deployment scanner summary tool

Deployment Scanner Parser
Deployment Scanner Parser is a Visual Basic utility which has been developed internally by EV support engineers. This utility is provided to assist customers and support staff with operational issues & diagnosing problems within an EV environment.

This tool is not a formally supported Symantec tool.
 

DSS Aims
DSS’s aim is to provide as much information to the user about the environment from which the cabfile was taken from.  It does this by parsing the information held in the extracted files and presents the useful information in the form of HTML reports. The reports open automatically once the tool has finished and can also be found in a subfolder called DSS in the extracted cabfiles location.
This link details what’s inside the cabfile and the DSS tools can only work on the information held in these files.  If this information is corrupt then the tool will error you can read the script and find the line number in the error and find which file is causing a problem, trying renaming the file to .orig and re run)
 
The information in each of the HTML reports is as follows:-

Alerts and Warnings -Tab (dss-alerts.mht_.txt attached)
 
Displays if tasks or services are running in "Read Only" Mode
Displays if the Enterprise Vault Binaries version matches Database version, confirming if an upgrade has been completed 100%
Displays if Tasks are in report mode
Highlights the warnings and errors detailed in the Report from the Deployment scanner report.
Details the best Practise Registry Keys that are generated
 
EV Configuration - Tab (dss-evconfig.mht_.txt attached)
 
Enterprise Vault Server Specific settings, Tasks and Services
Enterprise Vault Directory settings
Archiving and Retrieval Task Settings
EV Directory and Vault Store Database Info
Vault Store Partition Info
Index & Shopping Locations
EV Targets
Retention Categories
Site Entry settings
Exchange Information
PST Policy Settings

IIS info
 
Link to Deployment Scanner files
Message Queue Statistics
Symantec Enterprise Vault Event Log
Symantec Enterprise Vault Converters Event Log
 
Deployment Scanner Report - Tab
 
The report generated by the deployment scanner tool as seen on upgrade or installation (not by DSS)
 
 
Policy - Tab
 
This is a WIP but does list some aspects of Exchange MBX policies, such as aged or quota or age and quota archiving policies.
 
 
CA / DA Configuration - Tab
 
Details the Product / Binary / Database versions for CA / DA
Displays the install location
 
Reference - Tab
 
Details the EV Product version / EV Binary version / EV Directory Database and EV VaultStore database versions, along with some CA/DA versions
 
EV Schedules - Tab
 
Details the schedules uses for the EV site and the various tasks
 
 
Installation
Firstly copy the latest .vbs file to your local machine and store in a convenient folder, it is also recommended that you rename the latest version to a generate name such as “dss.vbs” as this will make updating in the future easier.

Launching the application:-

Just double clicking on the vbs will execute it

or

Running via the command line e.g.

cscript “location of vbs file” “location of extracted cabfile”
cscript "C:\tools\dss.vbs" "C:\Test Cabfiles\ev2007sp6"
note your paths will be different and the use of speech marks is required incase of spaces in the paths.

or

Running when right clicking on a folder from within Windows Explorer. (Requires further install steps)

To set this up the following needs manually creating on the machine that will run DSS.
Create the Registry Hive Path = HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\**DSS**\
Create the Registry Hive Path = HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\**DSS**\command

Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\**DSS**\command edit the (Default) Registry Key
Registry Key Type:        REG_SZ (should be this already)
Registry Key Data:         C:\WINDOWS\system32\wscript.exe "C:\tools\dss.vbs"  "%1"

Now you show see a ***DSS*** option in the context menu when right clicking an folder.

NOTE : All methods require the cabfile is extracted.
NOTE: From version 7.3.3 onwards you can select the parent folder that contains the DSS extracted files and DSS should fine the extracted cabfiles.

Updating
When a new version is released and you have used a generic name, simply copy over the new vbs file and rename to the generic name.
If you have not used a generic name you will need to re-install as required.

Example reports
I've attached some sample reports to give you an idea on what DSS can do. you will have to rename them from .txt to .mht

Deployment_Scanner_Report_15022010_125050.mht_.txt
dss-alerts.mht_.txt
dss-evconfig.mht_.txt
dss-evsched.mht_.txt
dss-ref.mht_.txt 

Incase of an error running the script....

Just a quick note if you get an error similar to the one below, with my script, DSS.  First try the following….

 Find where you have stored the DSS script and open it in your text editor and find the line number listed in the error, in this case it is line “760”

 In the script (in this example) just above line 760 you can see a line that says OpenTextFile

In this case the file the script is having problems open is enterprisevaultdirectory.dbo.DirectoryEntry.txt, and when opening this file we found it contained

 “The server principal "domainname\VSAaccount" is not able to access the database "EnterpriseVaultDirectory" under the current security context.”

Thus showing that the file does not contain the information that should be in the directoryentry table and why DSS is failing.  Whilst the solution may not always be as simple as this, it is always worth searching the lines  above the one mentioned to see which file is being opened/read to see the possible cause.

One final tip, if the file looks fine, try opening it in excel and check the tabbed separation is correct, if this is wrong than this will also cause issues.

 Version Updates

Version 7.5.6 includes increased policy reporting.