The other steveb - Steve Banks' Blog on SBS, EBS, and other Small Business Technology Topics : SBS

Chico and Sean Daniel get interviewed!

steveb — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:17:00 GMT

Check out Sean and Chico's Microspotting interview!

So when do I get to take a float plane ride with you up to your place? :-)

Error 0x80070057 returned from call to Adding routers IP address to the intranet zone().

steveb — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 11:17:00 GMT

Added note: In the heat of frustration the evening I first posted this I neglected to mention the initial issue was CEICW failing EVERY time I would run it on the initial installation of the HP ML370. I even did a repair install since I had a Eula.txt error I told it to ignore during setup. When if failed after that repair installation I started digging for answers and came across the issue below:

HP, I really like your products, but this time you've blown it. Why in the world are you removing the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains registry key in SmartStart? Doesn't make it so smart! :-( Here I was rolling on the install of SBS 2003 onto an ML 370 G5 and you have blown the evening for me and cost me a couple hours of troubleshooting and taken away time I could be home with my family on a Friday evening. Not good guys and gals.

Tonight is one of those nights when I am so thankful for the awesome community we have out there around Small Business Server. All of you who participate in the SBS newsgroups and forums rock! Have I told you that lately?

Thank you to Mariette Knap for your work and passion. Smallbizserver is a tremendous part of the SBS Community and I thank you for all you and Marina do.

Thank you Cory for your contribution in the Microsoft Public Newsgroups (and thank you Google for putting them out there and doing such an awesome job of indexing and allowing us to search them).

Thank you Microsoft for KB259493. Although you still are missing the boat. Without Cory and Mariette around, we'd have to be thinking outside the box a bit as they were to get the solution. If you update the KB or do one similar to KB875421 then you'll be back on track. If I've missed it (hard to though, I did Google site:microsoft.com for the error and didn't find it) you can comment with the KB number and I'll be happy to stand corrected.

Thank you to all whose posts I'm sure I've missed with the answer to this solution. You are all Rock Stars in my book. Greg Starks, please get on the Proliant team and get them away from playing Guitar Hero and back to work on cleaning up that SmartStart hassle, or at least modify those rock stickers you showed us at WPC on the side of the servers telling us you are going to mess with our boxes like that! ;-)

And if any of you get the error Error 0x80070057 returned from call to Adding routers IP address to the intranet zone(). and didn't check out the links above, add the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains back in that HP pulled out and you'll be on track to make it home before the family goes to bed.

Where did my old friend the SBS Console go in SBS 2008 (and EBS 2008)?

steveb — Sat, 31 May 2008 01:26:00 GMT

I requested of both the SBS and EBS development teams for them to add back into their respective Start Menus their Server Administrative Consoles. They are on the desktop of SBS 2008 (and EBS 2008 Management Server) but not in the menu. Instead there is the standard Windows Server 2008 Server Management link. Below was the response from the EBS team and it makes sense for both products after reading the associated blog post.

We'll take a closer look at this in V2. Note, however, that this is not quite as trivial as it seems. There is no programmatic access to the start menu list. See http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/09/03/54760.aspx for a great explanation (basically that apps were abusing the option to pin themselves there without you asking at install). Looks like for now we'll have to pin the SBS and EBS Consoles there ourselves.

The Windows Small Business Server 2008 World Wide Community Survey is Live!

steveb — Thu, 29 May 2008 06:13:00 GMT

Kevin Beares, the Community Lead for Microsoft's Windows Server Solutions Group (WSSG) asked a few of us to pass this along. If you haven't taken the 2008 SBS community survey yet, click on over to Kevin's Blog and get crackin! Below is the link and a note from Kevin:

The Windows Small Business Server 2008 WW Community Survey is Live

This is the third year we have published an SBS WW Community Survey to the SBS Community. We have learned an amazing amount of information from the people who have taken the time to tell us what they thought. Some things we kind of knew already, but other things were not as clear before we had received the feedback.Because of the previous surveys, we have made some adjustments in our community engagement. To name a few; we really worked on putting more focus on the Official SBS Blog. Our Sustaining Engineering team runs mini betas with our MVPs before KB's and Bug Fixes are released via Windows Update. We try to get more involvement in our techbetas from our User Groups. The list does go on.To the survey, the SBS Product Team would like to hear from the Windows SBS Community again. This survey is completely anonymous. In fact, some of you may have to sign out from Live in order to take the survey. So, if you get a PAGE NOT FOUND error message, please log out of Live and click on the link to the survey again.We want to know how valuable your experience is with the community resources and information that is available to you today as a member of the Windows SBS Community. We also want to know what you think could be done to improve your Windows SBS Community Experience. Please take a couple of minutes to provide us your candid feedback via this survey and let us know what you think. SBS WW Community Survey 2008 Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Kevin Beares
Community Lead – WSSG

SBS Migration's 2008 IT Pro Conference

steveb — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:26:00 GMT

Wanted to thank all of you who were at Jeff Middleton's SBS Migration IT Pro Conference in New Orleans this year. Sorry to miss those of you who are still at the conference on the cruise right now while I'm here in the great Pacific Northwest enjoying a day of overcast skies and rain. Too many items on the calendar this year to make it, but Linda and I will be on the cruise portion again next year if it is offered as part of the event. Hope you are having an incredible time right now!

