Microsoft – Page 3 – Absoblogginlutely!

Microsoft Volume License site practically useless at the moment.

By Andy 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.

Bugs Hotfixes Internet Explorer Microsoft Windows Update

Imagemaps (navigation) broken in IE8 – fix

By Andy on Tuesday, November 24, 2009

We rolled out IE8 to a customer earlier this week and promptly found their company website didn’t work in ie8 (despite some users having had IE8 for several months). An imagemap that they use for navigation did not show up in IE8 on internal computers. The weirdest thing is that all the computers at their office had the problem yet none of our computers or some other computers we tried could reproduce the problem.

After trying many technical solutions I passed it to our web developer who very quickly came up with a bug in ie8 and content produced by Publisher

“Publisher HTML output uses some very large numbers for object coordinates. This behavior has worked in the past. However, Internet Explorer 8 does not support such large coordinates. This is because some precision was moved from the most significant end to the least significant end of the coordinate variables to allow for sub-pixel layouts. Therefore, when large coordinate values in Publisher HTML output are run through Microsoft Dynamic HTML, the values are truncated. This behavior causes significant problems when Publisher HTML is rendered in Internet Explorer 8.”

Sure enough – saving the files within Publisher 2007 sp2 fixed the issue.

Bugs Exchange / Outlook exchange2007 Hotfixes Microsoft Work

Your Out of Office settings cannot be displayed, because the server is currently unavailable. Try again later – fixed

By Andy on Tuesday, November 10, 2009

“Your Out of Office settings cannot be displayed, because the server is currently unavailable. Try again later” occurs when trying to access out of office onwith outlook2007. The strange thing is that the out of office functionality through the Outlook Web Access page works as expected.
There are several documented ways to fix this, mainly ensuring that the various autodiscover urls are correct. See Proexchange.be – Your out of office settings cannot be displayed for the best document on this.
Interestingly is that if you enable debugging in outlook and try to access the Out of Office you do see the settings being pulled across in the logfile.

However I was still having this issue. From Microsoft forums on Exchange Server Clients I found that various patches to the dot net framework (oh how I hate thee) being discussed and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952883 was the first patch that was discussed. Sure enough, installing this patch fixed the problem and what is more I didn’t even have to reboot.

The annoying thing is that the first time I had this problem (on this server) was due to a typo in the autodiscover service, then the .net framework patches were applied and the problem re-occured.

Bugs Microsoft Registry Windows XP Work

Nothing happens when clicking on the start menu – fixed.

By Andy on Thursday, October 15, 2009

A while back we had a client that was migrating out of their existing domain and into a new SBS2008 installation. One of the things I learnt (too late) was to disable folder redirection before doing a migration otherwise clients will still point to the old server. Unfortunately I did not have access to the old server/domain but I had got a copy of the redirected folders and thankfully there was no real data on the server to be migrated from the redirected folders.

However to fix the redirected folders I had to use csccmd to remove references to the old server which was easy enough using “csccmd /unpin2:\\oldserver\share /recurse”. I then changed the registry entries in HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ User Shell Folders to point to the new location. This worked fine for every machine except one. This particular machine had a very strange symptom in that when clicking on the Start/All Programs button the machine would pause for about 20 seconds and then nothing would happen (to the end user). Behind the scenes the Start Menu, Startup and Programs entries in the registry would get deleted. I tried to use ProcessMon from sysinternals to monitor the registry setting but I either got too much registry information to work out what was going on or nothing at all (depending on the filters I had applied).

Anyway, yesterday I stumbled across Ramesh’s site which mentioned running “regsvr32 /i shell32.dll”. I tried this, clicked on the All programs and nothing happened – again. I rebooted and the problem persisted. I then ran it again and was about to reboot the machine again when the user logged into the machine so I had to stop work (I was doing all this remotely using rdp). I logged into the machine this morning and checked the registry. Somehow the registry items were no longer blank but were repointing back to the original server. I reset them back to the new locations and now the All programs button works as designed. I think the trick was to run regsvr32 and then reboot before clicking on the All programs button. (Either that or reboot twice and then check the registry settings and correct them)

Microsoft Work

Network Migration Workbook arrived.

By Andy on Friday, September 11, 2009

The Zero downtime migration strategies for Microsoft Networks book by Karl and Manuel Palachuk has arrived in the post this morning. An expensive book but I’m hoping this will reduce the number of weekends I have to work. Even if the book saves me 5-6 hours once, it will be well worth it.
590 pages to read, full of checklists and stuff – I’m looking forward to going through this. Unfortunately it came 5 days late for last weekends migration.
I’ll be writing a review later when I get a chance to start reading on it.

Bugs Microsoft Work

Dynamics SL crashing on startup after installation of .net patches.

