Archive for the ‘Techie Stuff’ Category

Hello,

Quick post to remind myself of how to fix volume shadow copy having no writers. Turns out this is a common problem when using the newsid utility on templated servers/computers. The fix is relatively simple.

1. Stop the Microsoft Shadow Copy Provider & Volume Shadow Copy Service
2. Export the contents of the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\EventSystem key to a .reg file (as a backup).
3. Delete the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\EventSystem\{26c409cc-ae86-11d1-b616-00805fc79216}\Subscriptions key. (Just delete the Subscriptions subkey; leave the EventClasses key.)
4. Restart the server.
5. Run the “VSSADMIN LIST WRITERS” command.

Thanks to Rhys Winter on his post in technet.

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.

So this is kind of cool. Microsoft’ Windows Live Writer appears to be able to post straight into WordPress blogs. If this post works, then i think thi is a great free product that will help people immensely. NO more having to open web pages, and send up boring attachments via form uploads and things.

Update: It does work, and it appears you can go back and edit the posts as well. I’ll have to see how the categories can be assigned. Undetermined, there’s a category section below the main text editing. Very nice Microsoft! Very nice!

I’ve ran into this a few times, where i’ve started building console/windows apps in Visual Studio 2005/2008 and the development machine i’m running on, doesnt have permissions to execute programs from a network share and access (for example) the registry or a sql server. The solution is to tell .net that its ok to let things running from that network share, to access the registry or sql server.

The normal, and proper way to do it is using the .net 2.0 SDK and tell it the paths which are allowed full trusts, however, the .net 2.0 SDK isnt fully installed with VS2k5 or VS2k8, and thus you are stuck.

No more, type in the following, replacing <PATH> with either a drive\directory or a \\share\directory and you’re set.

caspol -m -ag 1 -url <PATH> FullTrust

Update: easy quick way to let your local servers get fulltrust

caspol -m -ag 1 -zone intranet FullTrust

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.