Was great to see familiar faces and meet new ones; both from the attendees and the sponsors. Thank you all for an incredible four days of learning and interaction. What I see most valuable about the IT Pro Conference is how it challenges each person there to question their practices, both technical and business, and to ask themselves how to better their work to improve upon what they already are doing, while giving them tools and ideas to work with to do just that.

I saw vendors introduced to each other by their common resellers who then in turn worked together to think of how they could blend their offerings to better serve the consultants and their clients. The conversation was not driven by numbers or dollar figures, but rather, it was driven by a thought process of how each party involved could help the end user, the end user's business, the consultant and their business, and the other vendor, knowing that the monetary numbers would naturally follow once they took care of the needs of each other first. It is a foundation of business and of life, but not one you normally encounter at a technical conference. This conversation was over dinner Saturday night. The idea of looking at the individual and business needs of others, both your clients and your vendors, including professional services you use in your own company, was covered in the opening session Friday morning, and it carried through the entire event both inside the walls and timeline of the sessions and outside into the hotel lobby and restaurants of New Orleans, as small groups would gather and talk for hours on how to better serve the entire SMB Community as a whole.

So for the 2nd year in a row, thank you Jeff and Suzanne for allowing me to be part of an incredible conference. Thank you Jeff and Suzanne for doing so much for so many through your work. Your core values of caring and giving to others, of considering others' personal and business needs first, and then working to help solve those needs as a way to create your own businesses, shows through in this event brighter than any other part of the event to me. You are an incredible example to follow. Both in your personal and your business life.

Microsoft releases the Malware Removal Starter Kit

steveb — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:39:00 GMT

This is from an email I received this week from Mark Clagett over at Microsoft. Running into an issue today where I sent it to an end user so figured I would post it here as well. Thanks Mark for sending out the notice! - Steve ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I thought you’d be interested in this new Solution Accelerator from Microsoft – it’s called the Malware Removal Starter Kit. It’s a free download from TechNet, and provides you with excellent guidance and tools to help you restore PCs infected with malware. Here’s a quick overview of what the kit can do for your organization. Suggest you take a look!

PCs Infected with Malware? Every day, adversaries attempt to invade your networks and infect your systems with viruses, spyware, and other malware. In other cases, employees can open the door to malware by visiting infected Web sites, opening the wrong e-mail attachments, or running macros that contain viruses.As an IT professional focused on security, you know the risks first hand. You’ve installed antivirus software and you keep your protection updated. Sometimes, though, attacks are successful, and computers get infected. And once they are inside the organization, malware outbreaks can spread with alarming speed, compromising or destroying mission-critical data or personal information. Restore Infected PCs with the Malware Removal Starter Kit!When you discover PCs that have been infected with malware and your current antivirus tools can’t solve the problem, where do you turn next? Is there a way to restore infected PCs without completely rebuilding them from scratch? The Malware Removal Starter Kit, the newest Solution Accelerator from Microsoft, provides free, tested guidance to help you combat malware attacks and restore infected systems—so users can safely get back to work. The kit shows you how to use the Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) to discover malware by performing a thorough offline scan of your computers, uncovering malware that may be hiding in the operating system. And once malware is located and identified, it can be quickly removed from infected PCs with a number of free anti-malware tools, like the Malicious Software Removal Tool from Microsoft.The Malware Removal Starter Kit answers questions like:

· What are the keys to a reliable, effective response plan to remedy malware outbreaks?

· How do I build a bootable CD that lets me perform offline virus scans?

· How can I discover and remove viruses and other malware hiding in the operating system?

· How does the Malware Removal Starter Kit augment Microsoft’s anti-malware strategy?

Key Benefits

The Malware Removal Starter Kit is:

· Effective: Helps you to uncover malware that’s difficult to expose.

· Flexible: Lets you use best approach for the specific problem you’re facing.

· Reliable: Provides guidance thoroughly tested by Microsoft security experts.

· Simple: Offers a solution that is easy to configure and use.

· Free: The Malware Removal Starter Kit is a free download from TechNet. Download the free Malware Removal Starter Kit

Accessing the kit is easy, and it’s free! Click here to learn more or to download the kit.

A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart - not what I wanted to see tonight.

steveb — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 08:26:00 GMT

Once again the external USB drive strikes again! I tell you, they are a blessing and a curse.

Ran Microsoft Updates on a customer SBS 2003 SP1 Server via RDP session. On restart it decided to not run IIS or TS services, something that seems to be occurring a lot lately on different boxes after updates. So I fired up a PPTP VPN to the server logging in as the admin of the customer’s domain. Successfully establishing the VPN connection I then started a command session in Vista on my Tablet PC running as administrator. From there I launched a shutdown – i command and brought up the shutdown GUI interface. Using the NetBIOS name of the server I was able to do a remote restart of the SBS box. This has been a trick I have been using since my company’s own SBS box decided not to launch TS when I was applying updates while sitting in a classroom in Las Colinas, Texas with the PSS team this last summer.

