I’ve been moving all my home PC’s over to wireless as I reshuffle the rooms in my house. As part of this I have had a nightmare of a time with one machine being unable to connect to anything, the media centre dropping connections to the server, and other general weirdness.
I tracked it all to the Browser service and lack of decent name resolution. I have never really liked the browser service, it’s never reliable, but in this scenario, it should perform fine.
I have seen this one a few times and it’s always entertaining to watch and hard to fix.
Lets say you have a domain name of company.com.xx and you host it yourself. The primary is stored on your DNS server in your DMZ and the secondary with your ISP.
Now someone in your country will be hosting the .com.xx records. They will have a DNS server with a listing of delegations, that is who is responsible for sub-domains under .com.xx like your company.com.xx
This is where it gets interesting. Delegation is done by hostname, not by IP address. In this case it will be delegated to something like NS1.company.com.xx and NS2.YourISP.com.xx
If you get an EventID 14148 on your ISA Server (2K4 in this case) and it’s running on an IBM Server, chances are the IBM ServeRAID software has stolen port 8080 for it’s own use. Specifically Miniwinagent will be using it. The docs on IBM’s site say it’s not critical to the ServerRAID management software and only used for firmware updates. If you want port 8080 back you can either uninstall and reinstall without the feature, or just disable the Service.
A while ago due to a combination of circumstances I decided to build a Windows Media Centre PC. A few friends had them and spoke highly and being stuck on an island it seemed like a bright idea to pass the time between dives, fishing and drinking. I started, but never had the time to get it completed.
Then I moved back to Oz and it got put in a box for 12 months.
I recently resurrected the project and decided to fire the thing up with Vista. This is the story of woe that followed.
My Jasjam won’t browse the Internet successfully. It’s actually Windows Mobile 2005 at fault.
Turns out the Proxy settings buried under Start – Settings – Connections – Connections – Advanced – Select Networks – Edit – Proxy Settings
Are set to my work proxy, and it learns this every time I plug in to use ActiveSync, it learns them again.
I was installing Vista Ultimate onto a PC a few weeks back. The machine had a HDD installed that used to have XP on it. The HDD was configured as a Dynamic Disk and a single partition.
Vista could not install. Vista could see a single unrecognizable partition. Fair enough I think, it doesn’t like dynamic disks, I’ll just delete it.
Errgh, No. Vista doesn’t let you delete partitions from dynamic disks though the installer. The only solution I could find was to either boot to a 3rd party utility CD (which wasn’t handy) and nuke the partitions, or, the one I chose, to pluck the disk, drop it in an external USB caddy, and delete the partition from there on another XP PC.
I used to love the APC Smart UPS range. Fully line interactive, they’ll work of nearly any input power and give perfect output power. They don’t cut to batteries unless there is basically no input whatsoever, so brownouts or out of frequency gensets don’t bother them in the least, or even flatten the batteries. Just what you need living on a minesite, or somewhere the power is often dodgy. I still like them for server rooms, very flexible solution, but not for home.
I recently bought a power meter and the results were not good…..
264W – UPS running 2 PC’s, a laptop and a few other bits.
I find it fairly frequent that I have to assist a company redesign or improve their exchange infrastructure. When changing servers around Move Mailbox is a particularly handy tool. There is an absolute dearth of information on the Outlook side of things however. Here is a few things I have found that may be useful.
When you move a mailbox Outlook will (generally) get redirected without issue. It will do this by connecting to the original server, whop will then issue an instruction as to the new mailbox location based on what information is stored in AD. Some (5% or less) will not automatically redirect due to dodgy profiles.
Active Directory uses the _msdcs.domain.local sub-domain to host SRV records. Depending on your domain structure and upgrade path, you may find this domain delegated rather than held as part of your “domain.local” zone. The conditions are in this KB article.
Now lets get tricky. Let’s say your _msdcs is delegated as in the picture above. Let’s also say over the years you replace and upgrade servers as your network grows. Sooner or later you’ll most likely replace your original domain controllers.
I am very careful on servers to disable ALL unused network interfaces, lest they corrupt the domain. Here is why:
I once got called out on a job to give MS PSS support a hand onsite. Unusual I thought at the time, normally I ring PSS, not they ring me. Anyway, they had a rough time getting a client up and running and needed someone on the ground that could help sort through it.
