TechPublishing Now MS Certified

TechPublishing Now MS Certified
Professor Robert McMillen, MBA Microsoft Certified Trainer and Solutions Expert

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Couldn't start routing and remote access in Windows 2008

I was trying to install the network policy service in 2008 to setup a Radius server. The policy wouldn't install properly, so I uninstalled and reinstalled with the same results. After poking around I tried to manually start the remote access service. It said that the dependancy service wouldn't start. I went through each dependency and found that everything started except for Telephony. I tried to start it and it would start and then stop right away.
I went into the properties and looked at who was logging in to start this service. It said it was the Network service. For some reason the rights for Network were not enough to start it. I could have looked everywhere, but instead I changed it to the local system account and it started up. Now the rest of the services started and the policies installed. Success!

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Lots of interviews this week

Yesterday we recorded our radio show for KUIK and KKOL. Lost of good topics this week including information about the iPhone 4 leak. I was interviewed today by Lars Larson for his national show discussing the constitutional ramifications of the case and how technology changes law. I was also on CBS affiliate KOIN in Portland today discussing how to make a computer run faster. Eric Taylor brought his wife's PC in. He was confident the issue was not a virus because he had Norton 360 on it, but he was surprised when I found over 200 viruses and spy-ware programs that got past it. The computer runs a lot faster now, and it was a fun segment.

Monday, April 26, 2010

Studying for a Microsoft test

Had a lot of little issues today, but nothing too perplexing.
The big news is that I started studying for my last two tests to get my 2008 Microsoft Enterprise MCITP.
I hate studying for tests when I haven't been doing them for a while. If you get out of the groove it takes a lot of mental will power to get back into them. It's way easier if you just keep one going after the other. The last test I passed was the Vista test. It was pretty easy and only took about a month to prepare for.
The 70-649 is a much harder test, so I will be working on this for a while. I've passed so many of these I decided to pull out all of my certifications. I'm coming up on around 40 of them. Many people get these paper certs and never really use them. There are 400,000 MCSE's on NT 4, but by the time you get to 2008 it drops to 55,000.
These tests are way harder than the the late 90's when I started on NT 4. I think it's thinning out the herd.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Hive error after server crash

Life is full of surprises. The server disaster of the day was a server that crashed sometime in the night for a customer and came up with a hive corruption error on reboot. All the exe files worked but anything with an msc extension didn't.

After nosing around I did the following: I went into the C drive and pushed out the permissions without making any changes. I figured something caused a permissions change and that would fix it. Then I re registered all of the Volume Shadow Copy service files after stopping vss. Not all of the files regsitered properly but most of them did. MSC files started to work.

After that I was able to start DHCP and some other services that were down including Shadow Copy. Then I re ran Service PAck 2. After rebooting we still had a hive error and IE wouldn't work right. MSTDC also wasn't starting. To fix MSDTC I added a %systemroot%\system32\dtclog folder. It was missing. Then I ran msdtc -resetlog from a command prompt.  The MSDTC service then started.

Since the server was running IE 7 I went ahead and copied over the setup files for IE 8 and ran the upgrade. After a reboot everything came back without error.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Exchange 2003 Global Address List

Saw a strange GAL problem today with a new SBS 2003 install from a few months ago. We didn't see it at the time but the GAL wasn't updating. The first step was to go to System Manager and rebuild the list the list under the recipients update service. Then restart the MTA stacks.
Since that didn't work we deleted and recreated the Gloabl Address List. Now the server GAL showed the new list properly. Next we went to an Outlook client and went to see if it updated. It didn't so we deleted and re added the offline GAL from the server. We then logged off and back on and it still didn't show up. After waiting some time however, it finally updated itself.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Saw the new IBM servers

Ex5 came out and I went to a lunch and learn in Portland to check them out. There are some pretty amazing changes going on with the new architecture. I also like that they have a new SAN that is just solid state drives.
The biggest change besides the faster processors is that they have tons of RAM slots. This way you can create a lot more VMs.
At the end I asked them why they are still using Intel chips instead of their own Cell chips, and they did not want to answer the question. I should look further into this.
They use them in the PS3 game console and work amazing. What reason could they have for not using them in a server?

