Microsoft – Page 4 – 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 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.

Windows 2008 Work

Installing 32 bit printer driver on Windows200864 server

By Andy on Tuesday, May 5, 2009

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.

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.

Exchange / Outlook Hotfixes

Exchange 2003 NDR’s are sent a long time after email was sent.

By Andy on Thursday, April 2, 2009

The past two reboots (where the server has been offline for a while) has resulted in non delivery reports being sent back to some of the mailboxes for mail that was sent several weeks ago and that had not been reported as failed when the mail was initially sent.
The first time this happened I thought it was just one of those things, especially as I had not seen mail in the queue before rebooting the server. After the second occurrence I knew it was time to investigate.
SBSisyphus has a great posting including a link to the exchange2003 (sp2) patch that should fix the “kb950757 Email senders do not receive an indication that some messages have been held by Exchange Server 2003 until the SMTP service, The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service, or the Exchange server is restarted”. I applied it to my machine and I’ll have to see what happens.
For what it’s worth you do not need to reboot the server (unless wmiprvse.exe is running – but you get an option to kill this process if it is running before proceeding) but it will stop and start your mail and web services so don’t apply it during the day and it goes without saying that you should have a backup first.

Ghost Hyper-V Microsoft Virtual PC

Teched hands on lab – behind the scenes.

By Andy on Tuesday, June 17, 2008

A 3 or 4 minute video on the infrastructure behind the 900 machines used to build the hands on labs at TechEd. It was interesting to see that most of the main servers were all virtual servers and that the virtual images stored on the lab pc’s themselves were deployed using Ghost but the actual OS of the desktop was deployed using Windows Deployment Services (WDS). I’ve never been to TechEd but hope to go one day but it makes me wonder what they used to do before virtual machines existed?

Hyper-V Microsoft SystemCenterEssentials Windows 2008

System Center Essentials finally installed.

By Andy on Tuesday, June 10, 2008

I finally managed to get the System Center Essentials VHD working on my windows2008 server this evening. I tried to install it two nights ago but after the installation process got to the Reporting services, it would then remove everything again. Looking through the log files (%temp%\scesetup0.log) I found the error “current security context is not associated with an active directory domain or forest” which didn’t help one iota. The server was part of the domain, I was successfully logged in and therefore this shouldn’t have been a problem. There was very little information about this in google searches, most of them pointing to .net programming issues.
Trying to reinstall the software would give me different results – one time telling me that I needed to install the xml6 software and another time telling me that the installation had completed successfully but the log files disagreed!
In the end I deleted the vhd file, extracted it again and did the following.
Created a new machine in Hyper-V. Pointing to the extracted vhd, 1gb memory, nic on the external network, everything else was defaults (apart from the file locations).
Start the virtual machine. Log in and remove the virtual machine additions. Reboot.
Cancel the new hardware has been detected, approve the new Hal detection, reboot.
Log in, install Integration services, reboot.
Run Windows Updates (until no more updates found) and update everything (apart from remote desktop 6 client, silverlight) reboot. Make sure that all the service packs for the .net frameworks are installed.
Change the ip address of the dns server to be my existing domain controller, join the domain, reboot.
Take a snapshot of the virtual machine so I can roll back if required.
Run setup program, wait, wait and wait some more – success!
I’m prettty sure that the issue was due to not updating the .net frameworks and then trying to install the software. The first installation left remnants behind that then confused subsequent installation attempts.
Update Now I find that there is a System Center Essentials 2007 sp1 eval software that would probably have been better (although this is just SCE not a vhd). There is also a upgrade to SSCsp1 but I think this only works on retail or licenced versions – not eval ones (I’ll find out tomorrow as it’s too late to start on this now).
Update2 The upgrade to SSCsp1 does work and is a smaller download.

Tag Archives: Microsoft