Absoblogginlutely

Group Policy preference hurdle.

2008-12-30T01:23:22Z

I've been wanting to use the group policy preferences at a couple of sites but been unable to due to the fact that you need to have a Vista or Windows 2008 server in the domain. I knew that one or the other was required, but I was kind of hoping that you could get away with using a Vista machine not on the domain to edit the group policy settings. Much like you can use "connect to" in eventvwr and other mmc consoles I was hoping this feature would be available so I could take my consultants laptop and edit various group policy preferences at some of my sites without needing a domain joined pc. Alas, this is not to be - in fact gpmc is not even available unless you are joined to the domain.
Here's hoping that some enterprising company will come up with an application that will enable you to deploy group policy preferences without Vista or Windows 2008.

"Mark all as read" missing in Google Reader.

2008-12-19T17:45:24Z

My Mark all as read button was missing on the laptop in google reader this morning, and some other things didn't look quite right (the google reader logo at the top left was missing for example). I tried messing around with greasemonkey and disabling the better greader extension and narrowed it down to something within greader. I then checked the skins option and noticed that it was setup to use the optimized theme. I switched the skin to none, pressed F5 to refresh and all my buttons reappeared and the other sections of the screen didn't disappear either. Now I can mark my folders as read again and get my count back down to a reasonable number.

70-649 passed.

2008-12-15T15:24:16Z

Took the exam this morning - I would say this is probably one of the easier exams, especially if you are familiar with the product (well duh!) A lot of the questions have keywords in them which means that instantly you know the answer has to be this particular one. Hard to explain, but in some exams you narrow down to two possibles and then you have to reread to get the correct one - in this case, keywords in the question instantly narrowed down to 1.
The annoying/scary bit is that it's really 3 short exams in one and your worst score counts - if you fail one section you fail the lot. Fortunately I got 100% in the first two and 970 in the last one - I think I got one question wrong. Out of all the questions there were only 3 questions I wasn't sure about - the others I knew were correct.

70-649 exam booked.

2008-12-10T01:51:53Z

I booked my 70-649 exam last night for next Monday which gives me the weekend to do any last minute prep work and testing. I finished my 973 pages of reading the Syngress book - The Real MCTS/MCITP Exam 70-649 Prep Kit: by Brian Posey. The book wasn't bad but there were quite a few errors in the book. There was only one sample answer that I totally agreed with (and therefore it must be wrong ;-) but there were a couple of times where text was repeated twice due to sloppy copy/paste editing and several times words were spelt wrong or letters missing. The last chapter for example, on Network Access Protection, seemed to be short on finishing the actual testing of the NAP client and unfortunately spent more time going on about tips for the exam. I would have thought this would be better in a separate chapter and instead actually go through the steps of testing the client machine for compatibility
Anyway, the exam is booked with the second chance offer .and if I pass I'll be able to give the book a glowing review ;-)
This exam is pretty good in that it is needed to upgrade my MCSE qualification to the 2008 equivalent but also gives me 3 MCTS qualifications,

Fixing exchange2003 unable to send to exchange2007 mailboxes.

2008-12-01T22:02:12Z

In my newly installed exchange2007 site I also had an exchange2003 server that handles all the incoming/outgoing mail apart from the test user that I had moved to the 2007 server. Unfortunately I could not send mail to the 2007 user but I could receive mail from this user. T here was a lot of postings on the internet and various forums for solutions for a similar problem but normally in the opposite direction.
After a post at petri (2nd posting down) I deleted my smarthost setting on the virtual server on the 2003 machine and mail started flowing. Now I can progress in my mail migration. Many thanks to Andy at Petri for the answer on this one.
Annoyingly this did come up in the best practise analyzer, but only as a warning. As the smarthost had been working I left it alone - I really should have known better.

skitch screenshots for mac

2008-11-27T15:00:17Z

Skitch is a great screenshot capturing program for the mac that also has integration with flickr (and skitch.com) to upload the images after they have been taken. Extra features such as watermarking, highlighting of areas of the screen, writing and drawing on the picture with the edits being individual items or layers and therefore movable, make this a very feature rich capturing program. I'm very impressed with it so far in my limited mac experience. My skitch site is at skitch.com/absoblogginlutely. The one photo I have uploaded (and to flickr too) is a picture of some very bad redacting by the army

Kristen's comments are not working at the moment

2008-11-21T12:29:57Z

Kristen finally blogged something last night and I went to put a comment on it this morning only to find her comments don't work anymore. I did a quick comparison between this blog and hers only to find that her templates are completely different. I tried to copy the entry template for this blog over to hers and publish but it uses includes so failed. I think this is because I had to drop the old MovableType templates to get this blog to work and her blog has the old MT templates still.
I know it is going to be quicker moving her to Wordpress than trying to fix the template so I may end up doing this - especially as this blog will also move to Wordpress soon - I started the migration Wednesday night and it worked fairly well - some entries were lost in the move but they were fairly old so I'm not too bothered. It will take time to test and theme the site so don't expect a drastic change too soon - especially as I have work revision to do!!

