Recently in Microsoft Category

I have been using Live Mesh on the home computer and work computer for a couple of weeks and the synching of data between the two computers has been very useful.  The synch process works the same that foldershare does and copies files between the machines (and the web site) well. The only issue I have had so far is if I move the location of the data files by hand. The default location for a new Live Mesh folder is on the Desktop. As I don't want this location I used explorer to cut and paste the folder from the desktop and put it in a different location such as c:\andy\livemesh.  However, going to My Computer/Live Mesh folders then shows the folder as not synched on this computer and in the original location.  By double clicking on the folder a browse dialog box appears and the new folder location can be selected. If the new folder is the new location a merge data prompt will be given.  Selecting yes will then set the folder up to be synchronised again.

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?

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.

I took the 70-297 test this afternoon. It's a lot different and a lot harder than the other tests due to the amount of information that you need to digest and analyze (and in some cases assume). I passed with a score of 781. It could have been higher, but the main thing is that I passed and I now obtain my MCSE accreditation. This month has been very busy trying to study most nights for these tests - this was my third one this month and so for the next week or so I'm not going to be doing any overtime - I'm looking forward to being able to relax, watch some films and play rockband. Hopefully I'll also be able to post some more stuff to the blogs now too.

You can now access sysinternals tools direct from the command line (great for scripts) by accessing \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\toolname.exe for example \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\autoruns.exe This is great for running the command directly from a dos prompt or in a script or even just copying the file(s) directly to a server automatically without having to download each file from a web browser. Thanks to Ed Bott for the tip off and extra thanks to sysinternals for doing this
You can also download most of the tools in one go with tips on creating start menu icons for all the files in the zip file
Alternatively you can just "copy \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\*.exe ." to copy them to your drive.

It was quite disappointing to come out of the exam having not scored higher than 900. I was pretty convinced I had a higher score, but 873 is still a respectable score as 700 is the passmark. I won't be taking any more tests at this test center though - the room was hot and right by reception and the front door so all I could clearly hear the (long) conversations as people had their smoke breaks, came back from lunch etc. It made it pretty hard to concentrate and in this exam you really have to concentrate on precisely which user in which OU needs access to which resource in which domain Almost every question had an exhibit button that needed to be pressed and the screens are at such a low resolution you need to scroll all the time (although this seems to be a standard resolution for the Microsoft exams - they really should give you the abilty to change them on the fly)
So I now have only one more exam to go and then I get my MCSE qualification - I hope to take this one next Thursday - I've not decided whether to do 70-297 - Designing a Windows Server 2003 Active Directory and Network Infrastructure or 70-298 - Designing Security for a Windows Server 2003 Network. 297 sounds easier as it builds on the skills in the other exams (and we have the mspress book in the office) but 298 would be more interesting but possibly harder and we don't have the book.

Windows Mobile Live is now out - no need to obtain the cached version from google. It really looked like Microsoft were just pushing the date back x number of days after you looked at the web page, but I guess they finally did settle on the 15th to release the package. This version doesn't include Live messenger though.

So Microsoft update a patch today to do with Adobe flash player and I quote "Caveats: This bulletin is for customers using Macromedia Flash Player version 6 from Adobe. Customers that have followed the guidance in Adobe Security Bulletin APSB06-11, issued September 12, 2006, are not at risk from these vulnerabilities. Vulnerable versions of Macromedia Flash Player from Adobe are redistributed with Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3, and Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition."

Now XP sp3 has only been out a couple of weeks, if that, Adobe released their bulleting in September 2006 so how on earth is WindowsXP sp3 vulnerable - surely flash should have been updated in the xpsp3 release! This seems to make a mockery of the security focus that Microsoft are meant to be working hard on and coming on the heels of the recent snafu's with Windows updates and genuine advantage, it's no wonder people are not very happy with patching.

I got 955 on the 70-293 exam today and have started on the 70-294 which I hope to get done next Friday. The hours of study paid off!

As I found out that the 2nd chance exam offer runs out at the end of this month (for the initial exam - you have until the end of June to take the retake) I've decided to try and get my MCSE by the end of the month so I'm swotting really hard. I've finished the first half of the Microsoft Press book for 70-293 tonight - I started it on Sunday night and last night we were out for a couple of hours so it's not bad going. I've scheduled the exam for Friday afternoon and after that I'll only have 2 more to go.
I've also pushed the guys at the office to take advantage of the offer, so far I know at least 2 of them have booked exams and if the others are reading this - then just do it! With this offer I really don't think there is any excuse for someone not to be an MCP at a minimum, especially when the exam fee is reimbursed on passing and the 2nd chance removes a lot of the pressure.

