Windows 2008 boot process

1.System is powered on 2.The CMOS loads the BIOS and then runs POST 3.Looks for the MBR on the bootable device 4.Through the MBR the boot sector is located and the BOOTMGR is loaded 5.BOOTMGR looks for active partition 6.BOOTMGR reads the BCD file from the \boot directory on the active partition 7.The BCD (boot configuration database) contains various configuration parameters( this information was previously stored in the boot.ini).bcdedit /export save-bcd GUIDs program objects 8.BOOTMGR transfer control to the Windows Loader (winload.exe) or winresume.exe in case the system was hibernated. 9.Winloader loads drivers that are set to start at boot and then transfers the control to the windows kernel.

Benefits of virtualization

1.Faster server provisioning
2.Fewer physical servers means lowering monthly power and cooling costs in the data center.
3.Fewer physical servers means less data center floor space required.
4.Increase uptime with vmotion,svmotion,fault tolerance, high availability, and distributed resource scheduling etc
5.Better utilization of computing resources.Multiple apps and OS in single physical server.
6.No hardware dependency.
7.Easy and flexible infrastructure management

USB and VMware ESX

USB devices are not supported for ESX 4.0 and below.Use parallel port or Digi International has developed AnywhereUSB Remote I/OConcentrator, which utilizes USB over IP Technology.

ESX 4.1 does support USB controllers.ESX 4.1 supports USB device passthrough- Add USB controller and a USB device.
One virtual USB controller per VM.
Per VM max 20 USB devices.

Difference between Vmotion and SVmotion

Vmotion - move from one host to other, disk remains same.
SVmotion - move from one disk to other, host remains same.

Thin provisioning vs Thick provisioning

Thin provisioning  - In this format, the size of the VDMK file occupies on the datastore only the size of how much it is used. For example, if you create a 500GB virtual disk, and place 100GB of data in it, the VMDK file will be 100GB in size in the disk.

Thick provisioning  - If you create a 500GB virtual disk, and place 100GB of data in it, still the VMDK will appear to be 500 GB at the datastore filesystem, but contains only 100GB of data on disk.

Citrix interview questions

What all are the versions of Citrix?
2001 MetaFrame XP
2002 MetaFrame XP with Feature Release 1
2002 MetaFrame XP with Feature Release 2
2003   MetaFrame XP Presentation Server, with Feature Release 3
2004 MetaFrame Presentation Server 3.0
2005 Presentation Server 4.0
2007 Presentation Server 4.5
2007 Presentation Server 4.5, with Feature Pack 1
2008        Citrix XenApp

What is the name of  Citrix Systems proprietary presentation layer protocol?
Independent Computing Architecture (ICA).

What is the speciality of ICA?
It sends screen updates and mouse movements updates in kb size from client to server.Soo thin communication.

What is the ICA port number?
ICA  port number :1494
ICA Protocol on UDP :1604
If Session Reliability is enabled, TCP port 2598 replaces port 1494 as the port that the ICA protocol uses.

What is IMA protocol?
IMA stands for Independent Management Architecture.
It is used for server-to-server communication like licensing, server load updates etc, all which occurs "behind the scenes."

What is Data Collector?
Server which stores dynamic data such as logon info, app usage info etc (zone can be based on geolocation or subnet)

What is the difference between Dynamic Store and Data store?
The data store is a database on disk. The dynamic store is information stored in memory.

How to look the contents of the in-memory "dynamic store" on the data collector?
use “queryds” command

How to determine which server is acting as the data collector in the zone?
run "query farm /zone" from the command line)

What is zone?
It is a grouping of Presentation Servers that shares the common Data Collector.

What is Data Store?
Server which stores static data such as published app,licence info, printers info,form config etc.

What is Farm?
It is a management boundary.All the servers in the farm share a single data store.
Allows to configure features and settings for the entire farm rather than configuring each server individually

What is Local host cache?
If presentation server not connected with data store server, it uses Local host cache.

How to recreate the local host cache file?
dsmaint recreatelhc

What is shadowing?
You can view another user’s session on another device by using shadowing.

Windows systems admin Q&A

What is DHCP?

DHCP is Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. This server can provide IP address configurations such as IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, WINS address, DNS address etc to its clients.

How does DHCP work?

DHCP server has a scope of IP addresses to be issued along with other IP configurations. When we bring up a DHCP client it sends out a broadcast request to find a DHCP server to get an IP address. The DHCP server acknowledges the request and provides the IP configuration to the client with a leasing period.