Monday, April 12, 2010

SQL is a pain

I have been working on upgrading a customer from Symantec Backup Exec 10d to 12.5 today. I hadn't done one that was this old for a while so I forgot to you have to be on at least 11d in order to do this. So I had to completely uninstall 10d in order to do a fresh install.
The uninstall went fairly well, but the install of 12.5 failed with some error codes I had to look up. Since I was working remotely I forgot you had to be in console mode in remote desktop in order to get it to work right, so I ran an mstsc /v server /console.
I re ran the setup only to be stopped again. This time it was SQL. There was a half way installed version of SQL 2005 Express from a previous vendor. It wasn't showing up in add and remove programs but it it was definitely there. Now I had to go through the registry and uninstall each registry key by running an msiexec command for each SQL key that was found. KB article 909967 explains all of this.
The problem is that one of these keys still won't uninstall, so it's time to call Microsoft.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Sorry IPAD, maybe it's just me

I just don't think the IPAD will be a laptop, netbook, or any other replacement for anything. It may be a whole new reason to be plugged in, but I don't see it as a replacement. More than half of the apps are games according to PC World. So you'll be able to play solitaire or Qbert more often. You can't play console games with your fingers, so it won't replace that. Maybe we'll be more like South Korea where games are more important than taking care of our kids, or our kids will be on the IPAD so much we'll get more sleep.
We may even decide to travel with them to watch movies and send email, but we'll still need our laptops.
In a few years this could, and possible will change. This just doesn't work in it's current consumer only form.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Verizon FIOS support

I had noticed we had a bad route last night, so I called up FIOS support to tell them we needed them to fix it so we could go to a certain block of IP addresses on the internet. It was for one of our customers who needed to traverse into another ISPs block of addresses to get to a website. I got this horrible support lady who told me she couldn't help me because as long we could get to the internet in general, then there was no problem. When we have a customer with a T1, we deal with these routing issues all the time. The ISP, even Verizon, typically has no problem in looking at trace route logs to assist and find out where the bad router is.
So this Verizon lady said to me "As long as you can get out to a website then its not our problem. Do you want me to change the entire internet just for you?"
Then I asked to have her create a ticket so it can be escalated above her, and she said no. Then her supervisor was consulted and he said no. So I asked to speak to him and he took an hour to call me back. In the meantime the customer is going crazy trying to get to this site.
Finally when he called me back I reamed him and he did escalate it and it was resolved. But that was two hours I will never get back.

Monday, April 5, 2010

The old dog won't let go

We are trying to set our company up to support a new office for an existing customer, but the old IT provider just won't let go. Don't you just hate that?
They won't give us access to any of the hardware, and of course they're the only ones with the passwords. It may be time to go and do some resetting.

Did a lot of interviews over the weekend for the new IPAD. I did the Lars Larson show, Jeff Krupf show, and Koin News. Lots of fun telling people to wait for the next IPAD release.

Friday, April 2, 2010

No dialin box for VPN in Windows 7?

I just had a call from one of my business partners and he told me he ran into a problem. He wanted to use the dial up box so he could VPN into the network so he could login to a Windows domain just like he did in Windows XP. Since the dial up box is missing I told him to do the following. First create your VPN connection in the Network and sharing center.
Go to the Windows\system32 folder. Create a file called dial.bat. Type in rasdial "connection name" username and password and save it.
Then go to Control Panel, Administrative tools, Task Scheduler and create a new task. Allow it to run whether or not the user is logged in, and with the highest admin privilege. Then choose the trigger tab. Add a trigger to have it run at system startup. Then choose the next tab over to have it run a program. Choose to run the bat file that you just created. Reboot and he was able to login to the domain. I hope that helps somebody out there with the same issue.