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that their direct assist product that they push when you eventually (after 40 minutes) get to the support *queue* was withdrawn for new cases 4 days ago.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.
One of my clients had a dvd rom drive suddenly start to fail in Windows XP. Device Manager had the error message “information in the registry is incomplete or damaged (Code 19)” Acer’s website didn’t even have a driver for the cdrom so it was off to google. A lot of results for code 19 and cdrom drivers, but the results at Toshiba’s forums provided the answer – delete (or rename) HKLM \ system \ currentcontrolset \ control \ class \ {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} \ UpperFilters and LowerFilters and then reboot.
Ironic that I had to use Toshiba’s support for an Acer problem!
I’m not sure if moving to the new host is the reason, but I’ve had a lot of comment spam come through MovableType today (all of which was moderated) but annoyingly I couldn’t permanently delete it as my computer did not have the new ip address for the domain name!
I have added another captcha, Comment challengeto our blogs. Hopefully it is not too difficult for you to answer the question correctly.
Kevin Devin asked how SharedView fits with Netmeeting and Livemeeting – my first thought when I was using this product was that it appeared to provide similar functionality to netmeeting. This product is actually the Tahiti product that Microsoft purchased, rebranded and re-released as a new beta product.
I’ve not used netmeeting for several years so the statements may not be entirely accurate.
However the differences I see are as follows
- Looks a lot nicer than the netmeeting did.
- You can share your desktop with up to 15 people – netmeeting was limited to 1.
- Works much better through firewalls – I’m guessing it is http based so no firewall tweaking needed.
- No directory support included – netmeeting had the ability to join a directory of available chats – this needs an email address to connect to the original host (but there must be a directory on MS’s servers somewhere but it is just not viewable to the public)
I didn’t find the performance to be that great, with my two pc’s connected the screen refresh was pretty slow and artifacts would often be left behind on the screen. I did like the fact that you could see the guests cursors (but this would be pretty hectic with 15 guests) but you can turn this feature off.
If another program was moved over the top of the shared application, a grey box would appear on the guest screen where the application was – this almost looks like screen corruption but it isn’t.
The host computer will only share one monitor, spreading the shared application over 2 screens will only share the portion of the application on the hosted screen
It takes a small part of the desktop as the controls get placed at the very top of the screen – a nice feature would be to merge this into the title bar of the application to recover a little more screen estate.
File sharing worked nicely and I was easily able to share files between the two computers. It would be nice to have the downloaded file appear in a most recently downloaded window or have the option to open the file once it was downloaded in the same manner ie/firefox does.
I’ll be adding my feature notes to the Sharedview forums shortly.
If you can read this, then absoblogginlutely.net (and all my other domains) are now moved to a different host. It’s taken a while with each host being moved across at a time, with the last one being absoblogginlutely.net I wasn’t looking forward to it as there is a lot of customisation and tweaks in the background that I’ve done to the site. The actual process wasn’t too bad, the complicated bit is the testing to ensure that the new site works whilst keeping the old site active at the same time AND remembering what changes have been made to the old site and replicating them on the new one. MT posts, were simple enough, I just reposted them back to this blog again. I did testing by setting the dns on one pc to the new dns servers on the new hosting company and used that to test whilst keeping another pc on the standard dns to ensure normal internet connectivity. Hopefully it all moved across ok. For those people that are hosting stuff on my site, give me a shout if you can’t get anything to work and for those of you who have read this far, let me know too if there is anything you find that is broken.