sbuchanan

Manually remove DPM agents from DPM console

by

How do I manually remove a DPM agent from DPM after the protected server is gone? They de-commissioned a server and forgot to uninstall the DPM agent before taking the server down. Now the DPM console has a stale agent record in it. I have had a few people ask me how to remove these … Read more

Configure Windows to Automatically connect to VPN

by

I recently had a need to setup a server that would automatically connect to VPN on Windows startup. On this remote site I did not have a router with VPN tunnel capability. You will need to perform 3 tasks.

1. Create the VPN connection

2. Write a batch file to connect to VPN

3. Create a scheduled task in Windows task scheduler that will kick off the batch file at Windows start up

Here are the steps in detail:

1. Create your VPN connection

I am not going to go through all the steps of creating a VPN connection in Windows. I assume that you would not be reading this post if you did not already know how to create a basic VPN connection. However there is a setting in the VPN connection that you will want to set. This setting is:

  • On the VPN connection Options tab set the Redialing options. Select Redial if the line is dropped. This will attempt to reconnect the VPN connection if it detects that it has lost the connection. This is helpful if the internet connection drops and comes back.

clip_image001

2. Create a VPN auto connect batch file.

It should consist of

cd C:\Windows\System32\

rasdial.exe “MY VPN” “DOMAINNAME\USERNAME” “PASSWORD“

Replace “DOMAINNAME\USERNAME” “PASSWORD” with your own. Save this batch file on your %systemdrive%. When you are done you should have a AUTOVPN.bat file.

Read more

DPM found no recovery point which you are authorized to restore on the specified DPM server

by

Problem: On client computers that are protected by DPM you had to put the end users account in the local administrators group. If you did not add the end user account to the local administrators group you would get this error after opening the recovery tab in the DPM client: “DPM found no recovery points … Read more

Recovery notification email not working in DPM

by

PROBLEM: During a recovery you select the option "Send an email when this recovery completes". The recovery job completes with no issues but an email notification is never sent. RESOLUTION: There are several things you need to ensure are configured for this to work properly. These are: Make sure an SMTP Server is configured. To … Read more

Allow DPM Traffic Through ISA 2006 / TMG 2010

by

In this post I will explain the steps I had to take to allow DPM traffic in and out of my ISA firewall. (NOTE: This will also work with TMG 2010). This is required in order for a Secondary offsite DPM server to backup a Primary DPM server that is inside the local network and for client protection over the WAN. Both DPM offsite protection and offsite client protection are done via VPN. Configuring ISA / TMG for DPM traffic can seem somewhat complex and there is not any really good documentation on how to do this. My goal of this post is to simply this process as much as possible in clear easy to follow steps. I will assume that if you are reading this post that you are somewhat familiar with ISA 2006 / TMG 2010.

The steps needed to configure ISA 2006/TMG 2010 to allow DPM traffic in and out of the network are:

  1. Configure an access rule for DPM traffic.
  2. Define protocols in ISA/TMG for DPM traffic.
  3. Unrestrict RPC security.

1. Configure an access rule for DPM traffic.

You first need to create an Access rule in ISA 2006 for DPM. I called mine DPM offsite.

image

In the rule allow access to and from Internal, Local Host, and VPN Clients. We will add the protocols next.

image

Read more

Building Custom Reports in DPM

by

The Need:

You need to get detailed reports on your Data Protection Manager. The reports that are included with DPM are not enough and do not contain the data that you need to report on.

The Solution:

There is a way to create custom reports for DPM. I am not a SQL guy and will never claim to be but I was still able to figure out how to generate custom reports for DPM thanks to Microsoft SQL reporting services. Let’s cover the process of doing this.

The DPM Report Views

Views are like tables in SQL in the way they look. Views can be considered virtual tables that pull data from multiple tables. They dynamically generate their data when the view is referenced. Someone typically will build a view for non-SQL users that do not know how to write SQL queries but need to pull data together.

Microsoft has included a bunch of SQL views in the DPM database by default. They included these so that DPM administrators could create custom reports. These Custom Report Views for DPM can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff399120.aspx . On that link it will also describe what type of data each view will give you in your report. This is what the views look like and where they are stored in SQL management studio.

clip_image002

These views need to be used by SQL Reporting Services to generate the custom DPM reports.

Read more