The Random Musings of an IT Consultant.......

Had calls from two of our client's staff this morning who are working from home and connecting to an SBS 2003 server from their own PCs. Both had had this month's security updates downloaded to their PC last night and could not connect to RWW this morning. It turned out that we had to place the URL for their company's SBS box in Trusted Sites in IE. Why it wasn't already there and why it had worked before (they both were running SP3) is a mystery.

Sandy Donald has recently reported on the UKSBSG Yahoo! group that he has seen an issue with Outlook 2007 connecting to the GAL over RPC/HTTP (or Outlook Anywhere if you prefer). He reports the following in his post: "I did some more digging and testing. My conclusions are that after the application of Office 2007 SP2, Outlook cannot reconnect to directories over http. It can reconnect to mailbox and public folders but not directories. So, GAL is not available and the offline message appears. I have restored a client to the pre Office SP2 install status using System Restore (having proven the issue on this client by installing SP2) and after the rather lengthy process of Office 2007 having to do a lot of reconfiguring when Outlook is started (after the System Restore) including an apparently necessary reboot, and error 1719 Windows Installer, - but no reboot occurred. Anyway Outlook 2007 is back to SP1 and, hey presto, Gal is visible and directories are connected over http. You know, on the Outlook client...

We've installed a Server Core box into our network here so we can run Hyper-V as well as VMware ESX. We have also set it up as a DC and DNS server so that of our SBS box is offline things might continue to work a bit better than they have up until now :-) Instructions on how to do this are a bit sparse and my Technician got this information from the SBSC Newsgroups: From your description, I know that you want to add Windows Server 2008 Server Core to SBS domain. If that's not correct, please don't hesitate to let me know. Unfortunately there is no article talking about how to add Windows 2008 Core to SBS domain. You can add Windows 2008 Server Core to SBS domain with the steps below on the SBS server: 1. Open a Command Prompt window. To do this, Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK. 2. Perform the following commands in the sequence noted: Note In these instructions, "drive" represents the letter of your DVD drive on SBS server with Windows 2008 DVD inserted. 2. At the command...

We've implemented a VMware ESX farm in our offices (and we do have a Hyper-V server as well) and I have been looking at using VMware Consolidated Backup along with our NFR copy of Backup Exec to take snapshots of the VMs. I'm cheap see :-) I have got the VCB command line utilities working fine with the given documentation but whan I set BE up it failed with invalid username or password. This has been doing my head in. However looking around I discovered one post where someone had improved the JavaScript files that come with BE integration module and this gave me the idea to see if I could find out what username and password were being passed. I edited glue.js and wrote the username and password out to STDERR. In the CONFIG.JS I had put the username and password in (I'll lock down when it's all working) and was using a domain user in the form of domain\username. When I looked at the output in the logfile I was seeing domainusername all together. Being a JavaScript file it needed two \\ between the...

We've just had an issue at one of our non-mmanaged clients where they have had a number of machines running at 100% CPU due to the Windows Update Service going bonkers. The solution we have used on all machines is as follows: On the machine in question carry out the following: Log in as administrator. Download updates from step 1 and 2 from KB927891 into C:\ http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927891 Go to Start>Run, type net stop wuauserv. Kill the process ‘svchost.exe’ using 100% CPU if service fails to stop. ------------------- Install updates ------------------- Reinstall WUA 3.0 with option /WUFORCE from step 2. Install update 927891 from step 1. ----------------------- Re-register DLLs ----------------------- Open Notepad and copy/paste the following text: regsvr32 wuapi.dll regsvr32 wuaueng.dll regsvr32 atl.dll regsvr32 wucltui.dll regsvr32 wups.dll regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll regsvr32 wucltui.dll regsvr32 wups.dll regsvr32 wuweb.dll regsvr32 wups2.dll regsvr32 msxml.dll regsvr32 msxml3.dll regsvr32 msxml2...

After an exchange with an APC Support person a while back I discovered that you can get lots more information about your UPS by using a web browser. If you go :3052/">http://<servername>:3052 you get a login page to your attached UPSes. This gives a shedload more information about the UPS then you get from the PowerChute software. Well worth investigating.