Microsoft just released version 1 of their Pro Photo Tools  (genuine advantage and .net framework 3 required) that allows you to geotag your photos. Interestingly the software seems to think it is called Photo Info v2 as trying to install it popped up a message saying I needed to remove Photo Info version 1 before installing version2. Having got that hurdle out of the way I loaded the software. I was pleased straight away as this application loaded a lot faster than photo info v1 which could take about 45 seconds to load but at first glance I shuddered at the dark grey colour scheme but then continued to click around the application. I loaded a photo I had already geotagged and sure enough the information was displayed in the gps fields and on the map. One cool feature is the "Get Location Text" button that gets the street address from the co-ordinates - very cool.  The application also allows you to load in a gpx file (or other location files)  from your gps and automatically sync the location with the time stamp from the camera.  I haven't tried this yet as I don't have a recent gps log with photos - I'll have to go out geocaching some more to rectify this! If your camera time is slightly off (I just realised mine is an hour slow due to the time change) you can change the time stamp on all of your photos basing the original time on gps time or exif time.

I finally stamped a whole load of photos with my name, website and description of the event and quickly saved all the information back to the files. Keywords can be entered to tag the photos but need to be comma separated (the software doesn't tell you that and space separating them puts them all in as one long keyword.) It was handy to have the photos open in Windows Live Photo to view the keywords as the files were changed to see how this would work. No changes in WLP were necessary - as the files were saved the tags were changing in real time.

I'd really like to be able to create macros in this application to automatically stamp my data into photos such as Photographer, url etc as at the moment its a process taking a few steps - not many, but it would be nice to automate it. Also the ability to select various copyright choices such as creative commons would be good too (it defaults to all rights reserved).

Overall a nice package to be added to my existing set of photo editing tools - it will probably replace wwmx as my geotagging tool of choice.

I'm off to the Heroes Happen Here event in Columbus on Thursday - any other readers going?  I've not managed to get my hands dirty with the Windows2008 server yet so this event should be interesting and hopefully pretty fun too. The last Microsoft held event was packed which spoilt it a bit but I'm hoping this one won't be as crowded. It is a sellout which hopefully means they've only allowed enough people that they actually have room for this time.

The migration from NT4 and Exchange 5.5 to Exchange2007 and Windows 2003 is almost done. This weekend was the installation of Exchange 2007 and the move of mailboxes. Unfortunately it did not go to plan. Upromote worked great on the first server that needed the software and after two or three reboots it was acting as a member server. The second server however did not go well. Instead the server bluescreened in the middle of the process and I was left with a server that was neither in a domain or in a workgroup.  The logon box did not include the domain option but the local SAM was corrupted and wouldn't let me login. As the machine was out of the domain I couldn't connect to it remotely apart from ping activity. After struggling for a long time with a multitude of recovery tools we ended up with a parallel installation of NT4 on the machine so that we could access the data on the drives. This was not without hassles - the RAID controller drivers would not recognise the disk in NT4 - you would have thought that downloading the drivers for the raid controller that appears in the BIOS boot would work but nope - we had to use different drivers!  I tried to access the machine using Microsoft's Dart Tool - the rebranded ERD commander, but this tool doesn't support NT - in the end I had to go back to ERD Commander 2002 to get a version that worked with NT4 (although it didn't actually help). The parallel installation of NT also needed SQL 7 reinstalling but this needed ie4 installed (and where do you get *that* from?)  Fortunately it would also accept IE6 too.

Installing the Exchange2007 sp1 was not a fun experience either - the process stopped half way through with an error saying that a file was in use and that I needed to reboot the server to continue. When I did so, the installation would not continue as all of the Exchange services and several other essential windows services had been set to disabled by the previous installation and the upgrade needs the Information Store to be running. As the other services were stopped the machine acted like it was behind a firewall - you were not able to ping out or into it. Setting all the services to automatic and then starting them got through this problem - I had to boot up my Virtual Exchange 2007 server to see which disabled services should normally be running though. I actually had to try the upgrade about 3 times before I got through with no errors but the whole experience made SQL2005 look stable.

Now I am having major trouble getting the remote outlook clients to connect through to the exchange 2007 server using RPC over HTTPS - it worked great with the Exchange 2003 server but just will not work with Exchange 2007 - if you have any bright ideas then let me know - tomorrow I'll be logging a call with Microsoft for some assistance.

At the end of the weekend I felt like I had installed every piece of Microsoft software just to get Exchange migrated onto new servers. I have got some great ideas for future migrations and I know that I don't want to repeat the process sometime soon!

