My $10 copy of Visual Studio standard 2005 came in the post today – I took the two required webcasts ages ago and when I went to check the status of my registration I couldn’t find any documentation but the funny thing is that the next day I got an email to say the product was on the way. I’m quite eager to get started on the programming – it will be interesting to see how much has changed. The last serious programming I did was with VB6 – I started off with VB3, but I did a bit of programming 2 years ago whilst looking for a job, so to get a full copy of Visual Studio for free (plus $10 shipping) and two hours of my time was a bargain. There is still time to register for this offer yourself at the VB upgrade labcast webpage. I know you can already download the express versions of the software, but this is more complete for the home programmer, but a feature comparison chart should help you decide if you want to go for this product (the list price is $249 at amazon)
Month: May 2007
I started my Square Foot Garden blog this weekend – there are some photos at flickr to go with the project too. So far I’ve just got the soil down – seeds to go in later today
I did a short (2 min) audio clip for In The Trenches on keeping up to date with Microsoft downloads. It was fun to do – took me a couple of times to get right and I actually wrote most of the script out first to make it easier. A couple of edits to remove some annoying deep breaths and I sent it to George and Kevin to post. Let me know what you think – podcasting is harder than it sounds.
I’m in the middle of a Swing Migration and received the message “”this server has a trust relationship with domain.local” after continuing the standard setup (after I’ve done most of the hard work migrating the existing settings). It took me a while to hunt down, but this is solved by editing a registry value and rebooting as per the details on Jared Griego’s sbs blog and at event id. I’m posting the details in the extended entry for safe keeping. Not sure why it happened, I guess there was a stage missed in editing AD or dns, but it all looked ok after double and triple checking.
Today is May 25th and therefore Towel Day as a tribute to the late Douglas Adams. Unfortunately I don’t have a don’t panic towel and I can’t find my Steelers terrible towel so I’ll have to make do with carrying a plain towel around instead.
I noticed that client machines hadn’t been checking into some of the WSUS servers since the server was upgraded to version 3. Checking the log files of the desktop pc’s had errors such as “Reporter failed to upload events with hr = 80244016”
After a bit of digging and looking at the IIS console, I noticed that the wsus directories were now listening on port 8530 instead of the normal port 80. To fix this I changed the Group Policy setting “Set the intranet update service for detecting updates” and “Set the intranet statistics server” to read http://servername:8530 instead of http://servername, ran gpupdate on the desktop, restarted Automatic Update service, dropped to a command prompt and ran “wuauclt /detectnow” to ensure the desktop checked in *now* rather than later on.
Looks like the problem that I mentioned earlier with iisworker crashing happens every 29 hours. Cecil on the wsus newsgroups has asked for logs from people who have this problem. I’ve contacted him to ask where to send the logs to. I’m going to apply the registry changes in 918041 to see if this fixes my problem.
Ed Holloway has released PhotoSync for Windows Home Server which monitors a shared folder on WHS and then uploads the photos to flickr for you automatically. Sounds really good and so you might be seeing some of my photos on flickr real soon – hopefully a zooomr version will be available in the future.
It’s funny, but someone should tell Symantec’s music on hold operator that their direct assist product that they push when you eventually (after 40 minutes) get to the support *queue* was withdrawn for new cases 4 days ago. Seeing as though this product “prevents call waiting time, increases uptime, eases the support burden on the end user” – why are they closing it down?
Fixed! One of my servers has been failing to backup with the error “0xe00084af The directory or file was not found, or could not be accessed. Final error category: Job Errors. For additional information refer to link V-79-57344-33967” I spent ages troubleshooting the errors and trying to work out what was going on and found that it would fail to backup any file on the local hard disk of the machine.
I posted a note in the symantec forums and didn’t hear anything back, but did find a post that upgrading to 10d might fix it (not a current solution as this would mean purchasing an upgrade of the software for the exchange agent and the exchange agent is currently working)
The other solution was to stop SQL servers on the box. This server was the WSUS box and I had also recently upgraded it to version 3 of WSUS. This created (at least) two new services – SQL Server VSS Writer and Windows Internal Database (Microsoft ##SSEE). Through trial and error I discovered that stopping the SQL Server VSS Writer service meant the backup would work, which is weird as why this should affect me backing up something like c:\jobs\fred.bat which has nothing to do with SQLI don’t know.
I’m hoping that my forum posting about the problem will get a better solution but for now I’m just pleased to be able to backup my file server.