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.
I had to install a WordPress installation on IIS last week (I really would not recommend this is done – a linux install is so much easier) and part of that installation requires the install of MySQL for the database. The most current version is 5.1.35 but unfortunately there is a big bug with the install. It completely fails to install with the error message of “The wizard was interrupted before MySQL Server 5.1. could be completely installed.” With no useful explanation in the dialog box, event viewer or installation log files it is extremely hard to work out what is wrong. The solution for the time being is to download the 5.1.34 installation. The windows version is available at filehippo. It doesn’t help that the official MySQL web page does not link to previous versions of the software either. After logging a “me too” comment on what now seems to be the official bug report at MySQL Bugs – #45418, the number of people with the same problem has increased dramatically.
I had to register with the MySQL website to log my bug and they sent me an email a couple of days later mentioning the release of the new software (that has the problems) – rather annoying as it’s not a good idea to publicize software that doesn’t even install. I tweeted my comment that they should fix the issue before emailing out and I got a reply that they are aware of the problem and are working on it. No post has been added to the bug report though.
Due to a variety of reasons, it is not currently possible to upgrade our work laptops to Windows7 – we’re skipping Vista and want to be ready for Windows7 when it is released in the near future. As an alternative to using Windows7 as the main host OS I was thinking about dual booting the laptops to the different OS’s but that would mean some messy editing of disk partitions.
However, watching the Microsoft Edge demonstration of installing Windows7 to a VHD and then booting from that I got my hopes up. Unfortunately we use Truecrypt to encrypt out hard disks, and as the video demonstrates, you have to boot from the Windows7DVD which of course is not going to support TrueCrypt enabled drives.
My next thought was to temporarily decrypt the drive, install and then encrypt the drive with Truecrypt again – I think this will work but I was planning on storing the VHD file on a usb drive (for portability and the fact that my laptop hard drive is always full) but it looks like this won’t work according to Scott Hanselman’s post where he talks about doing something similar. So I guess I’ll have to wait until I can get a large hard drive for the laptop 🙁
I discovered that Sprint have finally released the 4.5 version of firmware for the blackberry 8330 that will work with a BES server. I took the plunge to upgrade my device (as I *really* want the html email functionality). The upgrade went fairly smoothly apart from the following gotcha’s.
After the reboot, my theme was set back to a different one than what I normally use. No big deal but surprising this was the case.
My Cacheberry software lost the database and registration details – again no big deal as I can reload the gpx into Cacheberry and I have the registration details saved.
Blackbird, my twitter client, lost it’s settings so I had to re-enter the username and password again. Again, no real problem.
The biggest thing was that the device lost it’s ability to synchronise with our corporate server – so no incoming or outgoing email – oops! This is a big deal as my blackberry is used primarily for corporate email AND I had to go and get my BES manager to reactivate the phone for me.
Unfortunately I don’t have html email or the ability to view other people’s calendars yet as both these features look like they need the blackberry server upgrading to a new version – something I’ve requested we look at doing, especially as this will make us a lot more effective.
I did like the fact that one of the new applications is voicerecorder – functionality I miss from our old phones as I was able to record timekeeping notes on the phone as I left a client site ready for updating back at the office. Now this functionality is in the phone and you can quickly and easily send the recorded memo via email. It saves it in amr format (for some weird reason) so you will probably need quicktime or another program to play the recorded message if you don’t listen to it on the blackberry.
I also now have the ability to send/receive mms messages – I’m much more likely to receive them as this phone doesn’t have a camera but as everyone else in the office also has the same phone it’s unlikely that I’ll ever use this functionalilty.
One really cool feature is the web browser – finally we have a real mouse cursor that moves around the web – much easier to navigate and as it has a flash player I can also watch youtube videos now.
As far as the memory is concerned, I did find that not going into google maps, gmail or cacheberry seemed to keep my available memory free so I’ll be running more tests to see which application is leaking memory. I do now have 10mb free on the device (but that is probably because I have an empty cacheberry database at the moment)
Overall, a great upgrade – I’m looking forward to the enterprise server to be upgraded and then I’ll really be able to be more efficient with work emails and checking what everyone else is scheduled to be doing at the office.
For more details on the upgrade check the v 4.5 Blackberry release notes .
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.
So I’ve spent ages troubleshooting and debugging Symantec’s Endpoint Protection (SEP) version 11, MR4 – the first version that actually has a hope of working on a 64bit platform. After spending far too long configuring the various policies and tweaking various settings I was finally able to get the software installed via group policy on a testlab machine but the client would not checkin with the management server. The virus definitions were 4 months old BUT the client console was saying everything was ok. Lots of troubleshooting later and I stumbled across the definitions for the Management server – a setting that I had originally wanted to change anyway. In there I saw that the management server was listening on port 8014 and a quick telnet check from the client showed I was unable to connect. Disabling windows firewall (temporarily – this is on a testlab so the infection risk is minimal) allowed the client to check in with the server, change some settings in the console and update the virus definition dates. Finally I re-enabled the firewall, added an exception for TCP port 8014 and it all looks good, but I’ll wait to see what happens overnight for definition updates on the client. For future reference the list of communications ports for version 11 can be found at Symantecs website here or posted below in the extended entry.
Tried to install a 32 bit driver for the Dell 2330dn printer but the software kept asking me “please provide path to windows media (x86 processor)’”. Pointing the dialog box to the x86 directory or the i386 directory that came with the print driver didn’t help. Neither did pointing the dialog to a copy of the i386 directory from an xp cd. A reply posting on Microsoft’s technet site gave me a hint to get this working. By first installing and sharing the 64bit driver, it is then possible to install the printer by using the following steps.
On a 32 bit (in my case XP) workstation, navigate to \\servername and then double click on the printer that was previously shared.
When it asks for the driver location provide the location to the i386 directory of the extracted driver.
Verify once installed that the driver is now successfully listed as an option on the printer by clicking on the sharing tab and then the additional drivers button.
I had an annoying case this morning where Backup Exec was refusing to write to a removable hard drive after it had got to the point where the disk was full. Even deleting old data on the drive, restarting services would not get the software to continue writing to the drive which now had 250gb of empty space.
In the end, right clicking on the device and selecting pause, then right clicking and unpausing the device fixed the problem. Simple when you know how but frustrating when nothing else seemed to work!
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.
I don’t know that much about vmware apart from loading up some virtual images in the vmware player some time ago. I’m more of a hyper-v fan currently, but thats mainly because it fits nicely onto my lab machine.
Anyway, tonight I’m off to the Techlife Columbus Meetup at the Buckeye hall of fame cafe to hear about VMWare courtesy of work. I’m looking forward to it as I should come away with some good tidbits of information and also get to go around the cafe as I’ve never been there before.
The Techlife Columbus group seems to be pretty active and has groups on LinkedIn and also allegedly on Facebook although the link to Facebook doesn’t work (there’s a surprise). Worth checking out to see if there are any social, training or networking events that would be of interest to you, your job or your career. Obviously if you don’t live in Columbus this particular group is unlikely to be of interest, but it would be worth looking to see if there are other groups in your area.
Incidentally my profile pages are here on linkedin and Facebook or you can check out my other networks from my retaggr page.