Then to top it all off, the advert shown in this blog post arrived stuck to the front cover of my Technet magazine today - talk about bad timing.  Having said that, I have received the white paper and I don't think we'd use their services as it sounds expensive. The advice was pretty basic but did include the steps of removing old mailboxes and cleaning up the database. One REALLY annoying thing to see when you are moving mailboxes on a weekend without pay is a lot of "moving 1 of 3654 spam messages" and "moving 3 of 12876 deleted items".  I had told the users to delete these items before the upgrade but this hadn't been done.  I think next time I will include a step of telling the users to delete their spam, junk and deleted items BEFORE the upgrade as it will be done as part of the upgrade "automatically" (and if anyone has a tool that will walk through a message store deleting items in the spam, junk and deleted items then let me know)

You may have heard that an undersea cable was cut affecting various countries internet access. Initially I didn't think this would concern me but apparently some of the companies who have off-shored their tech support to India like Microsoft are affected. This explains why it's been over two days to receive a hotfix from the Microsoft support website. Fortunately I got tired of waiting and called them up for it but I still haven't received my emailed version either.

It's been a very long weekend. I've been trying to do a migration from nt4 and exchange 5.5 up to Windows 2003 64bit, Active Directory and Exchange2007 and although I succeeded there have been several large hiccups along the way. More details in the extended entry as it will get technical!

I was going to use the Microsoft Group Shot software this evening for some editing on a photo but the software has expired and Microsoft haven't posted a new version online - a real shame as how am I going to do my clone shots now?
Update It turns out that setting your clock back to September 2006 gets this working again -

There's a pretty funny video doing the rounds on Bill's last day from the CES keynotes. I'm wondering who will sign my MCSE certificate when I get there.....

Thanks to the post from Danalive on the sql msdn forums by adding the characters ReportServer between the ReportServerVirtualDirectory tags in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\ReportManager\RSWebApplication.config the error message of "The reportservervirtualdirectory element is missing" disappeared and I could access the Reporting Services homepage.
This weekend I had to rename the server as part of the GoLive procedure with this server. Sure enough, the rename of the server caused a lot more errors. There are a couple of pages on the MSDN site with instructions - Basic overview and instructions for renaming SQL2005 and Renaming a Report Server.
So far I've had several issues with this server - SQL2005 seems to have the buggiest and most unstable installation routine I've ever seen.

Got a 900 score this morning - the passmark was 700 so I am very pleased. I tick off the number of questions that I *know* I have correct (32), the number of simulations (3) and the number of questions that I'm not sure if the answer is correct (9). Any question that I'm not sure about I make my best answer too, mark the question for review and go on to the next question. Sim's I immediately mark for review and go onto the next question. At the end of all the questions I go back and finish off all the review questions.
The exam was 4.25 hours long for 46 questions - I took about 90 minutes - the longest I've had so far I think.
This marks the end of my quest for MCSA certification - now I start on the remaining questions to get the MCSE certification.

It's rather ironic when the laptop Blue Screens as I start to install the debug symbols in order to debug a blue screen on a server. I think the pc is having one of those days - much like my past two weeks (I think I'm still trying to catch up on having 4 days vacation in October - and yet I've got two more days off at the end of this week - can't wait!)
Update Annoyingly, the pc reboots after the blue screen appears for about 2 seconds. I have turned off the restart on system failure option in My Computer properties. It occurs whenever I double click one of the symbol.exe files across the network.
Update2 After extracting the symbol files from a local version I was able to analyze the dump file and it told me that the problem was in ip_fw.sys - which at first glance looks like a firewall driver. Sure enough, a google search told me that it was from the wipfw openbsd firewall implementation on Windows. Removing the software means I can run the exe with no crashes. The strange thing is that I've never heard of wipfw before and I certainly didn't install it (by itself) as I log all the programs that I install and that wasn't one of them. I wouldn't be surprised if it came with another program such as wireshark or bidiblah or something along those lines...more investigation to come.

My passing score was 928 (pass was 700) so I passed comfortably - which is a very nice feeling and something I've maintained in all the exams I've taken with Microsoft so far. I now have 1 more to go and then I get my MCSA exam. This exam was quite different to the ones I've done before - there were 45 questions and about 10 (or more) were simulation exams. Personally I like these questions as it's a lot easier to recognise the process needed to go through as opposed to the previous "drag and drop to put in order" box questions where you have to remember the exact wording on the dialog boxes that in real life you pay little attention to as you use them every day.
After 20 questions the screen froze, for ever, and ever and ever. Eventually I went out to see the receptionist but when I came back the machine was waiting for the next question - it takes a long time to load some of the simulation questions. I was really nervous at this point as the first 20 questions were easy and I was confident I had about 19 of them correct. I really didn't want to start again.
After this scare the questions seemed to get harder but a lot of them were similar to the questions in the official MS press books and there were some questions I had seen that were identical to various test prep software solutions although I didn't use the MeasureUp software for this exam which I have used in the past. Now it's onto 70-291....

Following on from my post on trying to install windows live photo gallery I tried to install it again yesterday by uninstalling all of my .net frameworks and reinstalling them and then updating all of the frameworks with their respective windows patches - a process that took over an hour to complete....and the installer still doesn't work.
It did work on the office laptop, but that doesn't really have any pictures on it but at least I know the installer *should* work sometimes.