What is a DHCP reservations?

To dedicate an IP address for a client we can use DHCP reservations. Always this client will get the same IP address from the DHCP server. We would need to know the MAC address of the client to make a reservation.

What is an exclusion?

A range of IP addresses can be excluded from the DHCP server scope, so that those IP addresses can be given as static IP addresses for some servers. Excluded IP addresses won’t be issued to the DHCP clients.

What IS DNS? 

DNS is Domain Naming System. This server provides domain name to IP address naming resolution to its clients.

What is an A record?

A record in DNS server provides forward lookup or host name to IP address naming resolution.

What is an CName record?

CName record or canonical name record helps hostname to have aliases.

What is a PTR record?

PTR record or Pointer record in DNS server provides reverse lookup or IP address to host name naming resolution.

What is nslookup?

Nslookup is a command line utility to help us gather and troubleshoot DNS related information and issues.

What is DNS scavenging?

It’s a feature in DNS that deletes expired records based on their Timestamps.

What is Active Directory integrated zone?

If a DNS server has an Active Directory integrated zone, the DNS zone information will be stored in the Active directory database.

What is the basic advantage of using integrated zone?

The DNS database will be stored in the Active directory database. So the DNS replication will take place along with the AD replication.

What is dynamic DNS registration?

When we bring up a DNS client, it can go directly to the DNS server and register their name and IP address in the DNS database. So we need not create DNS records manually.

What is WINS?

WINS stand for Windows Internet Naming System, helps to resolve NetBIOS name to IP address naming resolution in Windows domain.

What is a Universal Group/Global Group/Local group?

Global Group – is to organize the users in to a group in AD.

Local Group – is to give access to the resources in AD.

We will have to make Global group as the member of local group, so that users can access the resources.

Universal group can be used if the users and resources are located in multiple domains.

What is the main advantage to using a Universal Group?

If the users and resources are located in multiple domains we need to use Universal Group, since it supports forest level scope and group nesting.

What is a global catalog?

Global catalog server is a domain controller in the Active Directory domain which will keep at least some information about all the objects in the forest.

What are the 5 Flexible Single Master Operations roles and what do they do?

Schema master – Controls any changes made in the schema.

Domain naming master- Controls adding and removing domains.

RID master – Controls issuing of unique Relative Identifier number for the domain controllers in the domain.

PDC emulator – Acts as a Primary domain controller for pre-Windows 2000 machines. Also handles time synchronization in the domain and changes in the GPOs.

Infrastructure master- Helps to update groups and its membership information between domains.

PDC  Emulator FSMO role – name the 3 functions it does

1.            Time synchronization.

2.            Creating or editing of GPOs is handled by this server.

3.            Password changes and account lockouts are handled by this server.

Which of the FSMO roles are forest wide/which are domain wide?

Schema master and Domain naming master are forest wide.

RID master, PDC emulator and Infrastructure master are domain wide.

What is a Site and when should you define one in Active directory (ie. basic criteria for establishing one)

Well connected IP subnets are called as sites. If there is a thin link between two locations we should consider them as two different sites in AD.

What is a bridgehead server?

In a multi site environment, Bridgehead servers on each site, handles the replication between two different sites.

What is the Intersite Topology Site Generator?

Every site has a domain controller which acts as an “Intersite Topology Site Generator “which helps to create connection objects between intersite domain controllers for active directory replication.

What is Group Policy and how can it be applied in Active Directory?

Group policy is some set of rules and configuration settings to restrict users working environment.

When these policies are applied, registry settings will be modified in the user level or computer level.

GPOs can be applied in Site, domain or OU level in Active Directory.

What is Group Policy order of precedence?

Group policy applied in the following order:

Local policy

Site Policy

Domain policy

OU policy

What is Group Policy inheritance?

Group policies applied in the top level container can flow down in the of AD hierarchy.

For example a GPO applied in the domain level will be inherited by the OUs in the domain and to its child OUs.

What is No Override?

“No Override” Group policies cannot be blocked by the “Block inheritance” option in AD.

If you want a policy to be applied in the entire tree structure, you need to use this option.

What is block inheritance?

If you prefer a policy to be not getting applied on an OU through inheritance, you can choose this “Block inheritance” option.

How can you apply group policy to only ½ the objects in an OU vs. all of them?

A policy will get applied only if the objects are having Read and Apply group policy permissions.

Taking off these permissions will help the objects not to get applied.

What is Group Policy loopback processing?

