» Microsoft Server

Expanding a RAID5 array without losing data

Rich Stevenson — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:16:26 +0000

One of my remote offices was getting a little low on drive space on their data partition, so it was time to upgrade the existing drives to large capacity drives. This particular server is a Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard SP2 on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with six 146GB SCSI drives and a PERC 5/i integrated controller. Drives 0 & 1 are configured RAID0 for the system partition and drives 2-5 are configured RAID5 for the data partition. Six internal drives are all the server is capable of, so I have no empty slots for additional drives to expand the RAID5. So replacing the 146GB drives with 300GB drives is the route I took to add additional space to the array. Here are the steps:

1. As always, make sure you have a good backup of the server in case things go wrong.
2. Remove drive 2 and replace it with one of the new 300GB drives.
3. Wait for the array rebuild to complete by watching it in Dell OpenManage Server Administrator.
4. Repeat steps 2-3 for the remaining 3 drives.
5. Once the four drives are replaced, restart the server and hit Ctrl-R when prompted to enter the BIOS of the PERC5/i.
6. Write down all of the settings for the existing RAID5 configuration, i.e. stripe size, read ahead.
7. Deleted the RAID5 virtual disk and then recreated it with the new 300 GB drives, making sure to match the settings of the old virtual disk and be extra sure that the option to initialize the disk is NOT selected. If the disk is initialized, you will lose all of the data and will have to restore from your backup.
8. Reboot the server and allow Windows to load. Once the OS comes up, login and verify that all of the data is still intact.
9. From a command prompt type diskpart.
10. At DISKPART> type list volumes and locate the Volume # of the volume that you want to add the additional free space to. In my case it was volume 1.
11. At DISKPART> type select volume 1.
12. At DISKPART> Type extend.
13. At DISKPART> Type exit and close the command window.

Your RAID5 should be expanded with all data intact.

Controlling workstation services with Group Policies

Rich Stevenson — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:55:06 +0000

Looking for a way to allow your users to start and stop specific services? Or maybe a way to prevent a Power User from stopping specific services? In this article I’ll show you how to accomplish both using a Group Policy.
This first thing that you’ll want to do is make sure the service that you want to control is installed on your administrative workstation. If it’s not, then you won’t see the service listed in the GPO.

1. Open your Group Policy and go to Computer Configuration | Windows Settings | Security Settings | System Services.
2. Right click the service that you want to control and select Properties as seen in Figure A.

Figure A:

3. Place a check mark at ‘Define this policy setting‘. Immediately the Security dialog will be displayed.

What you do from here depends on what you want to accomplish. If you want to prevent a user in the local Power User group from stopping a service, simply click OK. This will take away the Power Users group rights from the service.

If you want to allow a user or group to be able to start and stop the service, then add them to the Security list and click OK.

4. Select the service startup mode and click OK.

That’s it. Give the policy time to replicate and you now have complete control over the specified service on all of your workstations.

Map Windows drives based on group membership

Rich Stevenson — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:00:21 +0000

Need a way to map a network share for a user, based on security group membership? It’s pretty easy and can be done with just a few lines of code. Using a Visual Basic Script, you can map a drive to a Windows share based on whether or not the authenticating Active Directory user is a member of a specific security group.

In this example, I have an Active Directory group named acct and I want the members of that group to have the share located at \\server01\acct mapped using the drive letter Q. The text in yellow, represents where you modify this script to accommodate your environment.

‘Set the variable ACCT to the group name acct
Const ACCT = "cn=acct"

‘Access to network resources.
Set wshNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")

‘Network drive mapping info.
Set EnuDrives = wshNetwork.EnumNetworkDrives()

‘For checking group memberships
Set ADSysInfo = CreateObject("ADSystemInfo") Set CurrentUser = GetObject("LDAP://" & ADSysInfo.UserName)

‘Prevents an error if user is not a member of any groups.
If IsArray(CurrentUser.MemberOf) Then strGroups = LCase(Join(CurrentUser.MemberOf)) Else strGroups = LCase(CurrentUser.MemberOf) End If

‘This block first checks if the user is a member of
‘the ACCT group. If yes, then it checks for an existing
‘map using Q, if it finds one, it is disconnected and Q is
‘mapped to the \\server01\acct share.
If InStr(strGroups, ACCT) Then For i = 0 To EnuDrives.Count - 1 Step 2 If LCase(EnuDrives.Item(i)) = "q:" Then wshNetwork.RemoveNetworkDrive "q:", True, True End If Next wshNetwork.MapNetworkDrive "q:", "\\server01\acct" End If

Now just copy the above script and paste it into a text editor such as Notepad and name it with an .vbs extension. Double clicking the the file runs the script and you should see the Q: drive mapped to your specified share as long as you are a member of your specified group.