TechEd online training

2008-11-20T22:50:05Z

There are some really good (technical) webcasts from TechEd Europe online and I've just watched The case of the Unexplained - a very interestng and useful presentation by Mark Russinovich of Microsoft/Sysinternals on analyzing dump files, processes and hanging systems. I'm sure this will come in very handy. One of the tips I learnt was that you can actually use process explorer as a taskmgr replacement by going to options/replace task manager (or restore if you want to put it back again)
A highly recommended presentation if you do any troubleshooting of user desktops (or servers). Note it is pretty long - 74 minutes, and as it is in silverlight I don't think it's possible to download for offline viewing and the navigation to skip to a certain part of the clip sucks big time. There is no slider so you have to click randomly in a grey bar (that obscures part of the screen) to guess where you will end up.

Cleanup after Vista sp1 is installed.

2008-11-15T01:26:13Z

vsp1cln is a useful utility that removes files no longer needed after Vista sp1 has been installed and you are sure that you will not need to remove sp1. A useful utility but I’m surprised it is needed – after all you just needed to delete the $ntuninstall*$ files in XP

SBS2008 loadfest in Springfield 2008.

2008-11-15T01:21:31Z

I’ve never been to Springfield (any of them) before and tomorrow is the SBS2008 loadfest in Springfield, Ohio where people bring their machines to load SBS2008 on them and find out ways to automate the installation and demos and discussions about the new features in SBS2008. I’m really looking forward to this as it will be some great training and also a chance to network with some peers. I’m curious to see how it all works as SBS insists it is the only DHCP server on the network when the connect to internet wizard is run so I’m not sure how it will like all the SBS machines being plugged into the Lan.

I must admit I cheated/was too impatient/needed to test the installation of SBS2008 on my hardware so I kicked off an install before work this morning ,answered the remaining questions at lunch time today and now have an installation on the hardware. I wanted to make sure that the installation would work with my hardware and my disk layout. Now that I know it works I will either reinstall over the top tomorrow or install it into a virtual environment under hyper-v. The latter will enable me to snapshot the machine when playing with various what-if configurations.

This is all really good timing as yesterday I received my “fee” exam voucher from Microsoft for SBS2008 – there was a typo in the subject of the email that gave me the free voucher code for the exam. The only downside is that this will have to wait until I’ve passed at least one of my Windows2008 exams.

I had the beta of 2008 on my home training machine but it ran really slow as it was a virtual machine and the server didn’t have enough memory. Yesterday I purchased 4GB of ram for $70 (plus tax) and added that to the pc. I had an added bonus in that 1gb of ram had to be removed to make way for the 2gb sticks so I put these two sticks into my normal home pc.

I’m not sure if there are still spaces available – the click to register page still seems to work.

MCSE upgrade time.

2008-11-11T02:44:54Z

It’s been a while since I got my MCSE qualification and I’m now starting to use Windows 2008 and Exchange 2007 so it is time to update the certifications! Microsoft has a useful page on the transition path from MCSE on Windows2003 to MCITP (Microsoft Certified IT Professional) – looks like a lot more studying to do, although the first exam 70-649 gives me three new MCTS (Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist )qualifications immediately which is nice. The good thing is that I have until the end of the year to pass with the second shot offer AND to fulfill my annual review goals.

The training book has been ordered from the library and the virtual server has been fired up, updated and my vpn configuration tested to allow remote access back home (I managed to break this when upgrading my dd-wrt router)

SQL2008 installation failed to install with 0x84b30001

2008-11-11T02:31:52Z

I got the 0x84b30001 error when trying to install the latest Microsoft Assessment and Planning tool (MAP) this evening. Taking a look through the error logs gave me the message “A network error occurred while attempting to read from the file: c:\e….0\x86\setup\x86\sqlncli10.msi”, each time the directory name was different. I tried running the SQL2008 express installation manually and got the same message. However double clicking on the sqlncli10.msi file from the log file would work – or seem to. Trying to do a repair gave me the same message. I then chose to delete the 2008 native client installation (the sqlncli10.msi package) as I knew that a successful installation would result in the client being installed again. The uninstall was successful so I then reran the sql2008 installation with no problems. MAP then installed successfully. I posted a note on the technet forums here in case anyone else has some follow up comments/questions. Now that I’m home I can’t actually run the assessment tool, but I’ll be able to do this tomorrow – hopefully it will give me the results I am after.

Dell Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA) alert setup - updated

2008-11-07T21:01:09Z

Further to this post on how to set up Dell Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA) for alerts I have amended the configuration files required to correctly configure OMSA.
I discovered that Dell's documentation is incorrect and that running a batch file in an alert directly does not work - you need to call it with cmd.exe BUT you do not (normally) need to provide the path to cmd.exe - I have therefore changed the alert commands (shown in the extended entry).
I have also amended the dellalert.bat file as I also found that blat would not always work as there is no working blat profile when called from OMSA and there is no obvious way of setting a profile up. You could add the setup into dellalert.bat, trigger an alert and then remove the setup. Alternatively blat can have the mail server and the sender name provided in the dellalert.bat. This makes installation easier as all you need to do is copy the blat files to the windows directory. Again the updated dellalert.bat is in the extended entry.

]]> Dellalert.bat should now contain the following lines.

