Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

Error 404.2 when running Connect Computer on SBS 2008 / 2011 with Trend WFBS 8.0

Sunday, May 19th, 2013

This issue has been reported recently in a few of my fellow MVP’s blogs.  The issue is that after installing Trend Micro WFBS 8.0 onto SBS 2008 or SBS 2011 server, when you try to connect computers to the SBS server using the http://connect wizard, the Welcome Page displays, as below, but as soon as you select the “Start Connect Computer Program”, button, you get a 404 – File or directory not found error as you can see in the screens below.

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Trend have investigate and found that their installation program incorrectly changes one of the IIS settings.  They have documented the solution here

In essence however, you can fix it with the commands below (taken from the Trend KB article with my own modifications)

 

Fix the access policy permission of SBS Client Deployment Applications using command prompt:

  1. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories.
  2. Right-click on Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.
  3. Run the following commands:

CD inetsrv

appcmd.exe set config "SBS Client Deployment Applications" /section:handlers /accessPolicy:None

appcmd.exe set config "SBS Client Deployment Applications" /section:handlers /accessPolicy:Read,Script

 

I have tried this on my own SBS server and it works fine.

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Problems using the Windows 7 USB Download Tool

Sunday, May 19th, 2013

I’m spending some time rebuilding my aging laptop with Windows 8.  I’ve chosen to do a complete reformat and install using Windows 8 Enterprise.  In order to install Win 8 Enterprise, I’m using the Windows 7 USB/Download Tool to create a bootable image from an ISO over to my USB stick.

This morning I’ve tried 4 different USB keys and all of them have failed to be able to create a Windows 8 bootable image.  The Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool keeps telling me that there’s errors and problems creating the USB image. 

In the end I figured out the issue – my Trend Micro WFBS 8.0 antivirus software was silently blocking the attempts of the USB download tool to create the bootable image.  I temporarily unloaded (not uninstalled) the Trend WFBS Client Security Agent and now I’m creating the bootable USB without an issue.  You might want to consider this yourself regardless of the Antivirus software you use as they can all block writes to USB if they have that capability.

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Surface Pro to be available in Australia from May 30

Thursday, May 16th, 2013

I’ve had a Surface RT for 6 months or so now, and it’s pretty cool.  My one big moan about it is that it cant run the full Office suite including Outlook which I need if I am to replace my laptop with some other device.  Well news today is that Microsoft will release the SurfacePro devices here in Australia from May 30th.  At last!!!  Now I just need to figure out if I can justify the $1099 RRP for the 128GB model, and then fork out the extra $149.99 RRP for the Type Cover… decision, decisions, decisions…

Oh – I might have a SurfaceRT for sale soon too if anyone is interested Smile

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2 Patches you need on SBS 2011 Standard

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

When you are deploying a new SBS 2011 Standard network, your server will need a number of patches.  In amongst them are two key patches that you SHOULD deploy first and foremost before adding clients to the network.  These patches are listed below.

Update Rollup 3 for Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard

Update for Windows Server Update Services 3.0 Service Pack 2

These two patches give the ability for SBS 2011 Standard to properly support Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 machines.  The first patch ensures that the http://connect wizard works for Windows 8 clients.  The second patch ensures that WSUS on SBS 2011 Standard can correctly support both Windows 8 clients and Windows Server 2012 clients.

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Display Corruption on Windows 7 and Intel Express Chipset Family

Thursday, March 21st, 2013

I’ve had problems with my Toshiba Portege R600 for a few months now where when using it the display will corrupt from time to time.  You can see an example of it below.

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I’ve been thinking that it had some major hardware issue and was about to replace it.  I discovered however that there is a fix for it.  Microsoft has documented here about how systems with certain Intel Express chipsets and memory configurations are not symmetric (ie 2 or 4GB of RAM) will have issues.  The solution – very simple.  Disable the Virtualisation option in the system BIOS and the problem is now gone!!!

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Bringing SBS 2008 to patch Windows 8 and Window Server 2012

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

I recently had to reinstall WSUS 3.0 SP2 onto an SBS 2008 server which became horribly messed up.  I followed the SBS 2008 Repair guide and some notes of my own here and then applied WSUS 3.0 SP2 over the top of it.  That was great, but then I had issues with the existing clients not being able to check in to the SBS 2008 server.  They all gave error 800B0001 when you tried to do an update.  That issue is covered of with a Microsoft Update available MS KB 2720211 here – but wait – don’t go downloading that just yet.  You see – this SBS 2008 server now has a Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 machine in the network as well – so you will need to apply this update MS KB 2734608 you can download it here.  Now THAT is the update you want to get as it includes the MS KB 2720211 as well. 

