Tag Archives: Technet

Sometimes it’s nice to see Microsoft add my information to their knowledge base.

This morning I was working on a Sites and Services issue for a client and part of the troubleshooting process was to run the Best Practice Analyzer on the domain controller. One of the results was to enable client fallback to the local netlogon and sysvol share after the local domain controller comes back online again. This reduces traffic across the network. I’m not quite sure why this is not enabled by default.

The BPA points to the technet article DFS-N: Client failback should be enabled for the Netlogon and SYSVOL folders on domain controllers.  Scrolling through the page I was pleasantly surprised to see my avatar at the bottom with a comment on improving the documentation with the actual registry keys that needed changing. Not only was my comment on the page, the original web page had been updated to include the information.

It’s nice to see content updated based on user feedback. It’s not nice to see that I had this problem 3 years ago 😉

Fixed:MDOP download on Technet

One of the advantages of a Technet subscription is access to the (MDOP Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack) software including the Diagnostics And Repair Toolkit (DART). Unfortunately it took me a while to find it under the downloads today as MDOP does not appear under the list of downloads. However searching for Desktop Optimization Pack finds it. (You need to log into the Subscriber Downloads for this link to work). You’d be surprised how inaccurate the Google results for MDOP download on Technet results are.

Exchange 2007 services fail to start on DC (SBS server)

I’ve had an issue with a new SBS2008 server, running Exchange service pack3 rollup 2 where the information store service does not start after a reboot, especially annoying after the server is rebooting with a scheduled maintenance task. Apparently this issue was fixed in service pack 1, roll up 5 but I’m still getting it 2 service packs and 2 rollups later.

Microsoft have a “fast publish” knowledge base article 940845  and the first solution is to start the services manually – really helpful!  Thankfully there are other solutions that involve changing the dependencies of the services to ensure Exchange does not try to start before AD has finished.

One word of warning – using the Microsoft KB to determine the latest service pack or rollup for Exchange 2007 returns Service Pack 3, rollup 1 from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937052. However Rollup 2 has been available since Dec 14th 2010. I’ve put a note on the original kb article but the better way to determine the latest rollup is probably to search for Exchange 2007 service pack 3 rollup

Update Knowledge base 940845 now has a fixit file you can download that will change the dependencies for you along with instructions on how to fix it manually. The article no longer has references to this issue being fixed in previous rollups – probably because this was obviously not the case.

Archive mailbox missing in Outlook 2010 – fixed

If you’re lucky enough to already be running Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010, then you may have spotted your archive mailbox is missing in the newly released Office2010. There was a bug that is strangely fixed by obtaining a new key from Technet and reentering it from appwiz.cpl, office 2010, change, change product key.  I’m not sure why it took so long for the product key to be changed on my machine (about 3 or 4 minutes) but sure enough, after restarting office the mail archive box was back.Thanks to Henrick Walther blog for the heads up.

In my case, there is not a lot in it as we’ve only just switched over to Outlook with Exchange 2010 so there is not a lot of old mail. However I’m already 3/5 of the way through my quota.  With no archiving policies set up yet (and office 2007 on the work laptop) the manual housekeeping is going to be a pain.