I came across a situation on our network where we needed to give a local user the right to "Log on as a Service" on one of our servers. This was to support a LOB application that we run on a server here in our office. The problem I had was that for both the "Log on as a service" and the "Log on as a Batch job" the "Add User or Group" button was greyed out. This is because our SBS 2003 box has a Domain Group Policy which sets the rights to these services at a Domain level and stops any changes being made elsewhere. To get around this I did the following: 1) Logon to the server in question as Domain Administrator. Open up the Active Directory Users & Computers (ADUC) snap-in. 2) Right click on the Domain and choose Properties. Click on the Group Policy tab and open the group policies. You have to do this unless you install the GPMC on the server. 3) Create a new Group Policy and name it something appropriate. 4) Navigate to Computer Configuration / Windows Settings / Security Settings / Local Policies / User...

The next meeting of the London Small Business IT Pro Group will take place on Monday, 13th November. If you can let me know you're coming that'll be great (just so I've got some idea of numbers) otherwise just turn up. This month we welcome Matt McSpirit, Partner Technology Specialist for Vista who is coming to talk about all things Exchange 2007, Vista and Office 2007. In fact he would like us to tell him what we'd like to hear about so he can tailor some of his talk to our requirements, so if you let me know you are coming also let me know what subjects around EVO you'd like to hear about and I'll feed that back. Please let me have your input by 9:00am Wednesday. The meeting will be start at 5:30pm Monday 13th November at Microsoft House, 10 Great Pulteney Street, London, W1F 9NB. Drinks and pizza will be served and the meeting will finish around 8:30pm in time for those who travel any distance to get away and for the locals to retire to the pub :-) This is as far as I know the last meeting...

Just to remind you that the next meeting of the London Small Business IT Pro Group will take place this coming Monday, 11th September. Following on from our presentation on Kaseya back in June we have two presentations on Managed Service software this month. The first is by Doug Wilson and Dr. Alistair Forbes from HoundDog Technology and the second is by Ian Blyth. Ian presently works for Pygmalion, but was the Lead Technology Specialist for MOM in the UK for 4 years. He will be talking about all things MOM and telling us what he can about the up and coming System Center Essentials. The meeting will be start at 5:30pm Monday 11th September at Microsoft House, 10 Great Pulteney Street, London, W1F 9NB. Drinks and pizza will be served and the meeting will finish around 8:30pm in time for those who travel any distance to get away and for the locals to retire to the pub :-) If you could let me know you are coming that would be appreciated. Just to remind you of the other dates we have booked this Autumn: 9th October...

Our internal SBS2003 box and one at a clients were starting to get a bit short of space on the C: drive. One of the culprits were the Sharepoint database files which were well over a gig on our system and .5 gig at our clients. I read up various documents on the MS site and a few NG and blog posts before trying this and I have now successfully moved both sets of Sharepoint databases. I would strongly recommend you read the document at http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/1/6/11671e4d-fb21-489c-870f-db36fd21a7d2/SBS_MoveDataFolders.DOC before doing this. Because I'm basically lazy by nature and prefer to do things the easy way and I really don't like typing in obscure OSQL commands I decided to write a batch file that would do it all for me. Here it is: -------------------------------- @echo off rem Move CompanyWeb rem Based on MS document and posts on newsgroups rem YOU MUST CHANGE THESE SOURCE AND TARGET FOLDERS TO MATCH YOUR OWN rem DON'T FORGET THE TRAILING "\" EITHER OTHERWISE NASTY...

If you are using Sophos Puremessage and are having problems getting Server-side ActiveSync to work with either your PPC or your Windows Mobile 5 (WM5) device then you might need to do the following: In the Puremessage console go to Jobs / Exchange Information Store / Databases tab and check Public Store Background Scanning and Private Store Background Scanning. Click the Apply button at the bottom of the console. I've never been able to get Server-side ActiveSync working since I bought my iPaq a year or so ago, but haven't had time to work out why not. A chance comment by someone in the UKSBSG Yahoo! group put me onto it. Thanks to James and Alexandre! Since I found this out I've discovered there's a Sophos KB article about it - www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/3186.html . It's great when you know what to look for isn't it

The guys at Microsoft have released a paper for comment on how to use Certificates to secure wireless access on an SBS network. Read about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sbsdocsteam/archive/2006/05/16/599362.aspx They want your comments. I have already installed something similar in our office and at one clients. Having an Official Microsoft How-To will be very useful.

Jools Holland and his Rhythm & Blues Orchestra that is Went to see them at The Broadway Theatre in Peterborough last night. An incredible night out. If you get the chance to see these guys live, grab it with both hands - they are amazing.......