I downloaded the new Windows Live Installer program yesterday which provides the ability to install Messenger, writer, mail and photo gallery from one "easy to use integrated installer". There are two downsides to this - one is that the installer is really a stub that doesn't contain the full product - this is normally fairly annoying as it means that you can't download the full install copy for offline (or multiple) installs - instead you have to be connected to the network each time the software is installed.

The other downside is that in my case, the installation of Photo Gallery (the only piece of software that I actually wanted from this bundle as I already have the rest) doesn't work. Instead I get the error message "Install failed with error code 0x80240022" - a google search yesterday only came up with details for Windows Defender which didn't help me much.  Also, for those of you who are not aware, you need to hover the mouse over the error message in order for the full message to be displayed on screen in a tool tip. This means that there is no copy/paste functionality of the error message into google - instead you have to type it in manually. The link to "More about this error" only goes to a generic web page which tells you about the mouse tip.

The software also keeps checking the toolbar each time it is run - even though I don't want it to be installed but oddly enough doesn't check the Family Safety checkbox. It should be consistent to check both or leave both unchecked.

Finally found a solution/explanation to the Event ID 5050, Source IAS that reads "The description for Event ID ( 5050 ) in source ( IAS ) cannot be found. Apparently this is A LDAP connection with domain controller <domain controller name> for domain <domain name> is established. and therefore nothing to worry about. It's taken ages to track this down - I wasn't able to find it on eventid for quite a while, but this morning it was there.

The Exam Insurance webpage has been updated and no longer mentions the offers coming in August, but instead states that the program closed in July - looks like there is no delay in taking the exams now!

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.

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.

Has anyone managed to get their Software Assurance E-Learning activated for their organization for more than one person? I was interested to see a side comment from Susan Bradley, an SBS MVP who also can't get E-Learning working One of my customers gets the message "Access Code is over its user limit. Please contact your training benefits coordinator or HR representative for further assistance" when they try to access the site. They have a 50 user licence, and I only have 1 licence signed up (mine when I set the whole thing up). 3 times Microsoft have told me the problem has been fixed and asked for screenshots when I've told them it still isn't fixed and EXACTLY the same error message appears on screen. The last time I was asked for my passport username and password which was pretty unbelievable. I refused to give them mine, but I did set up a new user who was requesting the training but hadn't set up a passport account yet as there wasn't much point as the training site wasn't working. Anyway, I gave them this userid and password and they told me they had fixed it. If they had bothered to actually test the problem they would have discovered that they hadn't fixed it.
This SA E-Learning is touted as a free benefit, so far it's cost a lot in time spent chasing Microsoft and having to tell the users that No, it still doesn't work yet.
Also you are meant to get an update on the case every other day via email - I'm lucky if I get one a week.

After receiving a Samsung IP830W to allow international access to exchange, I had a big headache getting the device to sync with the exchange server.
The initial problem was caused by the SSL certificate having expired on the exchange server. Normal browsers can just hit the ok button to continue, but Windows Mobile5 will refuse to sync unless this is fixed.
Rather than purchase a new SSL certificate and wait the couple of weeks for Verisign or Network Solutions to provide me a certificate (this was needed *now*) I did some research and came up with the website SSL Enabling OWA 2003 using a free 3rd party certificate. Following the instructions was very simple and after a few minutes I had the certificate installed on the server. However the Windows Mobile Device would not accept the certificate! More research later the solution seemed to be to copy the cert file to the device and double click it but this still didn't work.
In the end I copied the ca.cer file to my pc and then used the infrared connection to copy it to the device. This got around the previous problem I had with the certificate programs not recognising the previous certificate I had BUT I then got the issue "Security permission was insufficient to update your device".
Whilst I was doing this I was on the phone with Sprint (on hold) for twenty minutes and at this point they answered the phone and were useless. They admitted they hadn't had any training on this, that no certificates were allowed to be installed on the device and to contact Microsoft. I hung up on the guy as he obviously had no clue and downloaded the RegeditSTG file from Bernt Lervik. Using the instructions at Bernt's site I edited the registry to allow the certificate to be installed. I did have to extract the zip file first and copy the exe file across as opposed to the zip file. Note that in order to expand the branches I had to use the center key within the rocker switch as the stylus/enter key wouldn't work.
Start regeditSTG and navigate to the hive key HKLM\Security\Policies\Policies
Change the following three registry keys (hint: hit Values first)
a. 00001001 to 1 (was 2)
b. 00001005 to 40 (was 16)
c. 00001017 to 144 (was 128)
After that I was able to double click the ca.cer file to install it, and then start the activesync process with exchange.

Hope this (convuluted) solution will help any other users and me the next time I have to do this certification dance.

For some reason, my installation of Windows Liver Writer will not allow me to select any of my other MT blogs (apart from the main one) when I go to set up an account. Instead I get the not useful error message "An error occurred while attempting to connect to your weblog: Blog Server Error - Server Error 1 Occurred Invalid Login You must correct this error before proceeding."

