Work – Page 8 – Absoblogginlutely!

Exchange2010 training from Microsoft

By Andy on Wednesday, February 24, 2010

It’s a busy week at the office this week as I’m at a 3 day event on Exchange2010 training as part of Microsoft’s Ignite sessions. You do need to be a Microsoft Partner to register for the Exchange 2010 training (if there are any further events going on – I’m not sure) but if you are going to be using or supporting Exchange2010 then I highly recommend it. So far it seems to be very similar to the Exchange admin training courses you would normally attend, but at a fraction of the cost. It’s a level 300 course so pretty technical – by about 4pm on the first day my mind was starting to get a bit confused – there was a lot of theory today and you certainly need to have some familiarity with previous versions of exchange.

The neat thing was that we’ve just recently moved to Exchange2010 in-house, so I was able to check some of the features that I didn’t already know about on our live client (outlook or outlook web app) as we progressed through the training.

We’re using Windows2008 machines running Hyper-V with 8gb of memory which means some creative juggling of memory and sometimes the machines are slow, but it really is the only way to do the training. Some points we have 4 machines running – this would have been almost impossible before virtualization was around to reduce the hardware requirements for enterprise lab environments. This course is also the first one I’ve been to that has some users in the local office and some using gotomeeting to attend the training over the internet. So far I think the arrangement has worked well for the internet users although I feel sorry for the person in Washington who has to start work at 6am due to the time zones. I was surprised that they were not using LiveMeeting to host the training (as this is a Microsoft event) but apparently the screenupdates were not been fast enough for the remote users.

I’ll be posting a few links on my twitter account – helsbyhome, and my absoblogginlutely delicious account as the course progresses. Mostly these are links for extra tools, utilities or downloads to assist in the management and implementation of Exchange2010.

Bugs Microsoft SBS Windows 2003 Work

Preparing Network Connections message at startup of SBS – solved.

By Andy 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!

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 Andy 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.

To summarize you need todo the following.

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

Sage Work

Peachtree Quantum 2010 install crash and recovery

By Andy 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)

Microsoft Rants & Complaints Windows 2003 Work

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.

Scripting Work

“set u” tip

By Andy 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.

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.

Books Training Work

Zero Downtime Migration seminar in Cincinnati tomorrow

By Andy on Friday, October 23, 2009

I’m currently reading The Network Migration Workbook: Zero Downtime Migration Strategies for Windows Networks as can be seen on my Goodreads shelf. So far it’s been very useful and there have already been lots of tips that would save our company time (and therefore) money in doing migrations. Even if we didn’t go down this particular route for migrations, the tips applied would be very beneficial for other types of migrations, especially when it comes to planning and quoting for the migration itself. The only hard bit is to get the customer to agree to the restrictions in the plan – it is vital to quote for *only* the migration – everything else results in another helpdesk ticket, project or work order.

I’ve been reading the book for a couple of hours straight through – I’ve resisted the lure of jumping to the checklists – and still have some way to go, which is why I’ve not posted a review of the book yet – but so far I’m definitely recommending it – but note that some significant time needs to be invested for each person in the migration project from the sales person, to the project manager to the team lead down to the tech doing the work. In some companies this could be one person – in our company it’s probably three people.

Anyway, the point of this blog post was to mention that the author is going to be at An Introduction to Zero Downtime Migrations – and More in Cincinnati tomorrow (Saturday) for an all day training event which I am attending. It was worth the cheap admission to get an in person overview of the book and also some tips and previews of the other books he has written – I’m particularly intrigued by the Network Documentation book as this is something that is typically hard/time consuming to do yet so valuable when troubleshooting customer networks (and is NEVER provided by the client). If you’re going to this training day, be sure to say Hi.

If you want to browse Karl’s store then you can click on my affiliate link or click through directly to the books from the links above (not affiliate linked). Currently the cheapest place to buy the book is either used from Amazon or new from the Good Little Books store. It did amuse me to see that someone has the Zero Downtime book listed for $1165 and a used version for $564 which is crazy when the book brand new is currently $250 (will be $300)

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)

Work

MSPWorld Las Vegas November 12,13

By Andy on Wednesday, October 14, 2009

I have been given the chance to go to MSPWorld Las Vegas from November 12-13th this year with work. Hosted by the MSPAlliance, this will assist in enabling us to

· Meet, greet and network with like-minded professionals
· Preview and test drive different technologies and platforms
· Learn how to build and/or expand your successful Managed Services practice
· Increase profit margins
· Learn how to market your services and reach the end-user
· Learn about hot new trends and markets and have access to ground breaking analysis and research

The boss’s went last year and came back with some great ideas and Level Platform’s software. This year I’m going to take a good look at the options and technologies available, looking especially from a management side of things and hopefully making sure that the product is actually any good. There is a lot of opportunity to network and get hands on demonstrations on products and hopefully ask those awkward questions like “Does this work with Lotus Notes” 😉

Currently the technical track is looking pretty empty with only 1 technical presentation but some of the other tracks look good but this does mean more time for seeing products on display.

If you are going to be there then let me know and make sure you stop by and introduce yourself – I’ll be one of the few people running Lotus Notes on the laptop and speaking with a British accent.