@echo off
::Dell alert program
::v1.21
::Set variables below as appropriate
::needs blat downloaded (http://tinyurl.com/2qdxea) Put blat.exe in the system path
::No longer needs blat installed as configuration is set in the environment variables.

@echo on
setlocal
set log=c:\jobs\dell.txt
set pager=destinationpageraddress@company.com
set mail=destinationemailaddress@company.com
set company=Companyname
set server=%computername%
set mailserver=mailservername
set alertfrom=fromemailaddress@company.com

date /t >%log%
time /t >>%log%
echo %* >>%log%
if {%1}=={p} blat %log% -to %pager% -server %mailserver% -f %alertfrom% -subject "%company% %server% alert - %*"
if not {%1}=={} blat %log% -to %mail% -server %mailserver% -f %alertfrom% -subject "%company% %server% alert - %*"
endlocal

The commands to specify the call to dellalert.bat are below. Note that you need to specify cmd.exe and then the batch file. As the batch file has parameters with quotes, the quotes need to escaped with backslashes (as per the information below). I highly recommend you save these commands to a batch file called conf.bat and then run the batch file - a lot easier to manage, recall and implement on multiple servers. Each line starts with omconfig - you will probably find your web browser has wrapped the lines, but if you copy/paste the content into notepad your lines should be correct.

omconfig system alertaction event=batterywarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p battery probe warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=batteryfail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p battery probe failure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=fanwarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert fan probe warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=fanfail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p fan probe failure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=hardwarelogwarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert hardware log warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=hardwarelogfull execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p hardware log failure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=intrusion execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert chassis intrusion detected\""
omconfig system alertaction event=memprefail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p memory prefailure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=memfail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p memory failure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=systempowerwarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p system power warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=systempowerfail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p system power warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=powersupply execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p psu critical\""
omconfig system alertaction event=powersupplywarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p psu warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=processorwarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p processor warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=processorfail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p processor failure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=redundegrad execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p redundancy degraded\""
omconfig system alertaction event=redunlost execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p redundancy lost\""
omconfig system alertaction event=tempwarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p temp probe warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=tempfail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p temp probe failure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=voltwarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert voltage probe warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=voltfail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p voltage probe failure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=watchdogasr execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert Watchdog ASR\""
omconfig system alertaction event=storagesyswarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p storage system warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=storagesysfail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p storage system failure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=storagectrlwarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p storage controller warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=storagectrlfail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p storage controller failure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=pdiskwarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p physical disk warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=pdiskfail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p physical disk failure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=vdiskwarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p virtual disk warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=vdiskfail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p virtual disk failure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=enclosurewarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p enclosure warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=enclosurefail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p enclosure failure\""
omconfig system alertaction event=storagectrlbatterywarn execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p storage ctrl battery warning\""
omconfig system alertaction event=storagectrlbatteryfail execappath="cmd /c \"c:\jobs\dellalert p storage ctrl battery failure\""

So now the implementation steps are as follows.

Install OMSA on the server

Download blat, copy dellalert.bat and conf.bat from above.

Edit dellalert.bat to have your specific information. The variables are pretty obvious

Extract blat to your windows directory

Double click conf.bat to configure OMSA

Run Server administrator to check the settings have been implemented correctly (see previous post for examples)

Test - normally a safe way to do this is to unplug one of the redundant power supplies. I would recommend you also set up the alerts to display a popup for this event so you know the alert has been triggered. Then unplug the power. Wait about 20-30 seconds for the alert to popup on screen and then wait for your email/pager to activate.

Any updates will be posted to this blog and to the OMSA category - so check there if this page is old.

I won a prize in the SMB Nation survey!

2008-10-30T17:02:21Z

A while ago I filled out a survey as a Certified Small Business Specialist and my thoughts on Vista. There were 75 prizes up for grabs so the odds were pretty good for winning. I had completely forgotten about it until a package arrived in the post this morning. I won a rechargable torch (flashlight for the US readers). Alas I didn't win a Microsoft jacket but a torch is always handy - I have a small keychain LED light that I use way more than I thought, so this one will also be helpful to have in the office toolkit - beats having to work in the dark when the normal torch has run out of batteries. It's pretty powerful and I now have green spots in front of my eyes as I looked at the LED's to see how many were on.

Windows 958644 direct download locations.

2008-10-24T20:12:06Z

I have spent all day patching servers, workstations and trying to find a direct download for the 958644 patch that got released last night. I was amazed when Microsoft even called us to join in a webconference for Microsoft partners about this patch - that is something new.
I was not so pleased when I called PSS to ask for a direct download to the patch as kb958644 does not have direct links, windows update services was timing out and the catalog website is badly broken. PSS informed me that as it was not a hotfix they could not provide me with the file and there was an 8-12 hour delay on callback from the server team. So instead I've been configuring wsus for servers (that were not already configured), approving patches and downloading by visiting windows updates - a VERY time consuming.
Anyway, without wasting more time - here are the download locations - I'd grab them before the server falls over too.

w2k3

xp/w2k3 64 bit

Windows 2000

Thanks to Larry and Derek for the help in finding these.