I know the password is correct as I've just used it to log into the system.

Another annoyance is the version number of WLW. Help/About displays the following version - 1.0 (12.0.1183.516) - nowhere does it mention that this is beta2. As the WLW website also doesn't tell you which build Beta2 is, it is pretty hard to tell whether you are on the latest version or not.

Kevin Devin asked how SharedView fits with Netmeeting and Livemeeting - my first thought when I was using this product was that it appeared to provide similar functionality to netmeeting. This product is actually the Tahiti product that Microsoft purchased, rebranded and re-released as a new beta product.
I've not used netmeeting for several years so the statements may not be entirely accurate.
However the differences I see are as follows

1. Looks a lot nicer than the netmeeting did.


2. You can share your desktop with up to 15 people - netmeeting was limited to 1.


3. Works much better through firewalls - I'm guessing it is http based so no firewall tweaking needed.


4. No directory support included - netmeeting had the ability to join a directory of available chats - this needs an email address to connect to the original host (but there must be a directory on MS's servers somewhere but it is just not viewable to the public)

I didn't find the performance to be that great, with my two pc's connected the screen refresh was pretty slow and artifacts would often be left behind on the screen. I did like the fact that you could see the guests cursors (but this would be pretty hectic with 15 guests) but you can turn this feature off.
If another program was moved over the top of the shared application, a grey box would appear on the guest screen where the application was - this almost looks like screen corruption but it isn't.
The host computer will only share one monitor, spreading the shared application over 2 screens will only share the portion of the application on the hosted screen
It takes a small part of the desktop as the controls get placed at the very top of the screen - a nice feature would be to merge this into the title bar of the application to recover a little more screen estate.
File sharing worked nicely and I was easily able to share files between the two computers. It would be nice to have the downloaded file appear in a most recently downloaded window or have the option to open the file once it was downloaded in the same manner ie/firefox does.
I'll be adding my feature notes to the Sharedview forums shortly.

Microsoft have just released SharedView - a program that looks like it can be used to present your screen to multiple (up to 15) computers. Not sure how it works yet as it doesn't work with Lotus Notes (see my posts on the Microsoft forums). These forums are brand new - I was the first to post (2) posts for support/product feedback. I'll be testing this out on the home pc tonight, and it will be interesting to see if gmail is supported as a mail client.
It uses a Live ID for the presenter (but it is not needed for the clients watching the screen) and as yet does not support audio (but neither does webex that I'm aware of). I think it will take some time for users to get used to getting SharedView installed on their computer and running it - it doesn't seem to be deployed via a web applet/activex component like WebMeeting.
More later after I've got it working.....

Zoomit has been updated, the tool that allows you to zoom into part of the screen, annotate the screen or have a break countdown timer displayed on the screen when doing presentations. I went to a presentation last week on Microsoft's Forefront Technology software (which seems to have promise but doesn't seem to be anywhere near capable as a replacement for Mcafee, Symantec etc due to the lack of functionality) which was in dire need of a zoom tool as the presenter even commented that he was having difficulty seeing the screenshots on his screen (so why on earth they were included in the powerpoint presentation I don't know). At the end of the presentation I fired my laptop up, loaded zoomit and took it to the (Microsoft) presenter to show it to him and suggested he downloaded it and uses it in the future.
Update You can the presentation and virtual machines for Forefront by downloading the Microsoft Forefront and System Center Demonstration Toolkit. I intend to write up my thoughts from the meeting into a blog post later (as I have to provide feedback to the rest of the office anyway)

If you have outlook and try to print an email and the font is incredibly small, then you will need the hotfix from kb932538 referenced in the article on Sandy's page. I would link to the Microsoft site but the knowledge base article is not published which explains why you can't find any details on this problem when you search in technet (sigh).
I'll be requesting this one for my customers on Monday morning as I have at least two desktops that are having this problem. The interim solution is to hit reply or forward and then print the email.
Update I installed this patch on a customer site this morning and it approximately doubles the size of the font so the printout is now just about readable - still nowhere near the size of the printout if I hit forward (or reply) and then hit print. I'm not sure how to go about sending feedback to Microsoft that this doesn't solve the problem.

If you are decomissioning an old server and moving the data to a new server, an easy way to let all the hosts still connect to the old server is to create a cname alias in dns such that oldserver points to newserver.domain This way, any software coded to use unc names will still find the share but on the new server.
Unfortunately, by default the new server does not expect to get requests for the oldname so it ignores them and the client receives an error message. This is apparently fixed by following the instructions in KB281308.

