Making RMS Troubleshooting Mo' Betta, /w QuickLook. Pt. 1

Definition of Mo' Betta
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- For something to be better than it was before.
Example: This last beer was mo' betta than the first. 

SETTING THINGS UP TO BE MO' BETTA
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There is another tool in the RMS Toolkit, that not many people use called QuickLook. We use this tool internally to track down, and troubleshoot problems with RMS. Lets say oh' ... Bill Gates sends out an RMS protected piece of e-mail, and we get a message from Bill saying 'Hey, I sent out an RMS protected e-mail but no-one can open it'. First of all, I'm not saying that anything like this has ever happened <g>, but if it did, first of all you'd want to make sure you had a updated copy of your resume handy, but most importantly you need to find out QUICKLY what the problem is and how your going to solve it. The clock has started!!!

Over the next few sessions, I will attempt to walk you through how to get to the bottom of an issue quickly, and one of the tools you will need in your 'protecting my asset' aresenal is QuickLook.

Alot of people don't use it, well frankly, because the documentation for it is horrible..and yes, I've put in a request to make it 'less on the side of horrible, more on the side of useful'. Mo' Betta, if you will.

So in this session I'll give a step by step of setting it up. (with a few corrections edited in quietly, I'm sure).

First things first. If you are running RMS V1, do yourself (and me) a favor and upgrade to at least RMS SP1. If you don't, you won't be able to use QuickLook. It doesn't cost anything to upgrade except a few minutes of your time, and the benefits are well worth the upgrade. If you can, you should actually upgrade to SP2, so that you can use some of the cool new toys like MOSS 2007. I'm standing by the phones waiting for your calls if you run into problems, so don't be a big chicken. Upgrade! Do you really think I'd tell you to do something that's going to create more work for ME? C'mon. :)

GOOD ADVICE ALERT:  If you do decide to upgrade: Back-up your config database, and export your SLC, and publishing certificate (through the trust policies section of the RMS admin console...there is an export button for the SLC, and an export link for the publishing cert.). That way even if you have an earthquake in the middle of the upgrade, you can restore your stuff. :)

Side note: I did have a call yesterday, where the person's RMS environment went completely down during the upgrade (although my contetion is that it probably wasn't working right to begin with), and we discovered there were all kinds of issues with the RMS server, on top of which, this person had inherited this server (we all know what that means), and didn't know anything about the initial setup including (but not limited to) the password used for the software private keys. After backing up the stuff I mentioned above, we essentially removed RMS (we couldn't deprovision because we couldn't get into the admin console due to the failed install attempt), uninstalled IIS, removed the SCP, removed the databases, went into COM+ and removed all of the remnants of the DRMS service (make sure that you set the properties to allow deletion), re-installed IIS (and ASP .NET), installed RMS SP2, re-provisioned (fresh), registered the SCP, and imported the publishing cert I mentioned in step one. He could now read, and create new content, as well as, open the old content, and had SP2 so he could use MOSS 2007, which is what they really wanted it for. We did this all in the span of about 2 hours...and that was with me having to learn his environment. My point...as long as you back up this stuff, it doesn't matter if your machine blows up. You can be up running again, pretty quick.

OK, so now you are up to at least SP1.

Next thing, install the RMS Toolkit from here: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=20760

The RMS toolkit will be located in C:\Program Files\RMS Toolkit. We don't create a program group for it. You would be wise to create a network share, and put these tools out on it, so that you can access them from anywhere on the network. They come in handy if you have a client that cannot open RMS content, and you want to go to the workstation to investigate. I have a share called RMS on my Tools server, and I copies my RMS Toolkit folder into it.

Ok, now we want to get RMS LogAnalyzer installed on the SQL server.  LogAnalyzer is essentially a data gathering and consolidation tool. It will take all of the information from all of your RMS databases, and put them into a single database, for easy, centrally located, analysis.

-If your SQL server is on a different machine get onto the console (mstsc, or whatever).
I'm using SQL 2005, so things may be a little bit different than SQL 2000.

-Go into your network share that you setup \\tools\rms and copy the RMSLogAnalyzer folder to your SQL machine.
I put mine right on the root of C.

-Go to C:\RMSLogAnalyzer and doubleclick on the GenerateRMSAdmin.sql file.
With SQL 2005, I got prompted to log in (I just used Windows Auth), and it took me into the SQL analyzer.

-Click on the 'Excecute Query' button, and you should get 'Command Suceeded' message. 
You should now have a DRMS_Log_Admin database.

-Go to C:\RMSLogAnalyzer and edit the DBConfig.xml file in Notepad.
You need to make it look something like this:

<RMSAdminConfig>
<Server HostName="MySQLServerMachine" DatabaseName="DRMS_Logging_RMS_80"></Server>
</RMSAdminConfig>

Change the 'Hostname' to the name of your SQL server, and the 'DatabaseName' to the name of your RMS logging database on that SQL server. This is NOT the same DRMS_Log_Admin that we created above. It is the logging database that RMS created when you provisioned. You want to add a new <Server> section for each of your RMS servers logging databases.If you only have one...well then that makes things easy, doesn't it?

- Go to a command prompt and CD to C:\RMSLogAnalyzer

- Type RMSLogAnalyzer.exe
It will start processing the information from all of the databases that you specified in the last step using little alien symbols that mean nothing to humans. It's a pretty basic language, and here is the translation:

OK. LogAnalyzer is all set-up. Time for me to go take a shower, and come into work...more to come....

-Jason