If you want the user settings should be determined by the computer accounts policy rather than the user accounts policy, we need to consider using loopback processing.

Why would you need or use Group policy loopback processing?

In some situations like kiosks, we need the machine policy to get applied regardless of which user logging in. In those situations we would use loopback processing.

What are the two types of group policies you can apply to an object?

There are “Local group policy” and “Domain group policy”

These policies are having two section in them “Computer configuration” and “User configuration”

What are some tools you can use to troubleshoot Group Policy that wasn’t applying properly to an object or in conflict?

Gpresult.exe command line tool.

Rsop MMC snap in.

How long does replication take within a site and intersite?     

Within a site – every 15 seconds.

Between sites – every 180 minutes.

How would you restore an object or OU in active directory?

To restore an object or OU we should have already taken “System state data” backup.

If we have the backup, we need to do the Authoritative restore by rebooting the domain controller in “Directory service restore mode”. We will use ntdsutil command to restore the objects.

What is Web farm in IIS?

Serving a web site with more than one web server is called web farm.

This way we get fault tolerance and load balancing.

Here we will be having a load balancer with a virtual IP.

Client requests will be send to the load balancer and the requests will be distributed across the web servers farm.

What is Web garden in IIS?

Every application pool in the IIS will be having a worker process (w3wp.exe).

A application pool with multiple worker process is known as Web garden.

Most of the cases default single worker process application pool is good enough.

If you are having applications that make long running database requests for example high computational database transaction or applications that have threads occupied by long-running synchronous and network intensive transactions would take the advantage of having multiple worker processes.

How to copy a printer driver from one computer to another?

Use backup and restore option in Print Migrator 3.1 to take one printer from one server to another windows machine.

Download from here
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=25311

How to delete duplicate lines along with its original in a text file?

Here is a way to delete repeated duplicate lines along with its original in a text file. If there are two lines with same string in it,it will remove both.
Finding double entries and delete both of them in a text file.
Do it in unix.
sort filename | uniq –u
Out put to a text file.

Setting up Arabic Input locale in Windows Vista

All of the files needed for you to view the Arabic Characters should
already installed in Windows Vista. However, you will need to install the
Arabic Keyboard Input so that you can type with the Arabic characters.
1) Click on Start button and then select Control Panel.
2) Under Clock,Language, and Region area, select Change keyboards or other input
methods link. Note: If you are in the Control Panel Classic View, then double click
on Regional and Language Options icon and click on the tab keyboard
and languages.
3) Click on the Change keyboards…button then click on Add…
button.
4) Select the input language and keyboard.
Expand "Arabic (Egypt)" tree then Expand "Keyboard" tree from the list. Check
Keyboard Arabic (101)
5) Click OK to add the selected keyboards to the Installed Services.
6) Click OK to confirm and apply your new language settings.
7) Open any Windows application then make sure the Language Bar menu on top is set to the input language you want.

How to use handle -c to a kill process in Windows?

You are getting this error "Cannot delete _vxfiVspCacheFile_1.VSP: There has been a sharing violation. The source or destination file may be in use."This _vxfiVspCacheFile_2.VSP file is in the folder NBU_VSP_Cache.This is happend because of netbackup client is caching opened files.You would soon run out of space in the local drives if there is no cap on it.

To resolve this issue or to delete this file do the following. You might have to download handle.exe or processexplorer.exe will help.

Run handle.exe > output.txt
Find out the process id and the handle number used.

For example in the following output file process id is 8 and the handle to be closed is 218
So run handle -c 218 -p 8

How to run handle -c example:

C:\handle>handle -c 218 -p 8

Handle v3.46
Copyright (C) 1997-2011 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

218: File (---) C:\NBU_VSP_Cache\_vxfiVspCacheFile_1.VSP
Close handle 218 in System (PID 8)? (y/n) Y

Handle closed.

Now you can delete the file.

Handle output file:

Handle v3.46
Copyright (C) 1997-2011 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
System pid: 8 NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
EC: File (RW-) \Device\Mup
15C: File (-W-) C:\pagefile.sys
218: File (---) C:\NBU_VSP_Cache\_vxfiVspCacheFile_1.VSP
250: File (RW-) C:\FTP

How to find Windows XP edition is 32 bit or 64 bit?

