I’ve never been able to get Google Music working in Firefox. Ironically, IE was the only browser that I could get it to work in. I could log in, see all my music but whenever I clicked on a song to play, I would get “Oops, we have a technical issue:Please refresh this page in your browser to get back to listening to your music. If issues persist, make sure you have Flash enabled and working.” Naturally I am already at the latest version of flash and clearing the cache etc didn’t work. I searched this afternoon and came across this thread which recommended adding music.google.com to the flashblock whitelist and sure enough it worked. Thanks to JackieGleason who posted the question on their linux box, fixed it themselves and then posted the solution.
Had a weird problem this morning with a user that had issues with incorrect data appearing in their outlook contacts. When you looked at the contacts in Outlook 2007, the Full Name was typically somebody else, yet the email address and name displayed in Outlook would be correct. Occasionally things like company name would appear incorrect. Looking at the phone, the data looked correct however the phone typically does not seem to use all of the fields that outlook2007 displays.
When I looked at the contacts within OWA the data looked ok. In OWA I changed the middle name on one of the corrupted contacts (although it looked correct in OWA) and then switched back to Outlook – the contact was now showing the middle name as expected, but the rest of the data was also coming across correctly. I took out the middle name within OWA and sure enough Outlook removed the middle name too and the contact was now correct.
The next stage was just to open the contact in OWA and hit save and close. This fixed the contact in Outlook too. I have no idea why this issue occured, and thankfully there are not *too* many contacts to open (only 170 in total) but just opening and then doing a Save and Close fixes the issue.
It will be interesting to see if this issue reoccurs.
The new laptop has a fingerprint reader included and comes with DigitalPersona’s fingerprint software. At first glance, this looks like a useful piece of software but after trying to use it, I’ve found it very buggy and the support is non-existant. DigitalPersona offer no support for the product and refer you to the OEM partner, in my case Dell, who have nothing in their knowledge base about this product either.
My problem was to do with our roaming profile. After receiving the laptop last night I synched (or so I thought) to the domain, took the machine home and logged in. Windows7 decides that it can’t load my profile and uses the temporary saved copy – all well and good for now, my desktop background, images, shortcuts etc all exist. However every time I go to add a new website in DigitalPersona, it seems to take the information but does not actually save it to the machine. Suspecting roaming profiles, I created a local user, logged on as that user and registered my fingers. Note that if you do this, when you use the Windows Login Screen and your finger to login, the pc automatically logs you in without asking which user you want to use. I’m not sure how it determines which user to use, but in my case it used my local user (which was also the most recently created user).
After logging on as the local user I was then able to launch Internet Explorer (9), log into gmail, facebook and this blog and register my usernames and passwords and DigitalPersona kept the information. At this point I also used the option to download and install updates to the software – the most recent version that is now running on the pc is 5.30.252a. Note to get to the updates, click on the plus sign by central management and then the update tab appears.
I then logged off the machine and logged back as my domain account. Tried to use DigitalPersona and yet again the software refused to take my passwords. I opened explorer up, browsed to %appdata% and sure enough – there was no DigitalPersona directory. I then browsed to c:\users\localusername\appdata\local and checked out the DigitalPersona directory. This contains an OTS directory and then a _dp_ots_tmp and DPIconCache directory. The tmp directory was empty and the DPIconCache directory contained an icon for the sites I’d saved the password to. I copied the DigitalPersona directroy from the localusers\appdata\local directory to my own %appdata% directory and magically was able to start saving passwords in IE9.
Unfortunately I’ve yet to get the program to work with Firefox or Keepass – the program is unable to detect Firefox or Keepass having a login window.
If anyone has a better (preferably free) password manager that works with IE, Firefox, Chrome and Keepass (last is optional) then please let me know.
One of the things we now do as part of an SBS2011 or SBS2008 migration is to add a report in the console purely for backup purposes. This gives us the ability to check the backups are running every day and can also be sent to the clients IT technical contact for reassurance. If you log on as the administrator and try to run a report to email, the server fails with “An error has occurred while sending this report. As a result, some of the recipients will not receive this report in email.”
The solution is simple. Log off from the administrator account and use the one that was setup for the migration – this seems to do the trick. The only thing left (for me) is to work out how to modify the report to send me the last 24 hours of backups – not just the last and the next backup job. We backup 3 times a day but only find out the status of the last job with the existing reports.
Using firefox on my main computer at home this morning I started to get a message stating “openid provider login status returned an invalid ssl certificate” and it took me a couple of minutes to work out how to fix this.
About 2 years ago, I installed the Verisign Labs PIP seatbelt extension for firefox. This enables me to sign in with an OpenID account and not have to pass my real credentials across the internet all the time. This works great for securely signing into my WordPress account without passing my credentials in cleartext when I am at a conference etc. However, Verisigns certificate expired a couple of days ago and they replaced it with a new one.
Unfortunately it seems that the seatbelt extension knows about the old certificate but does not trust the new one.
The solution is quick and easy, but not obvious from the error message. However thanks to Doug at TakeALeft from back in 2009, you just need to update the seatbelt extension.
In firefox go to Tools, Addons and scroll down until you get to the Seatbelt extension. Select Options and then click on the OpenID Providers tab.
Note that in my screenshot above, I have already updated mine, but select the Provider and then click Update.