Installing it is simple – apply MS KB 2734608 and reboot the server.  Then you are good to go.  If you have Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 servers that were reporting into the WSUS server BEFORE you installed the update then you will also need to do the following;

  1. On the affected client, open cmd.exe in elevated mode
  2. Type the following commands. Make sure that you press Enter after you type each command:
    Net stop wuauserv
    rd /s %windir%\softwaredistribution\
    Net start wuauserv

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Geek Tracert

Monday, February 11th, 2013

Someone has way too much time on their hands… I heard about this one on facebook.

Try doing a TRACERT 216.81.59.173 and see what it comes up with.

Now Tracert for those that don’t know is a tool used to trace the route information takes to get from you to a given point on the Internet.  It does this by revealing the names of the various routers along the way and is used predominantly for diagnostic purposes.

Anyway – if you do a TRACERT –h 100 216.81.59.173 you get the full story… see below if you want.

 

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Synchronization with your WP failed – could also be iPad, or Windows Mail

Wednesday, January 30th, 2013

I saw this message over the course of this week coming into my mailbox.  No one else in the company was affected just me.  I saw it on an Exchange 2007 server that was running on SBS 2008.

It also came back in a number of other formats including

Synchronization with your WP failed for 3 items

Synchronization with your iPad failed for 3 items

Synchronization with your WindowsMail failed for 3 items

The body of the message went on to show

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as well as the appointments it had failed to synchronise.

I could not figure out what it was at first and then realised that the appointments in question all had a new status of “Working Elsewhere” which is new to Office 2013.  All this started when I upgraded to Office 2013 and then started to use these new status to describe that I was working on a customer site vs just out of the office.

I figured that these devices or ActiveSync does not know how to handle the new status and therefore it gives the error.  Once I reverted my appointments back to Out of office, it worked just fine.

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How to reclaim space after upgrading to Office 2013

Wednesday, January 16th, 2013

I found that after upgrading to Office 2013, that I had lost quite a bit of disk space, but did not know where.  I used the TreeSize Free tool to find it.

Below you can see that the OneNote\14.0 folder is using over 9GB of disk space (a lot out of my 120GB SSD in my laptop).  Given that I was now using OneNote 2013 and the older OneNote 2010 was removed by the upgrade, I figured I could delete the entire 14.0 folder.

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Naturally I made sure I had full backup of my laptop before doing this, but after deleting the folder, I’ve seen no ill effects at all and was able to reclaim over 9GB of space.

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WD DX 4000 – Software Update Available v1.5.7.30

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

I’ve been away for a few days and came back to find that my WD Sentinel DX4000 has software updates available for it.  You can do the update manually or enable it to do automatic updates.  Personally I prefer to do manual updates on a number of my key servers so that I can review what has changed prior to installing the update.  You can check out what is now in the v1.5.7.30 update here.

Upon reviewing the above mentioned PDF, I can see that they recommend I have a specific Microsoft Update Rollup 4 (MS KB #2757013) installed before I do this WD update.  Glad I checked as whilst I did have this update installed, I’m not sure what would have happened had I let it do it’s thing automatically.  You can force download and install of the update from the Monitor Tab on the Dashboard as you can see below.  Installation takes maybe 5 to 10 minutes once it’s downloaded and it will need a reboot after it’s done (which it does automatically).

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The big new feature in this release is that it adds the ability for the WD Sentinel to act as an iSCSI target which many people have asked for. They have incorporated the iSCSI support from StarWind and have even got a cool dashboard add in that you can see below.

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From the Dashboard, you can quickly create iSCSI targets and then have iSCSI clients connect to them.  I’ll do some performance comparisons later of this vs. my QNAP so you can get a guideline of the difference.

Overall – this upgrade went smoothly for me on one of my two WD DX 4000 Sentinel units.  The other one (my main production one which I did 2nd) lost the ability to pickup a DHCP IP address after the reboot.  I had two WD supplied cables connect it to my Netgear switch. I tried many different things, and in the end replaced BOTH network cables with new cables – it now works fine.  I can’t see why the cables don’t work as they did before the upgrade and both cables work fine with other laptops.  Further testing shows the WD cables don’t work now with EITHER of my WD Sentinel units… One of my units uses the cables supplied by WD, the other is using a single cable I’ve supplied on my own.  It appears for now, I need to replace the cables with alternate cables so that my systems can continue to function.  I’m going to take this up with WD as it should not be like this Sad smile

I am looking forward to playing wit the iSCSI functionality and will do some performance tests later compared to my QNAP.

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