I had to invoke Business critical support tonight (and I'm still working!) after a SBS2003 server would not complete the Internet Connectivity Wizard, complaining on the network configuration and website configuration. Microsoft give their partners free "Server Down" support if the problem is business critical affecting production. They will work with you 24/7 until the problem is solved. After 3 hours on the phone with remote desktop support we ended up rebooting the server and starting a repair installation of the server. For those of you who are Microsoft Partners and didn't know about the support, then go to Business Critical Support on partner.microsoft.com, a registered passport account is required that is joined to a Microsoft partner.
I'll update more on the patch problem when we get a resolution, but so far it's been a long 7.5 hours working on this - dst can wait.

You can sign up for the Windows Home Server Beta. Looking forward to this one.

Microsoft have just announced their Exam Insurance package where you get a free retake if you fail, 25% off your next exam if you pass and a years subscription to technet plus (which contains full versions of a lot of microsoft software) - I've requested details on pricing as their website doesn't mention it and unfortunately nobody is answering the phone at the nearest exam office.

I've been trying to use Microsoft's WWMX application to geotag some of the photos that we took on holiday ready to upload to zooomr, but the level of mapping detail for Jamaica and Grand Cayman Islands was pretty awful However I have found that by using Garmin's mapsource to load the track data from the gps and then saving the tracks to a gpx I can then use wwmx to automatically tag the photos if I had the gps on at the time the photos were taken.

However, for the rest of the photos that were taken without the gps I needed a better way of marking where they are taken. A combination of picassa and google earth makes the job very easy. First the photo's need to be loaded into Picassa - this will probably be done automatically (although for some reason Picassa doesn't like to find my cruise photos and they disappear from the folder view even though I can see them being scanned). Anyway, once the photos have been loaded, select the photos that need to be geotagged and then go to the tools menu, geotag, geotag with google earth. Then use Google Earth to navigate to the spot that the photos were taken -the satellite view does an outstanding job for this. Then just hit geotag, select the next picture and repeat (or do geotag all if they are all in the same place. At this point, the locations are written to the picture (exif data I presume) and can then be uploaded to flickr or zooomr already geotagged for you.

As it will take some time to load the cruise photo's, I took some pictures of the Pumpkin Festival at Oakland Nursery including the Worlds Fastest Pumpkin Carver and entries for the Worlds biggest pumpkin.

I knew there was a problem with using folder redirection and customizing internet explorer via group policy but I didn't realise there was a hotfix available for it (it's been around for quite some time looking at the date of the hotfix)

MS06-049 has issues with Windows 2000 and compressed files which could lead to compression. Make sure you read this discussion and the original patch article.

 I'm going to be at the Microsoft Technet - Gear up with Microsoft Windows Vista and Exchange Server at Easton tomorrow morning so if you are reading this and going too then come say "Hello!" I'll be the one with the FriendsInTech button on my shirt and talking with a british accent ;-)

I downloaded Microsoft's Antigen for Exchange last night and installed it on a server to remove some old virus's that were stuck in the mail store (there is no scheduled scan of the mailstore as realtime desktop and smtp scanning is now used for virus protection). Although the product did the job of deleting the mail, the whole admin interface is awful to use and the support on the Microsoft website is non existant - there are NO documents in the technet database on Antigen version 9. With the various quirks in the admin interface and no support, this software really should be released as a beta. I'd only say beta due to the fact that it did remove the virus's otherwise I'd recommend alpha status.
The extended entry contains my 22 points that I would provide as bug reports if it was in beta status.

I got an email on Friday from Microsoft with the following - "Thank you for your interest in the Mystery Solved Windows® licensing promotion. We've received your request for more information to help clarify Microsoft® Windows Desktop Licensing pre-loaded on the USB drive. Unfortunately, this Mystery Solved promotion was available in the U.S. only and while supplies last. Supply is depleted at this time, so we encourage you to please utilize the online alternative today.
Simply download* the Windows Desktop Licensing reference files directly at:www.microsoft.com/mysterysolved/corp. Oh well :-(

I've had several computers fail to install the MS06-020 patch for Flash - which seems to be caused by having more than one version of flash loaded on the pc in the past. The main solution at KB913433 is to go to the Macromedia site and download the new player directly

How to fix ie freezing when you use the drop down box and the answer (at least official) isn't to use firefox. This is due to a known issue with HP hardware and the MS06-015 / KB908531 patch.
On a related note I was wondering what readers policys on implementing patches are. We tend to wait a week or so to see if there are known issues (like above) but if everyone waited a week to see if there were no issues then this policy isn't very practical. Also testing the patches on machines isn't often very practical either - with a vast array of software on users desktops - most of which I would not use, just how do you test the effect of patches? Even getting hold of a spare box in most companies is unlikely as they are all in use. I've also found that the details in the patch documentation is getting sparser so it is also difficult to tell just what the patch does or what it affects.

