Archive for the ‘Networking’ Category

Microsoft’s Windows 7 packs a lot of power, performance and stability – for the vast majority of us. Unfortunately, one glitch left me tearing my hair out from this virtually perfect operating system. It appears that in a particular environment, Windows 7 Ultimate x64 will crash and burn all the time for no apparent reason. Luckily, David Weisz has found the problem, and given a reason and a solution to the problem.

Let me explain the scenario where this occurs. I have a Asus M50V laptop, a stellar laptop for business and gaming use. It has 4gb’s of RAM, and it’s my daily workstation for practically everything. Since I’m an IT professional, i run and operate my own Windows Domain within my enterprise, along with Exchange and all the other goodies – mainly as a showpiece of what a good network deployment can do for a customer. Hence, my laptop is joined to a Windows 2003 AD, just like all my other previous laptops and workstations and operating systems.

After installing Windows 7, it appeared that there may have been a glitch with the firmware on the motherboard and Power management, as 7/10 times, when i’d resume my laptop from a sleep state, and after logging in – i’d get the LSASS crash and the usual “Critical error, system will reboot in one minute” message, making me scramble to clsoe all my documents.

However, it appears that it is a small environmental issue with the types of Domain controllers i have, and authentication of such. Hence David Weisz’s solution works. The fix is a simple registry change so that the LSA service authenticates to Windows Servers, pretending to be of Windows Server compatibility. That change is

Key:   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\Kerberos\Parameters
Type:   REG_DWORD
Name:   DefaultEncryptionType
Data:    23 (decimal) or 0×17 (hexadecimal)

And bingo, no more crashed, and now i can resume my dance of saying Windows 7 is pretty much perfect in every way.

To put it simply, it is my opinion that everyone should eventually be using Windows 7 as it is a remarkable operating system with little issues. I’ve been using Windows 7 since January 2009, and have had very few issues, if any at all during that time. I should also add that I have been using Windows Vista since late 2006, and am coming from using Windows Vista for a long time on a laptop that was designed for Windows XP.

Here is a simple guide that you can follow that should tell you in a nutshell what you should do

IF

You are running Windows Vista now – Windows 7 is recommended to you.

You are running Windows XP or Windows 2000 – Windows 7 can be considered after a consultation.

You are looking to buy a new computer – Make sure it comes preloaded with Windows 7. If you are a business customer, and have a server, make sure the computer comes with Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate

How to install

In all cases, I do not recommend a Windows 7 upgrade. It is always in my interest to keep customers and the public in a safe environment, and because of my belief in this – I only recommend a clean install of windows 7, and not an upgrade.

To install Windows 7, backup all of your data to an external device – and then install windows7 by formatting the computer (select a custom install and delete partitions and install to the un partitioned area)

Once installed, reinstall your office applications and other applications and restore your data back to you’re my documents / favorites.

How to buy Windows 7

Windows 7 comes in a variety of editions. Since you already own Windows, you should look for the upgrade packages only. You do not need to buy the full version to do a clean install of windows. If you are unsure which edition to get, please contact me.

I’m on Windows XP, what do I do?

If you are on Windows XP, then there is no rush to move to Windows7. We should make sure that all of your existing applications can run in Windows 7, before making the plunge into Windows 7. Like Vista, windows7 runs in a different way to Windows XP leaving a lot of applications and devices unusable on Windows7 without updates or upgrades. Some devices such as old scanners will not work in Windows7 at all.

If you are running on a relatively new computer (newer than 2005) and have atleast 1gb of RAM, then running Windows7 should be fine – but perform a clean install as described above.

If you have one of the newer Netbooks (the ultra portable computers with 10inch screens) then running Windows7 should not be a problem, as long as you have enough disk space to install Windows 7 and 1gb of RAM.

If you are unsure, do not install Windows 7, and contact me instead.

Just came across this gem of a KB from Microsoft, which happens to be pretty recent as well. I had a customer with a x64 Win2k3 installation where NTBackup would just not run. It hung on Preparing the Volume Shadow Service, and never did and simply died. This KB outlines the exact issue and fixes it. Not sure if the patch is needed, but it could just be that the Registry key is needed.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913360

You may come across an entry in your event log’s on your domain controllers that reads something like this:

2009-05-11 11:23:13 Local0 Critical

Pre-authentication failed:

User Name: TNLT1$

User ID: %{S-1-5-21-343818398-813497703-839522115-3620}

Service Name: krbtgt/techienetworks.com

Pre-Authentication Type: 0×0

Failure Code: 0×19

Client Address: 10.X.X.X

This appears to be common to all newer Windows operating systems that are Vista and above (including Windows 2008 Server). This from what i understand, is related to UAC and the need to do some kind of “pre authentication”. Never the less, there is a fix for this.

You will need to install the ADSI Editor on your domain controller. Once you have that installed, open up MMC (start -> run -> mmc) and add in the snap-in called “ADSI Edit”

Once you have it added to your MMC, right click on ADSI Edit, and click “Connect” and click “OK” to connect to your domain. You will then need to drill down into DC=<DOMAIN,DC=com, CN=Computers.

Here you’ll find a list of all the workstations, and servers joined to your domain. Look for the machine giving you the event log message, and right click, go to properties.

Within the attributes section, look for “userAccountControl”, and check the value. If the value is below 4194304, then simply add 4194304 to the value. For example, if the value is listed as 4096, then make it 4198400.

That’s it.

A Quick note, mainly to myself about how to disable the Windows firewall on Server 2008 Core

netsh firewall set opmode mode=disable

Techie Networks is proud to announce the release of TNWinLog, a syslog agent for Windows servers. This free utility can be found here and attaches to your server’s event logs and forwards any new entries to a syslog server, such as Kiwi Syslog.

TNWinLog is free to use by anyone.

Yay! Fedora 9 is out, and it finally installs fine using on a Dell T105 with a SATA DVDRom. The previous version of fedora (8) on x64 didn’t properly recognize the install dvd.

Today i got a call from a customer stating that Outlook 2007 was starting, but giving an error message “A Dialog box is open” trying to open or compose new emails. The problem was that Outlook started on a new user profile, and the usual Outlook/Word dialog that asks you for your Name/Initials was gettign hidden someplace (since word starts silently in outlook).

Solution is to close everything, and start Microsoft Word first. Enter your name and initials, and then you’ll be able to start outlook.

Update
Bill pointed out that if you don’t have the full Office installed, you won’t be able to launch Word. So to fix it, you’ll have to temporarily remove a Microsft Update item number KB946983. Use the control panel to remove this update, start Outlook, then windows will apply the update again at a later time.

Just a quick post on how to quickly remove the Dell Utility Partition. I just received some Poweredge T105 boxes (quiet nice actually ,very quiet, very efficient – only 70W power consumption idle with 2 80gb drives). I was bummed to find out that the bios didnt come with a SATA raid option, but oh well.

So to remove partition. Boot up from your XP/2003 CD/DVD, and then go into the Console Recovery mode. Login to your partition , then use “DISKPART” to open up the partition manager, and then simply remove the 55mb partition.

Done.

Hi,

Just an update. TNMailserver 3, is around the corner. This time its based on Fedora 8 and is much easier to install and keep up to date, but works iwth the same charm as the Slackware version. It will also be renamed to “Techie MailServer”