Run Msinfo32.exe.
You will get Help and Support Center screen.
Here under "Pick a task" click "Use Tools to view your computer information and diagnose problems "
You would get tools screen.
Here click "My Computer Information" and "View general system information about this computer "
My Computer Information - General , Processor, Version if it says x86 Family it is 32-bit edition
My Computer Information - General , Processor, Version if it says x64-based PC it is 64-bit edition

How to Change your ftp server password using Filezilla FTP Client?

Connect to the ftp server.
Click on "Server" menu in the top and click "Enter custom command"
In the Enter custom command box type in the following

site pswd oldPassword newPassword regular

here oldPassword is your old password and newPassword is your new password.
This will change your password in the FTP server.

To correct it in the client,make sure to enter this password in the site manager, so you don't have to enter the password every time when you try to connect to the ftp server.

How to find last logon user information on Windows?

For Windows Local user accounts:
For local SAM user accounts use the following commmand
net user
This command will give lot more information about the user along with last logon date and time.In case if you need for multiple user accounts last login information, run this command in a batch file and export to a text file.
eg:
net user user1
net user user2
net user user3

Keep above lines in the file called userlist.bat.
Then run the following
userlist.bat >output.txt

This output text file can be imported to an Excel sheet (In the import data wizard choose "Fixed width").So the sheet will have multiple Columns. Then use the Autofilter feature to filter the required coulms out like "user name" and "Last Logon" etc.

For Windows domain user accounts:
For Active directory domain user accounts use a tool called UsrStat. This would pull the data from the ADS PDC. This command-line tool displays the username, full name, and last logon date and time for each user in a given domain.
You can download this tool from the following location:
http://www.dynawell.com/download/reskit/microsoft/win2000/usrstat.zip

How to fix PostgreSQL "could not open process token: error code 5" Error?

PostgreSQL Database Server 8.3 Service (pgsql-8.3) is not starting in windows.Getting “The PostgreSQL Server service on Local Computer started and then stopped. Some services stop automatically if they have no work to do, for example, the Performance Logs and Alerts service”.
Throwing "could not open process token: error code 5" error in the Application log of event viewer.

Resolution: Make sure the PostgreSQL service account is NOT member of administrators group.It is not allowed as per postgresql.

How to fix "Search this blog" gadget keep loading message at blogger.com error?

Forget the blogger or blogspot.com own "Search box" gadget.
Get a new gadget or widget from Google Custom Search.
www.google.com/cse/.
Create your own search engine here.Add your site(s).
Get the code and paste in the html/javascript box of your blog.
Make sure you have only one custom search engine placed on your blog.
This way you can avoid keep loading message of "Search box" gadget of blogger.com.
You can monetize aswell in the custom search engine by placing adsense ads.

How to remove Make Private option on godaddy.com?

You got “make your domain private” for free deal when you buy the domain name from godaddy and now if it is time to renew and the “private domain” deal isn’t free now. But how do you tell them you don’t even want it? You can’t! Not on GoDaddy.com at least. Here is the secret. You need to go to domainsbyproxy.com and get your account number by telling them you lost your account number/password. You have to enter the email address you registered on GoDaddy. You will get the email with your domainsbyproxy.com account number. Enter that number and your GoDaddy password. You will be able to uncheck the “Make Private” box from all your domains. Wait a few minute and go back to GoDaddy. Make sure you clear your cart and attempt to renew your domains again. You should be able to do so without the additional $8+ privacy charge for each domain.

Hindi,Tamil font in Blackberry.

Blackberry 6 OS supports natively Indian indic fonts if you bought black-berry from india.
People who bought from other countries, they might have to install net_rim_font_indic.cod in their blackbery.

Blackberry OS Version 5 does not support indic fonts. Need to use the opera browser technic for that.(in the browser type in “opera:config” and enable “Use bitmap fonts for complex scripts” will do the trick)

Check your balckberry os version by go to "Home screen" then "Settings"" then "Options" then "About"

Blackberry OS can be upgraded as long as if it is your personal one by using the following link.

http://us.blackberry.com/update/

If it is a corporate blackberry, needs to be done by corporate IT.

net_rim_font_indic.cod file can be downloaded from here
install this cod file using a program called BBSAK
Download BBSAK from here

Connect blackberry to the PC.If it does not show up in the device manager you would have to install the following driver.
BlackBerry USB and Modem Drivers_ENG.msi - download from below link.
https://swdownloads.blackberry.com/Downloads/

Once it is connected successfully run BBSAK and type in the password. Click "Modify COD" and then "Install COD(s)". Specify the above said cod file.

Your blackberry will reboot and you could see indian language fonts flawlessly.