And as to firefox - I'm not that impressed with the autoupdate facility for 1.5.0.2 - now most of my extensions don't work and on my home computer they seem to have been ALL wiped out - not sure if that is because it's loaded a new profile or not. I'll look at that later, but having all the extensions disappear is very annoying. The other strange thing is that I wasn't aware of there being any major patches or bugs in firefox - they've kept them pretty quiet unlike the latest MS patches - is there a mozilla security zine like the MS security posts that I should be subscribed to?

You'll still need to buy server licences though if you are running MS servers but Virtual Server 2005 is now free. Thanks to Random Thoughts

I'm having a problem where ctrl-p doesn't work in a kiosk mode machine with group policy restrictions and wonder if anyone has a clue? I've posted this to google groups.

I have a group policy enabled for a particular user for a locked down, kiosk user interface in a public area. Currently in *some* web pages the ctrl-P shortcut key will work, but on other web pages nothing happens when ctrl-p is pressed. Other shortcut keys such as ctrl-h, ctrl-r, ctrl-w activate properly (in the case of ctrl-w this option complains that the user does not have access to close the window).
We are running internet explorer as the shell in kiosk mode, but removing the kiosk mode doesn't make any difference. Likewise, we have disabled the toolbar, but adding the toolbar back and enabling the print button also does not make any difference - the print dialog box never appears on certain web sites.

www.msn.com, http://travel.msn.com/default.aspx both work but http://travel.msn.com/New_York_City_New_York_State_list_entitylist_attractions_23164_2.aspx or http://www.helsby.net or http://absoblogginlutely.net doesn't. There are a lot more sites that do/don't work but these are just a couple of examples.

Anyone come across this problem before?
I've uploaded the resultant set of policies wizard output to http://absoblogginlutely.net/test/lock.htm - the only thing I've done is change the domain name for security reasons.

Did you know that if you change the motherboard in your pc then MS will see this as a new pc and you therefore need a new licence of xp? Apparently you can replace a motherboard under warrenty (but I assume this needs to be the exact same model) but how likely is it that someone could obtain the exact same motherboard 9-12 months after their original purchase?
I read about this on the partner website (I think) which implied that this was a new licence change, but the system builder chat in Feb2005 mentions this too - so it's not actually that new.

It's patch tuesday today with two vulnerabilities out, one critical and one important. Needless to say I'll be looking at these in detail real soon now. Of interest is the fact that Microsoft now do an ISO of all the security patches available which is updated each month. This might be very useful to have when investigating a dial up pc.

Useful list of Microsoft podcasts which I didn't know they did - there are at least 3 of these that I want to listen to.

Microsoft are doing the 2nd chance again - see the 2nd chance site for details. Useful as I'm taking my Small Business Specialist exam on Thursday. I really need more time to prep for it but I'm on a tight deadline and things have been so hectic this week I've not had as much time to revise as I would have liked.

Microsoft Virtual labs will be handy - especially as there is a Live Communications server one and a Windows 2003R2 one. I've not really heard much about the new features in w2kr2 so will try and attend the lab soon.

For some reason I had a users computer ask for Microsoft Journal viewer source files whenever a pdf file was launched. According to Lancaster University this is a known problem!

You need to install (or repair) Microsoft Journal Viewer 1.5 using a reliable method (explained below).

You can do this by downloading the viewer from Microsoft's site:

1. download the viewer from: Microsoft's download Journal Viewer site.
2. run it.
3. follow instructions
4. retry the Adobe Acrobat update.

I tried to import my SBS server from Virtual Server into vmware player as I was fed up with Symantec complaining that the program was trying to tamper with the virus protection. For some reason the import would not work with an error message stating "err -2147213293: The source virtual machine is paused. To convert it, please shut down and close the virtual machine". It actually turns out that vmware doesn't like a virtual server name ending in a period. Renaming the file let the import go through ok. I've logged a bug about this on the vmware forums but so far I'm impressed.
The vmplayer logfiles are stored in %temp%
Update Just wish I could work out why the server takes forever to get past the Applying Computer Settings when it boots up (in both virtual servers) - I think it is something to do with only using a wifi access card for the internet and it is somehow trying to access dns records or something strange

Use the Microsoft Product Licensing Advisor, a wizard-driven tool that provides consistent advice to help you better understand various Microsoft product licensing and pricing options. Works pretty well and gives you the part numbers and approximate price for the software. US only though.

Microsoft have launched their own version of a website that allows you to get access about event id's. The advantage to this service is that it has links to the Microsoft knowledge base articles whereas you only get direct links if you pay eventid.net. Having said that, you do get extra peer input on problems with eventid.net

kb article 909444 has how to fix the issues that may arise when you install Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-051: Vulnerabilities in MSDTC and COM+ Could Allow Remote Code Execution (902400). Although I've not had any of these issues - yet - this will be good reference for me.

Office 2003 sp2 has been released along with sp2 for Visio 2003 and sp2 for OneNote 2003. That's going to take some investigation back at the office!
Update It's a 100+mb download for the full install or 50+mb for the intelligent download AND there is no uninstall feature.
Update2 There is a webcast on the 6th October about the outlook update.

