Dear SCOM. You blew it

In case you weren’t aware, for SCOM to work against a non domain machine, all manner of certificates is required between the RMS and the agents in order for this to work. Not only is it required, but you have to use the fairly archaic tools provided with certificates, oh, and you will need your own certificate authority too. This is such a complete and utter #FAIL that I don’t really know where to start. Mainly my issue is that it doesn’t need to be this hard.. if someone wants to see the CPU time on my webserver, then by all means, hack in, but damn if I care enough to go through this level of work for it. And that brings me to my second issue, the shit just doesn’t work. Sure you could say this is a “rush it out the door” kinda thing, but this happened back in 2007 and there have been plenty of releases including an R2 version, yet still this useless and archaic process is still in place.

So in short, the SCOM guys failed by over-complicating something that isn’t needed, and then making it 10 times more difficult than necessary. FAIL.

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highpoint rocketraid and high cpu use

I have a Highpoint RockerRaid2310 in my server at the house. For some time I have had an issue with the “HighPoint RAID Management Service”, which runs an .exe called “hptsvr.exe”, which then runs “drvinst32.exe”, taking up a lot of cpu time. In my case the server was a quad core and it took 25% of the total CPU. Everything would work just fine, but this bothered me for a lot of reasons, so I would leave the service set to manual unless I needed to run the card’s management software. In that case I would start the service, do the management, then kill the offending .exe. Life went on.

Recently I decided I wanted to use more of the features of this card, so I went looking for a fix. There were several random internet posts about the problem but no one had a fix for it. Contacting HighPoint support seemed like the obvious thing to do, so that’s what I did, and they proved helpful.

In my case I was running the older management software, which was version 3.14.5. This was the latest version of it. I was also already running the latest version of the firmware (2.5) and windows driver (2.3). At the advice of HighPoint’s support, I switched to the web management software which is version 1.5.3. I did have an issue with the new software installing itself in the same directory as the old software, which broke my ability to uninstall the old stuff, so my recommendation if you do this is to uninstall the old version first. This has left an uninstall for the old version in add/remove and for now I’m just going to leave it, but that’s not hard to clean up.

So now life is good, I can schedule verify tasks, get emailed if a disk fails, all that good stuff. Basically, things are working as they should.

scom 2007 r2 cumulative update 2 (cu2) update notes

Download it here

Microsoft’s KB article on it

Installing it

Applying update to a clustered RMS

If the install fails and you need to run it again, this is where it installs it (on an x64 system)

C:Program Files (x86)System Center 2007 R2 Hotfix Utility

If the install fails and you need to run it again, this is where it installs it (on a 32bit system)

C:Program FilesSystem Center 2007 R2 Hotfix Utility

If the install fails, this is probably why