When I got there the Windows 2000 Domain Controller and Exchange 2000 Server were both very unhappy. The Exchange database was offline, corrupted, and the Domain had more errors in the event log than I had seen before.
Now this may be old news, but hey, it’s new to me.
I ran a DCDIAG /test:dns today and received an error
DNS server: 128.9.0.107 (b.root-servers.net.)
1 test failure on this DNS server
This is not a valid DNS server.
PTR record query for the 1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa. failed on the DNS server 128.9.0.107
Well it would appear that way back in 2004 the B Root Server had a change of IP Address as advised here. The old address was valid for some time but has since been de-commissioned, although I don’t know when exactly.
Lets say you have a server – MAILSERVER1
And you rebuild it for some reason. It’s a clean rebuild. As part of this rebuild you delete the Computer Account from AD. When you add the computer to the domain again, a new computer account is created.
BUT – if you have “Only Secure Updates” enabled in DNS, the new computer account doesn’t have permission to modify or overwrite the existing DNS entries. You’ll get an Event ID 11166 on boot up of the new server from DnsApi in it’s System Event Log. It’s only a Warning, not an Error, but the consequences could be significant. In my case Exchange Auth kept failing, despite logging no other errors in the event log. Don’t forget this applies to the PTR or Reverse lookup as well.
It’s tough for media companies these days. We all hear about terrorism piracy of Movies and Music, and how it’s destroying the world.
Well I hear a rumor that now it’s moved to books. If you for example were stuck on a remote island with no access to external print media, then it wouldn’t be surprising that you found this floating round.
Reading books on a PC or handheld device just isn’t relaxing. Luckily Adobe has a “print in booklet” function, allowing a novel to be broken into manageable booklets.
Network Attached Storage – hey that sounds pretty cool. That should be kinda like iSCSI? Ahh – no. NAS is the buzzword for what used to be known when I was a young boy as a File Server.
WOW – a real file server? yep, it’s that astounding. Somehow I have trouble getting all excited here. File servers have been round for a while now. NAS boxes come with an OS installed, and the discs on some type of RAID. I’m still not excited.
I’ve been playing with sat dishes here and there and every time I see a Fiberglass one the thought keeps occurring – how does something radio transparent reflect radio waves?
I had a few theories ranging from
I had the opportunity to drill a water drain hole in one today and the answer became obvious (at least for the Prodelin brand dishes)
I spend most of my time visiting different sites implementing projects and sorting out problems. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the huge plethora of file shares at most of these sites. It’s like having a file server means you have to map everything you can. It makes life far more confusing than it needs to be.
There is no “backup” tool for share configurations when performing DR on a file server. Ideally for my DR I want to be able to restore the files and that’s it, not worry about the server configuration. My File Servers don’t run any app’s, they do SMB and that’s it. All other functions are run on an application server. Print Serving runs on a VM.
Years ago I had the pleasure of getting called out to a client site where they had some problems with their IBM Server. I needed access to the data from their Raid 1 pack running on an IBM ServeRAID controller. For some reason that eludes me there was a problem on that machine. ”No Worries” I thought, I’ll just drop it in the box beside it and read off the data. It’ll show up as a normal disk on a normal SCSI controller.
Err – NO
Jesper has been doing some brilliant digging and shown that you need to be very careful before you bag out the opposition for their failures….
Hey, Mozilla- Quotes Are Not Legal in a URL
It’s been 15 years or more since Microsoft launched Windows NT. No one has used a Windows 3.11 Server in production since Windows 2000 was around.
So why oh why do we still have share permissions in W2K3 and Longhorn? All they do is confuse Administrators and allow for weird security configurations and the problems that come with them. I frequently see mismatched configurations, confusion over remote and local access or confusion over other sharing methods such as HTTP.
There is a small supportive argument or them that goes along the lines of “but what if the NTFS permissions are wrong”. Well, lets look at the failure mechanisms.
I like having a bit of space to store stuff at home. Dumping the Media Centre, Music, Photos and Backups back to a central server makes sense to me. It lets me use my XBox (chipped original) as a brilliant DivX player with AC3 Surround. I also worry about losing this data, and find it impractical to back it up to CD (3000 CD’s is difficult). This is why I run RAID on my server, to help protect my data. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start.
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