It’s patch tuesday today with two vulnerabilities out, one critical and one important. Needless to say I’ll be looking at these in detail real soon now. Of interest is the fact that Microsoft now do an ISO of all the security patches available which is updated each month. This might be very useful to have when investigating a dial up pc.
Useful list of Microsoft podcasts which I didn’t know they did – there are at least 3 of these that I want to listen to.
Microsoft are doing the 2nd chance again – see the 2nd chance site for details. Useful as I’m taking my Small Business Specialist exam on Thursday. I really need more time to prep for it but I’m on a tight deadline and things have been so hectic this week I’ve not had as much time to revise as I would have liked.
Microsoft Virtual labs will be handy – especially as there is a Live Communications server one and a Windows 2003R2 one. I’ve not really heard much about the new features in w2kr2 so will try and attend the lab soon.
For some reason I had a users computer ask for Microsoft Journal viewer source files whenever a pdf file was launched. According to Lancaster University this is a known problem!
You need to install (or repair) Microsoft Journal Viewer 1.5 using a reliable method (explained below).
You can do this by downloading the viewer from Microsoft’s site:
1. download the viewer from: Microsoft’s download Journal Viewer site.
2. run it.
3. follow instructions
4. retry the Adobe Acrobat update.
I tried to import my SBS server from Virtual Server into vmware player as I was fed up with Symantec complaining that the program was trying to tamper with the virus protection. For some reason the import would not work with an error message stating “err -2147213293: The source virtual machine is paused. To convert it, please shut down and close the virtual machine”. It actually turns out that vmware doesn’t like a virtual server name ending in a period. Renaming the file let the import go through ok. I’ve logged a bug about this on the vmware forums but so far I’m impressed.
The vmplayer logfiles are stored in %temp%
Update Just wish I could work out why the server takes forever to get past the Applying Computer Settings when it boots up (in both virtual servers) – I think it is something to do with only using a wifi access card for the internet and it is somehow trying to access dns records or something strange
Use the Microsoft Product Licensing Advisor, a wizard-driven tool that provides consistent advice to help you better understand various Microsoft product licensing and pricing options. Works pretty well and gives you the part numbers and approximate price for the software. US only though.
Microsoft have launched their own version of a website that allows you to get access about event id’s. The advantage to this service is that it has links to the Microsoft knowledge base articles whereas you only get direct links if you pay eventid.net. Having said that, you do get extra peer input on problems with eventid.net
kb article 909444 has how to fix the issues that may arise when you install Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-051: Vulnerabilities in MSDTC and COM+ Could Allow Remote Code Execution (902400). Although I’ve not had any of these issues – yet – this will be good reference for me.
Office 2003 sp2 has been released along with sp2 for Visio 2003 and sp2 for OneNote 2003. That’s going to take some investigation back at the office!
Update It’s a 100+mb download for the full install or 50+mb for the intelligent download AND there is no uninstall feature.
Update2 There is a webcast on the 6th October about the outlook update.