GUI, Virtual Infrastructure Client, only creates zeroedthick disks (pre-allocated and zeroed on demand), therefore using up much more space than required. The command-line tools, RCLI, either on Windows or in VIMA, are read-only, therefore don’t work for anything useful. If you try, you get an error fault.RestrictedVersion.summary; in other words - you’re not allowed to do that. But there is a way:

On the console (the yellow server console), press ALT-F1.
Type the command unsupported (you won’t see your typing) and you’ll get a password prompt.
Enter your root password, and then you should get a busybox prompt.
Use the vmkfstools to create your disk, like this:

vmkfstools -c 10G -d thin -a lsilogic /vmfs/volumes/[Your_Datastore]/[YourGuestOS]/ThinDisk1.vmdk

If you ls -lh the directory, it will show the full size, but if you df -h you’ll see that very little space was actually used.

While you’re on the hidden console, might as well enable ssh access, too:

vi /etc/inetd.conf and uncomment the ssh line. Look up the Process ID, ps | grep inetd, and restart it with kill -HUP [pid]

Yeah, pretty cool.

Filed under: Linux, vmware | Comments (0)

Partition alignment

March 11, 2009

Windows:

strComputer = "."
Set wmi= GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\CIMV2")
Set col = wmi.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_DiskPartition",,48) 

For Each item in col
	Wscript.Echo "Disk: " & item.DiskIndex & "  Partition: " & item.Index & "  StartingOffset: " & item.StartingOffset/1024 & "KB"     

Next

Set partition alignment on a new partition, required on <= Win2003

c:\>diskpart.exe
DISKPART>list disk
DISKPART>select disk x
DISKPART>create partition primary align=64
DISKPART>exit

Filed under: Microsoft, Windows | Comments (0)