Geeky Stuff

QNAP NAS full and unable to delete files

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We have been using QNAP NAS devices as near line storage for our customers online backups. We have recently stumbled across a slight inconvenience when the NAS device runs out of disk space and becomes unusable. Now you would like to think you could just login to the NAS via SSH or SMB share and delete a file to make some space. Unfortunately the SMB’s shares weren’t available and I couldn’t browse the complete file structure via WinSCP to delete a specific file. I could login to the NAS via the web interface, however I could view the files when selecting the shares. I had the option to delete a share, but I didn’t really want to lose three terabytes of data.

Below is the official line from QNAP support, obviously I take no responsibility for any data lose if anything goes wrong.

  • Power off NAS remove all disks then power on NAS WITHOUT disks download and install Qfinder http://download.qnap.com/Storage/Utility/QNAPQfinderWindows-4.0.1.0530.exe
  • After a short beep and a long beep, plug the disks back to NAS one by one in original order push in till the previous HDD led flashes solid green.
  • Run QNAP Finder, it will find the NAS
    Note: Do not re-initialize when the QNAP Finder prompt a message, if you have some useful data in the disk
  • Connect to the NAS via SSH port 22, login as admin password admin, I use a popular SSH client called putty which can be downloaded here http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
  • Run commands bellow
    # config_util 1
    # storage_boot_init 1 (wait 30sec and press enter)
    # storage_boot_init 2
  • Download and install WinSCP which can be found here http://winscp.net/eng/download.php
  • Login to the NAS with the IP Address on the screen and use the username admin and password admin, navigate to /share/MD0_DATA/ and delete a couple of files to free some space. There needs to be at least three gigabytes of free disk space for the QNAP NAS to function, reboot the device and all will be good.

I hope this helps.

 

Exchange Powershell

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In recent months both myself and powershell are becoming best buds. I love the way how it makes my life so much easier. I’ve been asked by plenty of customers for a comprehensive list of mailboxes on their IT systems, you can find out by entering the following powershell command on Microsoft Exchange 2007, 2010 and 2013 servers:

get-mailbox –resultsize unlimited | get-mailboxstatistics | select-object DisplayName,TotalItemSize,LastLogonTime | Sort-Object DisplayName

The above command will display a list of mailboxes sorted by the DisplayName field, the size of mailbox and when they last logged on.

If you would like to output this to a text file to send to someone you can use:

get-mailbox –resultsize unlimited | get-mailboxstatistics | select-object DisplayName,TotalItemSize,LastLogonTime | Sort-Object DisplayName > C:\list-of-mailboxes.txt

Enjoy

World Wide Web Publishing Service failed to start

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I woke up this morning to find one of my customers Sharepoint sites wasn’t running, after logging on to the server I discovered a number of service errors.

System event log 7001

wpid309-media_1363077531197.png

The World Wide Web Publishing Service service depends on the Windows Process Activation Service service which failed to start because of the following error:
Transaction support within the specified resource manager is not started or was shut down due to an error.

System event log 5189

wpid310-media_1363077663453.png

The Windows Process Activation Service failed to generate an application pool config file for application pool ‘*’. The error type is ‘0’. To resolve this issue, please ensure that the applicationhost.config file is correct and recommit the last configuration changes made. The data field contains the error number.

First thoughts

Initially I ran a chkdsk on the system drive, but the file system was clean. I then ran the following command from an elevated command prompt:

fsutil resource setautoreset true c:\

The above command assume c:\ is the system drive. When you issue this command the transactional resource manager will clean the transaction metadata on its next mount on drive c:\.

Afterwards I restarted the server, and it restarted with a clean bill of health.

Final thoughts

All this was achieved with proactive monitoring and before 08:30am so the customer didn’t even know anything was wrong.