It looks like the Google Desktop software has been updated recently as now the index status does not show how much of the index has been completed (or it has finally indexed the computer). The status on this computer is normally stuck at about 20% complete but this information no longer appears on the status page. However the cpu usage of the desktop search does seem to be often pegged around the 50% mark so something is still not quite right there.
The Antispyware software also seems to have been updated as the nightly scan that ran last night picked up Ultravnc as potential spyware even though it has been installed on the pc for about 2 months and I had previously flagged it as ignore.

I've been accepted onto the Microsoft Onecare beta so as soon as I'm back to base I'll be installing this onto the main machine. Hopefully the antivirus software will be compatible with google desktop (which STILL doesn't work with Nod32 antivirus or properly on my desktop pc). There is no antispyware software at the moment but that is slated to come at a later date.

I tried my first web page in .net using the visual web developer beta 2 (why am I a sucker for trying out beta software?) and it didn't work - returning an error message http error 403 Forbidden. Oddly enough, if I opened the same page in Internet explorer it worked ok. From my experience with IIS I knew this was something to do with NTLM authentication but trying to find out where this was configured was rather bewildering. In the end, the post on the microsoft forums gives the answer - "Select the Solution Explorer view, and right click the very first element of the tree (the project itself). Choose property pages and select Start Options. On the Server section, clear the NTLM checkbox and save the configuration and it now works in firefox. MS's official response is that this is by design to ensure websites are secure. Personally I just wonder how many websites on the internet insist on using NTLM authentication.....not many I guess so I'm afraid this excuse doesn't ring true to me.
As a side note, I can't see how you are meant to permalink to the individual post in the forum - there doesn't seem to be any visible anchors to use. I had to use the WebDevelopers Extension to display the anchors. I've logged a bug in the forums on this point too.

I downloaded Ubuntu this afternoon and tried it out as a virtual machine. Unfortunately the screen was garbled as the default installation uses 24bits for the screen resolution andVirtual PC can't cope with that.
It can be fixed (each time you boot the virtual pc) by doing the following that I have added to the Ubuntu faq

• Press Ctrl Alt and Backspace at the same time. This will kill the xserver and drop you down to the console.


• cd /etc/X11


• sudo vim xorg.conf


• Now, scroll down to Section "Screen" and find the entry named "!DefaultDepth". Change the setting you find there from 24 to 16.


• Move the cursor to the "2" in 24.


• Hit the D key. Spacebar key. (You now deleted the "2".)


• Hit the D key. Spacebar key. (You now deleted the "4".)


• Hit the I key for insert. Type "16". Hit Ctrl-C to stop inserting.


• Hit a colon, cursor jumps to bottom left. Type a "w" as the command and press Enter. This saves your changes.


• Hit a colon, type a "q" as command and press Enter. You are now back at shell prompt.


• startx to get back to the xserver screen.

KB article 896358 shows the steps on re-enabling this ability on intranet/lan locations.

Unfortunately it seems to be MS bashing this morning - Virtual Earth from Microsoft is out (but meant to be released on Monday) but the aerial data is awful. If you zoom in on Columbus Ohio, the only time you get real data is when you get about 100 miles across on the screen. Any other zoom strength has no pictures which is basically useless. Ohio just looks completely green

Longhorn is apparently going to be called Vista according to an announcement earlier this week. Already I've seen posts saying this stands for "Virus infections, spyware, trojans and adware!"
Oh dear oh dear oh dear.......

MS Antispyware decided that logmein was spyware last night due to the possibility of it being used for remote control from afar. I've had this software installed on the computer for several months and this is the first time that it has been detected. Naturally I've flagged it as "ignore always"

The missing code in the VS2005 tutorial has now been added so I can continue programming. However, they other problem I had of errors when installing the product has been marked as resolved due to not being able to reproduce it! If only helpdesk calls could be closed like that...

Grrr - firefox crashes after I've uploaded a file to a website. Happens on geocaching.com, this blog and on Microsoft's site uploading a bug report. Very annoying as the whole browser crashes :-( Not sure what has caused this, probably some faulty extension or something. (It happens when the page you get after uploading a file is displayed). I've sent several reports back to Microsoft and the mozilla group, but the latter is annoying as most of the time the bug reporting application seems to freeze too :-(

Microsoft have released a beta of Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP that is suitable for computers in shared access such as libraries etc. It has features such as resetting the boot partition back to the administrator saved configuration each time the machine is rebooted (unless the administrator specifies that changes should be saved), Windows restrictions, policies etc. Looks like it could be handy (although I'd need another machine to try this out on). The local library had a copy of limewire installed on their desktop machine the other day that managed to persist after a reboot. Seeing as though this machine is *meant* to be locked down I'd like to know how that managed to get installed on the machine.