Some Notes on the Machines

Sometimes, StorageCraft ShadowProtect retention fails. One cause of this, is a corrupt database. There is no such warning in logs. The way to confirm, is to stop the ShadowProtect service, delete or rename SPX.DB3 located here:

%ProgramData%\StorageCraft\SPX

to SPX.SP3.OLD, restart the service, recreate both destination and job settings, and test. If the retention policy works, you’ve fixed it. Interestingly enough, when this works, it often will not need manual cleanup of the destination folder, but will take care of much or all of the cleanup of old chains automatically. Does not always happen however.

Excellent tool.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/microsoft-support-and-recovery-assistant-sara-e90bb691-c2a7-4697-a94f-88836856c72f

Sometimes Windows Installer will pile up a queue of items to be installed. These will show up as multiple ‘msiexec’ processes in TASKMGR. To clear them:

msiexec /unregister
taskkill /f /im msiexec.exe
msiexec /regserver

The idea is, first we take Windows Installer offline, then we kill any leftover stalled / queued processes, and lastly, we bring Windows Installer online again. Unless there’s something else in the backgrounds starting more of these things, this will take good care.

There are the commands currently known to this writer. These exist on Windows 8/2012 and up, though memory compression for at least one one item is not present in 8/2012. Do a Get-MMAgent to see what your OS has and what the status is. There are a lot of tweakables, it’s not small, especially on 10. There is a tweakable number immediately visible, “MaxOperationAPIFiles”.

Get-MMAgent

Set-MMAgent

Disable-MMAgent

Enable-MMAgent

Get-Help for the above did not help much. But the Microsoft web page for Disable-MMAgent shows that it will disable bits and pieces. Disabling memory compression is a good idea, it conserves CPU resources, if you have lots of RAM. Items known to be available:

-ApplicationLaunchPrefetching
-ApplicationPreLaunch
-OperationAPI
-PageCombining
-MemoryCompression
-CimSession <CimSession[]>
-ThrottleLimit <Int32>
-AsJob

So to disable only memory compression, out of all of the above functions, just run this PowerShell command:

Disable-MMAgent -MemoryCompression

The above works, even though -MemoryCompression is not listed in the Get-Help items for Disable-MMagent.

Another setting which may help, if you have an SSD or fast RAID, is to increase “the maximum number of prefetch files for scenarios that the Operation Recorder API records”. Default is 256.

Set-MMAgent -MaxOperationAPIFiles 1024

These can be very dangerous. Recently during a Windows 10 upgrade, C:\Windows.old contained a Users folder where the subfolders were all junctions to the live profile folders in C:\Users. Trying to delete Windows.old almost produced disaster.

To handle this, first check and see what your objects are, with DIR /A in CMD. If you have a junction or a symbolic link, convert it to a simple empty folder/directory first:

fsutil reparsepoint delete foldername

and then delete:

rmdir /s /q foldername

Open up your SQL server instance in the Studio. Go to the Properties of your instance.

Under Memory, you will see a minimum and a maximum. Set the minimum to 1024 (MB) or 2048. Reserve 4 gigabytes RAM minimum for the OS, add some more for anything else running on it, then use the rest as your maximum memory usage setting.

Also under Memory, you will see “Minimum memory per query”. Default is 1024. Set this to 2048.

Then under Processors, check “Boost SQL Server priority”.

And click OK.

Some info here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/configure-windows/server-memory-server-configuration-options?view=sql-server-2017#max_server_memory

Try SMPlayer:

https://www.smplayer.info/en/downloads

For a silent install in Windows, use /S for the EXE installer.

Here is an excellent tool to check if your IP or domain is on a spam blacklist (a.k.a. RBL):

https://www.debouncer.com/

The current download site for MegaRAID (formerly LSI, Avago, et al.) drivers and Storage Manager now appears to be here:

https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/raid-controllers/megaraid-sas-9361-8

A Lenovo-supplied method to update drivers, BIOS, and firmware in Windows.

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/tvsu-update