You will then be prompted with “Your Primary OpenID provider has published a new configuration file. Say OK to this message.
OK your way out of all the dialog boxes and the error message is no more.
Using Adobe Reader 9.04 on a Windows 2008r2 Remote Desktop server, I was finding that a lot of websites would fail to run when a pdf file was opened in the browser. Going to Edit/Preferences/Internet and unchecking the “Open pdf in browser” fixed the problem. The next problem was making this site wide and for every user on the terminal server.
Using procmon I was able to check the registry changes that occurred when this box was checked (although this does not help when the av software is constantly scanning the registry and files). By creating HKCU\ Software\ Adobe\ Acrobat Reader\ 9.0\ Original\ bBrowserIntegration as a dword and setting the value to 0, this option was checked for everyone. I did notice that the server initially checks HKLM for the same value, but in testing I found that adding this value under HKLM did not make the user interface change. I know Adobe checks other settings in the registry so I’m not sure if it was checking other locations to see if HKLM should also be set, but in that case, why check the HKLM value too?
Using the Group Policy Preferences I was able to create a new setting and now Adobe Reader works for everyone on the server.
Of course, once you know this key it’s easy to find lots of google articles mentioning bBrowserIntegration but I couldn’t find anything when I initially researched this problem. One solution that might make it easier is to download a Adobe Reader Group Policy template which you can then import (computer / Administrative Templates/ Right click and browse) to apply this and other settings. Note that I found the EULA supression did not work for me with Adobe Reader 9.04 on W2k8R2
As part of a client migration this week I had to install a whole load of new printers on a new Windows 2008r2 server. In particular, one copier printer had about 7 different printers setup pointing to the same device – this was to allow the user to select which tray they wanted to print to without having to change the printer settings each time.
By the time I got to my fifth printer I noticed that the devices window was only showing two printers. When I selected the details view in explorer it was only showing printer1 and printer4, pressing F5 to refresh the screen would only show printer2 and printer3. This was really disconcerting as I kept getting interrupted in what I was doing so it was hard to work out which printers had already been setup when they did not appear in the user interface. However they did appear in the list of printers when I went to print something from notepad.
Puzzled, I did some searching and eventually came across Network Steve’s post about bringing back printers in Windows 7. Following his instructions and creating a new Key under hklm \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion\ Explorer \ControlPanel \NameSpace called {2227a280-3aea-1069-a2de-08002b30309d} a new icon appeared in control panel called printers and I can now see all of the printers so Thanks Steve!
Incidentally, these printers were set up and shared on a print server and then accessed on a locked down terminal server. I haven’t been able to work out how to get the list of printers to show up for a locked down user within control panel. The printer icon is not a normal .cpl file so I can’t include that in the list of available icons in control panel for users to use. This is not a critical function but helps when testing and troubleshooting printer issues for users in the future.
I had a strange case the other day at work when all of a sudden my laptop would fail to resolve dns queries for my wireless connection only – my wired card was not affected. Changing dns entries to another server did not fix the issue. Eventually I tried disabling the Microsoft Virtual Wifi Miniport Adapter (from device manager) and immediately I was able to resolve dns again. Once I discovered this fix I remembered something similar with this adapter. Looking back through my previous notes we had an issue with Shrewsoft’s vpn software – with the Microsoft Virtual Wifi Miniport Adapter enabled we were unable to get a vpn session working to a Cisco client.
So far, disabling this adapter does not seem to have caused any issues – apparently it’s purpose is to allow you to connect to more than one wireless connection at the same time – an unlikely requirement in most business situations.
I had an issue with blat yesterday with a new script I was working on. Every time I sent an email, it would crash and I would get “A Win32 command line eMail tool has stopped working.” As this was also running on a Windows2008 server this was also affecting the reliability index on the server – one of the things we check as part of our checkups.
I spent a good while trying to work out what was wrong, typed out the command to send mail and it worked – so I knew the issue was not blat itself. After calling over a colleague to help, demonstrating the (reproducible) problem of pasting the script line and crashing blat I asked what was wrong. The two of us still took a couple of minutes before he realised I had mistyped the server name used to send the mail. Instead of domain.com.s6a1.psmtp.com I had entered domain.com.s6a1.pmstp.com
Sure enough – if the mail server hostname can not be resolved by blat – it will crash. I was also able to reproduce this on my Windows7 machine at home too.
A simple fix but difficult to find after looking at code for a long time – getting someone else to look at your code often does wonders.
I’ve been doing a bit of work with the latest beta this morning and found that the option to right click on a folder or file and scan it was missing. According to the connect website, the “Item Scan with Microsoft Security Essentials is missing from right click menu because file shellext.dll is not registered in the OS (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client\shellext.dll). To resolve this issue, open a command prompt with administrator permissions, type regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client\shellext.dll” and press ENTER.”
Sure enough this works. Thanks to 777Andrey777 for the solution on the connect website (login required).
The other issues that I have also encountered include the Windows Home Server connector monitor flags the fact that my av is out of date or turned off when the computer is rebooted – this lasts for about 20 to 30 seconds. The instructions to provide feedback are also missing on the connect website (which was not very helpful). However log files can be generated by running “mpcmdrun -getfiles” from the Microsoft Security Client\Antimalware directory within program files.
