I’ve been busy installing a new server today and after the initial install of the nic and chipset drivers the server had no network,mouse or keyboard so I had to boot into last known good, then install the nic card, reboot, install the chipset drivers and then reboot. I then came to install Service pack2, rebooted and got the message “Windows could not be started as configured. A previous working configuration was used instead”. From reading the article at kb 924690 it seems that you will get this if you have used last known good before and that it seems to be safe to ignore. At least this seemed to be the case as I have mouse, keyboard and network card functioning correctly.
Now if only I could get the belkin kvm to work with these servers rather than randomly mouse clicking I’d be happy. It’s very hard navigating around Microsoft’s website using only the keyboard.
This is actually my first sp2 installation so I’ve not had a good user experience with sp2 so far.
Microsoft are going to do Exam insurance with a free re-take if you fail and a discount if you pass on the next one. Seeing as though I only need 2 more exams for my MCSA I’m wishing they would hurry up and release the details. I called them up this afternoon and apparently the details will be released at the end of the month which means I get some extra swotting time but also means I have a chance to forget everything I learnt recently by the time the exam comes around.
They don’t really go well together do they? An amusing editorial on the turtle cookie jar/urn
No, not a spelling mistake, but last night after going to see the new Josiah Lefor we saw loads of deer in one of the gardens nearby and took some photos. I’ve uploaded the better ones of each to zooomr with some thumbnails below
I had a remote user, working behind a vpn connection to the office log onto the pc for the first time (which was a hard job in itself – I had to use the dial up networking login to authenticate to the domain and cache credentials to the workstation). This user was having problems running outlook with the software prompting him to provide the location for the office source files with the error message “Error 1706. Setup cannot find the required files. Check your connection to the network, or CD-ROM drive. For other potential solutions to this problem, see C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\1033\Setup.hlp”
Entering the network installation location did not work. This issue is documented in KB Article 297834 which didn’t help what so ever, the setup /fvm took forever to run but didn’t work.
However, if I logged on as the administrator user outlook would run successfully. So I added the user to the administrators group and I still got the same error message.
Looking in the eventlog I got the generic error 1004, but I did get the message “Detection of product ‘{90110409-6000-11D3-8CFE-0150048383C9}’, feature ‘OutlookUserData’, component ‘{8ADD2C9C-C8B7-11D1-9C67-0000F81F1B38}’ failed. The resource ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Office\ 11.0\ Outlook\ UserData’ does not exist.
Copying the registry entries for the admin user for the Office\11.0 tree didn’t work either.
A search on google for 11.0\Outlook\UserData came up with the article kb0106250 on rangersuite. I modified the text file to only include the version 11 entries, ran it and outlook ran through the first time wizard and the user (and I) was very happy.
For completeness sake, the registry entries to fix this problem are in the extended entry.
I had a really good time yesterday at Grove City when Jonathan and I went to see Balloons Off Broadway. This is an annual event where hot air balloons are launched, tethered “rides” in a balloon are available, a band plays and then a night glow is performed.
After a couple of quick geocaches, we settled in to watch the balloons being prepared. Eventually we decided to just start taking photos instead of just waiting from our spot so we had a good 30-40 minutes taking photos as the balloons were prepared and launched. After that we jumped in the car and caught up with the balloon chase vehicles and hoped to get some pictures of the balloons landing. Unfortunately we weren’t able to get close enough but it was great fun joining in the convoy of people following the balloons and getting some photos on the way. Fortunately I had got my 2 way radio with me so we set it to scan and listened to the conversations between the balloonists and the trucks which was very funny. It was a bit disconcerting when one of them said the battery on his radio was about out and he would have to resort to hand signals – I would have been a bit concerned if I was a guest in the balloon and heard the operator say that! There were also some pretty funny comments about the landing sites chosen and apparently someone’s basement was really awesome.
We then headed back to the launch location for the glow – it wasn’t as spectacular as I hoped but still fun to watch. I managed to get a couple of fairly decent photos – it was the first time I’d even done night shots like this so there was a lot of experimenting. In the meantime, the band The British Invasion were playing and they were pretty good. They play covers of various British bands such as the Beatles and play all over Ohio – well worth seeing them if they play near you.
Pictures of the event are at my Balloons Off Broadway gallery and a few highlights at my Flickr gallery. Finally a video of a balloon being inflated (along with the hissing of the air) and a backing track of “I get by with a little help from my friends” which I thought was quite appropriate uploaded to YouTube (below)
No need to buy me an iphone though 🙂
For more details check out SysAdmins day
Why is it that gmail seems to be incapable of blocking the emails that start “Hello! I am bored tonight. I am nice girl that would like to chat with you”. It’s not like its a difficult phrase to detect and not something that is likely to be used in everyday emails. I would have thought that marking 99 (or more) of these as spam would have clued the antispam engine to make sure that these emails don’t get delivered to my mailbox.
Update I checked my spam folder this morning and I actually had about 4 or 5 of these emails in the spam folder (amongst the other 350 spams) so maybe it is working (now). Deleting the 20,000 spams that were in the spam folder previously made it hard to work out which were new spams. It would also be nice if marking an email as spam would tag it slightly different so you could tell which was taggedspam and which was detectedspam.
For some reason my Firefox Bookmark toolbar was blank, yet going to bookmarks, Bookmark toolbar folder showed all of the links there so the data wasn’t completely gone. Doug has a solution of restoring the default set which didn’t work for me until I disabled all extensions (using MrTech’s install extension), restarting firefox, right clicking the empty toolbar, selecting customize and then clicking Restore Default Set. That brought back all the links to the Bookmark toolbar. I then enabled all extensions, restarted firefox and everything is almost fixed. I still have an issue with Web Developers Toolbar being blank and if I click Restore Default Set I loose all the links again.
Finally managed to solve an issue that has been bugging me for months. A user was logging onto the Terminal server but two of their network drives would not connect as part of the login script. However doing a net use and providing username and password in the prompts would connect (which is how they’ve been connecting for a while). Logging into a local pc worked fine, but logging in via terminal services always had this problem – so it had to be something to do with the roaming terminal service profile.
Eventvwr was showing events Userenv 1030 – Windows cannot query for the list of Group Policy objects, Userenv 1006 – Windows cannot bind to domain.com domain (Invalid Credentials), MsGina 1010 Failed to set the user’s home directory,
I tried debugging using KB221833 which gave me 43 pages of logs to read through.
Eventually I logged into the Terminal server as the user, went into control panel, stored passwords and lo and behold – there was someone elses username (and password). Deleted this stored account, logged off and back on again and got all their network drives connected.
control keymgr.dll is a shortcut to this screen that users might be able to use to clear this themselves.