Month: December 2009

Bugs Microsoft SBS Windows 2003 Work

Preparing Network Connections message at startup of SBS – solved.

By on Thursday, December 31, 2009

Today of all days we’ve had two clients that have had their server reboot for a couple of valid reasons but after reboot the server just sat at “preparing network connections” screen and would not continue. We’re not sure right now what caused this issue but the solution was to reboot the server, press F8 and choose the Last Known Good to be able to get into the server.

Today has not been a good day for this to happen as some clients have been closed so they’ve not been around to let us in to look at the server on site but at the same time we don’t really want to wait until Monday to get access to the server, yet this is a holiday weekend.

For me, it’s been a long week . I’ve started work at 4am twice this week and was working at 1am until 2.30am last night so I doubt I’ll be staying up for NewYear – but I think I can make it until 7pm when I’ll be able to watch BigBen strike midnight.

Happy New Year everyone and I hope 2010 starts off better than 2009 finished!

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Bugs Hotfixes Microsoft Remote desktop control Windows Update Windows XP windows7 Work

Unable to rdp to Windows2008 SBS server from XP client after KB969084 installed

By on Wednesday, December 23, 2009

We had an issue when all of a sudden we were not able to remote desktop to a clients SBS 2008 server using the rdp client and the TSGateway functionality. Remote Web Workplace would work fine and so would Windows7 clients.
After proving this patch was the culprit by removing the patch and finding my saved rdp session would work, I went back and read the kbarticle 969084 on this patch. I hadn’t initially read this (in common with a lot of other people) and also because the patch was pushed down via wsus. It turns out that XP does not turn on CredSSP by default and this is needed to work with the new RDP client. I followed the instructions at kb951608 and after a reboot, going to the control box/About I got the message that Network Level Authentication was supported and I was then able to connect succesfully.
MSTSC showing Network Level Authentication Supported
To summarize you need todo the following.

  1. Click Start , click Run , type regedit , and then press ENTER.
  2. In the navigation pane, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
  3. In the details pane, right-click Security Packages , and then click Modify .
  4. In the Value data box, type tspkg . Leave any data that is specific to other SSPs, and then click OK .
  5. In the navigation pane, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders
  6. In the details pane, right-click SecurityProviders, and then click Modify .
  7. In the Value data box, type credssp.dll . Leave any data that is specific to other SSPs, and then click OK .
  8. Exit Registry Editor.
  9. Restart the computer.
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Sage Work

Peachtree Quantum 2010 install crash and recovery

By on Friday, December 11, 2009

I had the misfortune today to have to go through the torturous process known as the Peachtree install. Having turned off my AV and turned on my firewall so the installation can poke holes through the firewall, the installation actually went fairly smoothly on the server. 2 hours later though I’m still struggling to install the first client.

The initial installation got all the way through to the end and then gave me an error 1327 which is something to do with installshield and redirected folders. (It’s actually because I launched the setup program using runas, but the program checks for the logged in users data location which the setup program does not have access to).

The next installation, logged on as an administrator almost finished with the status bar filled to the end but the “Peachtree Accounting is performing the requestion operations” had a blank section underneath. Checking the eventlog and temp file locations showed me nothing was actually happening.

After rebooting the machine, the installation would not run again as the product was already installed although no shortcuts had been added to the menu’s anywhere and the software wasn’t in add/remove programs like the install alert said it would be. I ran the Microsoft install cleanup program to remove the software and then started the install again.

This time the software said it was still installed, but going back to the setup splash screen the modify/remove option said the software was not installed.

I called Peachtree and thankfully they answered the phone pretty quickly – the solution is to exit the install program, delete c:\windows\peachinst directory and also the c:\windows\ptx*.ini files.

Note that this worked in my case, it may be specific to Peachtree Quantum and I would recommend you take a backup before deleting files.

I’m not a Peachtree expert by any means so I can’t guarantee this process is safe to do (but worked for me)

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Microsoft Rants & Complaints Windows 2003 Work

Microsoft Volume License site practically useless at the moment.

By on Thursday, December 10, 2009

Microsoft “upgraded” their licensing site and in the process managed to break the functionality that allows you to request access back to the licenses that you could see before the upgrade. After wasting an hour trying to obtain our licenses online and 2 hours on the phone to try and speak to someone I eventually twittered my frustration and got a message back from Microsoft_VLSC to say they were aware of the problem and offered some help.  I’m currently still without access to my agreements but at least I now know someone is aware of my issue and is looking into the situation.

A note on the front page of the licensing portal would have saved lots of people a lot of time and a lot of frustration (and also saved the poor twitterer from having to message everyone who was having a problem).

To make matters worse when we called up on Tuesday night to activate a Windows 2003 server we were told the product activation systems were also unavailable. Interestingly this happened on Patch Tuesday, after a zero day exploit and I know that Microsoft were hit internally by slammer when that was launched, so the conspiracy theorist in me wonders……. If it’s not a worm, you’d have thought that Microsoft would be able to cluster together a couple of servers so their product activation system would stay up and allow customers to obtain a key so they could access the servers after product activation had crippled the server that the customer had paid for.

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Scripting Work

“set u” tip

By on Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Typing “set” from a command prompt will show the environment variables currently in use in that particular command prompt session. As I do a lot of batch file scripting I tend to give my variable names a two character prefix of xx. This enables me to see the status of all my variables at the end of the set statement.  Yes I know that I should really use zz but historically I had a case to use x and therefore I’ve stuck with xx.

Anyway, about a month ago I accidentally hit the enter key too quickly but stumbled across the fact that you don’t actually need to complete the set statement from a command prompt in order to see variables and typing in “set x” will show you only the variables beginning with x.

If you change the set statement to be “set u” you return a lot of the information that you were probably trying to obtain – the username, domain,dns and profile location – all very quickly and tidy.  I thought this was really neat, told my tech support guys this trick and they’ve used it several times. Yesterday I was on a support session with Microsoft and was pleased to see they used the exact same command.

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