This was the second machine of the night last night to have behaved this way after updates. Problem was that unlike the other server last night that came back online after the remote restart through the VPN connection, this server went down and then stayed down. Not what I was wanting to see.

I fired off the flares to the business owners of the now offline server to power-cycle it in the morning when they arrived in the office to bring it back on its feet. Unfortunately for all of us, they tried it and it didn’t help. The Small Business Server was down for the count.

I came into the customer’s office, attached a monitor to the normally headless SBS box to find the following:

A disk read error occurred

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

This was not what I wanted to be reading. Okay, time for a call to Server Down Support at Microsoft.

With PSS tech Uday Godbole on the line, I tossed in the Windows Small Business Server 2003 Disc 1 and headed for the recovery console. What I found there was that the Windows directory was now D:\Windows instead of C:\Windows! Not cool. Changed the drive to C: to find its name as IOMEGA_HDD. Now we had something to work with.

Pulled both external USB drives that were attached to the back of the HP ML150 and exited the recovery console. On restart the server fired right up into Windows.

On a side note, Microsoft's Uday did a great job on the call. He was referring to past cases as to possible causes and thought of the recovery console which I hadn't gone to yet. I was thinking of running chkdsk from a Windows PE 2.0 boot disc first. The recovery console showing D:\Windows as the installed directory was a quick indicator of the problem and led me to attempt to change over to the C:\ drive to see what may be there. Without that fortunate turn I may have been here a lot longer on the wrong track.

So now that I have a working server again, I have gone into the HP BIOS to see what the boot order is. As I thought, USB HDD is higher in the list than the SCSI controller. Well it "was" higher in the boot order. Now it is back where it belongs below the floppy drive, CD and RAID controller.

Thanks again Uday for the help on the phone!

Steve

When updating to Vista, here's a time saving tip.

steveb — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 04:22:00 GMT

Okay, hopefully you will learn from my mistake. Thought I would install Windows Vista Ultimate on my HP TC4400 again now that I have RTM bits. My RC1 upgrade was less than desirable back in September but I have been hearing of great results of running the Windows Easy Transfer Wizard from and then doing a clean build of Vista so I thought why not? Besides I am presenting on this in Vancouver at the VanSBS User Group so I figured I better get up to speed on it! ;-)

Well please learn from my mistake. I'm not going to cancel the wizard now because it has been hummin' along here for a few hours now as I have been working on other things at the office, but I noticed that the wizard is ”saving" my “My Documents” folder to the share on the server I have selected for the transfer. Not a bad thing except that the My Documents folder is already redirected to my company's SBS Server so I am in essence copying over files that I already have on the server to begin with and wasting time on the Windows Easy Transfer wizard to boot. So if you are doing a Vista install and you have My Documents redirect enabled you may as well use it and save the bandwidth and time in moving those files unnecessarily.

I'll be adding more to my Vista with SBS experiences as I progress. May keep some of it quite until after the Vancouver, BC presentation so I have material for the presentation. :-)

Steve

Here's an update after watching it all night. You really do not want to include those offline folders in your WET settings! You are unable to edit on the other side when loading back into Vista and even worse, the Windows Easy Transfer will attempt to load those files back in over the network to the share location. I've been sitting here watching it attempt to load an archive PST back into a directory in my user share on the SBS box for the last few hours and finally realized what was staring me in the face the whole time. Now I've cancelled it and am waiting to see how long it takes for it to exit. Fortunately I have a Storage Craft ShadowProtect backup image on another drive that I'll be able to load and pull what I need off of back over to the Tablet (mainly my music and items that were on the desktop). The rest of my files were in those offline folders and SharePoint which I synch with Colligo Networks' product. So as I was saying earlier, exclude your offline folders from your Windows Easy Transfer Wizard!

Steve

Wireless client computers and the SBS_LOGIN_SCRIPT

steveb — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 09:01:00 GMT

Stumbled upon this the other day. Was using the Intel PROSet/Wireless software to manage my wireless conections on my HP tc4400 Tablet. Getting frustrated with the notebook never running the SBS login script (\\servername\SYSVOL\your-domain-name\scripts\SBS_LOGIN_SCRIPT.bat) when using WiFi I decided to allow Windows to configure my wireless network settings to see if it would perform differently hoping the Windows wireless client would behave better on startup and shutdown.

As I had anticipated, the Windows XP SP2 Wireless software is launching sooner than the Intel PROSet/Wireless had, allowing for the SBS_LOGIN_SCRIPT.bat to load at login and also hangs on at shutdown until the synchronized folders (My Documents redirect) has a chance to sync where before the Intel client would be shutdown by the OS before it had an opportunity to synchronize. While I liked the Intel PROSet software I like the ability to have the wireless network connection tighter with the operating system. So if you are on an SBS or other Windows domain using login scripts and/or offline folders that you want to synchronize at shutdown, consider changing over to the built in Windows interface to manage your wireless settings.

Steve