By Andy on Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Overnight several of the .net patches were pushed out to workstations and now when Dynamics SL is run I get the following error. “Microsoft Dynamics SL has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience”

Looking in the event log or the details I see a .net Runtime 2.0 error, Event 5000. Description EventType clr20r3, P1 msdynamicssl.exe, P2 7.0.0.0, P3 4889f859, P4 solomon.kernel, P5 7.0.0.0, P6 4649b3d9,P7 1b4, P8 0, P9 system.accessviolationexception, P10 NIL

This is then followed by id 5001, Description “Bucket 300554837, bucket table 5, EventType clr20r3, P1 msdynamicssl.exe, P2 7.0.0.0, P3 4889f859, P4 solomon.kernel, P5 7.0.0.0, P6 4649b3d9,P7 1b4, P8 0, P9 system.accessviolationexception, P10 NIL

The cause of this was actually the installation of a .NET Framework 3 patch.

The sorry saga of trying to fix this solution is documented at the dynamics forum but this is a known issue and the patch is available through Customersource or PartnerSource if you have access to this. Alternatively call Microsoft hotfix line on 1 888 456 5570 and request the Dynamics SL hotfix 961802. There is no charge for this hotfix. Install on your workstation and you should be good to go.

However if you have tried to fix this issue by editing your .NET framework settings then I recommend totally removing .net from the computer, reinstalling v2 and the service pack. There is a really good tool for removing .NET framework from Aaron Stebner which works a treat.

Beta Testing Microsoft

Windows 7 Upgrade advisor ran into a problem

By Andy on Friday, May 8, 2009

I downloaded the Windows 7 upgrade advisor from Microsoft, that is currently in beta on both my work and my home pc to see what the differences were. The work laptop had some warnings but the software fails on the home pc. I get a very unhelpful message of “Windows 7 Upgrade advisor ran into a problem scanning your devices. Upgrade advisor needs to be able to scan your devices to determine if your computer is capable of running Windows 7. Please let us know about this problem.”

Unfortunately there is no UI to send the feedback to Microsoft and there is nothing on the download page either.

Exchange / Outlook exchange2007 IIS Microsoft Work

Security warning pops up when using Outlook2007 and Exchange 2007

By Andy on Wednesday, April 29, 2009

After a recent migration of mail to Exchange2007, we’ve just started getting users logging tickets where a security window pops up saying “The name of the security certificate is invalid or does not match the name of the site”. This can happen even when the client is not at their desk. It took a few seconds to work out what was causing it – the clue was that the window had an icon in the taskbar for outlook. Searching in Google found Microsoft’s KB article 940726 with the resolution to the fix which involves changing various internal url attributes.
The instructions are fairly straightforward but I wanted to see what the values were set to before making the change. As I’m not very familiar with powershell it took me a while to work out what I needed.
For the command

Set-ClientAccessServer -Identity Servername -AutodiscoverServiceInternalUri https://name.contoso.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml

you want to run the command

Get-ClientAccessServer -Identity Servername | fl
The pipe fl provides all the values in a list – if you don’t include this part of the code you will end up with one line containing the name of the server – a value that you hopefully know already!
I really need to get cracking on my powershell skills – I still prefer good old fashioned dos batch programming but now that we’ve started to roll out powershell across all machines, powershell skills will be in demand more and more.

Bugs Microsoft Windows 2003 Work

Performance monitor showing numbers instead of counters.

By Andy on Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Had a weird error today with a machine only showing numbers instead of descriptions in the performance counters. Thanks to maximum asp this is solved by exporting the registry entries from hklm\ Software\ Microsoft\ WindowsNT\ CurrentVersion\ Perflib\ 009 from another machine and importing back into the affected machine. This kind of solution is great if you have another machine that you can export from – not too great if this is the only machine you have access too. If you don’t have access then “You could check the strings in the 009 key under the key described below and look for any garbled entries, entries that have two numbers, or entries that have two strings in succession (you should see ### string ### string, and so on in the multi-sz editor). This may not explain the different behavior between the local and remote cases because they both access the same registry values. (KB152153). Good luck with that!

Exchange / Outlook exchange2007 Microsoft ScreenCaptures Search Engines

-1056749164 when exporting a mailbox in Exchange 2007

By Andy on Saturday, January 17, 2009

Trying to export an Exchange2007 mailbox using the export-mailbox cmdlet I was getting the error message “Failed to copy messages to the destination mailbox store with error: MAPI or an unspecified service provider. ID no: 00000000-0000-00000000, error code: -1056749164”

A lot of the tips online suggested that I excluded the inbox folder, but that doesn’t help as I needed to export the entire mailbox as this was for a user who had left the company.

Microsoft has a kb article on this and states the problem is fixed with Rollup4 for Exchange, but I was already on Rollup5.

Thanks to kyBOSH on the Technet forums , it turns out that I needed to give my account FullAccess to the mailbox using the command “Add-mailboxpermission account -accessrights fullaccess -user myaccount” Obviously you need to replace account with the accountname of the user that is being exported and myaccount is the accountname that is doing the export.

Whilst searching for these results I discovered how bad Microsoft’s Live Search is.

The initial search for “-1056749164” on Technet came up with 619000 results (although when I reran it later it dropped to 512000!).

As the results were completely useless I expanded the search to the entire internet – this time the search returned zero results!