Over this weekend I have had to quickly build a Virtual SBS2008 server for one of my clients. I came across an interesting issue which took me a while to figure out, so I am plonking it up here on the blog so that others that may come across the problem will find it quicker.
A quick description of the setup.
Dell Poweredge Server, Onboard Broadcom Netxtreme II network card, Addon gigabit NIC from SMC networks (Realtek chipset). Windows 2008 R2 is on the HyperV Host. SBS2008 is installed as the only Guest on the HyperV setup. This is all behind a Sonicwall NSA240 on a dedicated LAN network.
The SBS2008 Virtual machine would not update from Windows Update and the log file (c:\windows\windowsupdate.log) was showing a lot of errors with the code 80072EE2. When you search for this on the internet it makes mention of reinstalling the various DLL’s involved with Windows Update, and also ensuring that your network settings are not blocking connections to the Windows Update servers. None of these suggestions helped me.
So, I decided to do some packet captures on the network whilst Windows Update was running. It turned out that every time Windows Update ran on the SBS Virtual Machine, it could no longer ping the default gateway (yet the host machine could). This pointed me back to the network cards….
What I found odd about this is that I had already installed the latest drivers for the Broadcom and the Realtek chipsets. I had also disabled the various offloading options on the physical network cards to see if that would help, but no change.
However, after a coffee, I realised that I was missing one step… the step that fixed this problem was:
I disabled the Offload options on the Microsoft Virtual Network card on the SBS Host, and as soon as I did that, Windows update started to work.
Hopefully this may help some one save a few hours 
First, a big shout out to Eddy from Amulet Devices (check out those cool remotes) who nicely sent me a mail pointing out that Windows 7 and Xbox 360 now “play nice” with various different formats and that Transcoding should not be needed.
This made me look again.
Sure enough, there is an option, which was on by default in the build of MediaBrowser that I downloaded. It is this:
Silly me. I had not even seen the advanced tab! Turn that off and all the movies that I have are playing without issue. Including Fast Forward and rewinding now working…. No need to Transcode360 at all.
Life is good.
Recently a few friends of mine have got their hands on Windows 7, and are loving it. One of the common things I am seeing these guys do is to setup Windows 7 PC's in their living room, next to the PC, to play their movies and record live TV. Nothing new, and something I have avoided until now.
The reason I am now looking at this is because my friend and neighbor (hi Vic) decided to shove down my throat that he had something setup before me. Rightly so, I am meant to be "Mr. I.T" around these parts and he was showing me the new improved Windows 7 Media Center and a cool plugin called Media Browser before I had even heard of it. My dear wife can blame Vic for the entire evening last night, and day today, spent trying to get this thing up and running.....
Right there.... that is my first comment about this whole Media Center lark. Its meant to be easy, and at one level it is.... setting up an Xbox 360 to connect to your PC to play movies is just fine, setting up Photos and Music is also pretty easy, but that is where the 'easy' ends, and the 'pain' starts. A few times today, I shouted quite loudly at my computer.
Not all files are the same….
After you get Media Center talking to your Xbox, you would expect the Xbox to play everything the PC can right? Wrong. AVI files are not the same, there are various encoders and types of AVI files. Such a pain in the hole, I cannot tell you! The fact that Microsoft do not update the Xbox quickly to support new formats is beyond me, they really should! That said, the fact that there are so many formats is also beyond me. (Just look at this one example of how to get MKV files playing to get the idea of the hellishness that it is!)
Obviously, I am not going to re-encode all my movies to a lesser format just so they can play on it, and I am not (right now) going to put a PC in the living room, though this is the real solution….
So, the answer, even though it sucks, is to install an outdated piece of software on your Media Center PC. If you follow this guide on installing Transcode360 on Windows 7, it will work (it did for me anyway). Transcode360 “streams” the file from your PC, converting it on the fly. It works, but its a hack! Lets hope MS improve this on the Xbox 360, and soon. Not being able to fast forward and rewind is a massive pain on the extender. I can see reference to that issue in google going back to 2004!
Have a read of this new post regarding the deletion of above
Mediabrowser, the new cool…..
Mediabrowser is a plugin for Windows Media Center that takes away the dull(ish) look and gives you backdrops, cover-art, Meta-data for your movies and TV series. Here are some images from the add-in just to give you an idea of its coolness….
Bottom line, its cool…. but I think I mentioned that.
It is not without problems (remembering of course that it is free!). Notably on the PC it runs really quickly. On the Xbox as an extender, or the Linksys extender its a lot slower, though still usable. I had to disable the opening enhanced screen in the settings because this hung the extender. I am hoping that the team writing this will improve the speeds on extenders!
Also, on the extenders I got an error every time I tried to load the Mediabrowser plugin. (I cannot remember the exact error), but to get it working I had to give full user permissions to the folder C:\ProgramData\MediaBrowser on my Media Center PC to fix this issue.
How about the MetaData………?
Well, this is the easy part (relatively)! Another bunch of talented coders have written a tool called MediaBrowser
This tool allows you, on the Media Center PC, to download current Metadata for your movies and TV Series so that Mediabrowser can display it all.
Simply point it to your video share and it will help you get all the metadata, images, actor information and more into your system quickly and easily.
Again, there are a few bugs, but we can only hope the development team continue on fixing them!
But Nick, you have a Hauppauge HDPVR and DigiLinX. How did you tie that in and get live TV working and controlled?
That’ll be the next post ;)
Remember this post?
Well, after working hard with the development team over at Sage, it seems that the issue is with the version of the Amyuni PDF driver that ships with Sage Line 50 2010.
It does not like Windows 7 at all.
The good news is that Sage now know about the problem, and the fix is to upgrade to the latest Amyuni 4.0.9 driver. But there is a problem……
The installer that Sage uses has a special “Sage only” key. That means that unless you are willing to go out and buy the Amyuni driver yourself, you are going to have to wait for Sage to release a PDF driver update patch for Sage 2010. They wont do that unless their support team gets calls about this issue, which of course will not happen until the release of Windows 7 tomorrow!
Keep the pressure on, this is one patch that will be needed! Sooner rather than later.
If you are REALLY stuck, post here, and I may be able to help.
Oh Man!
Today I disabled offline files by mistake on a laptop that was no longer the member of the network it was syncing with… major mistake as this, of course, kills the offline files on the PC.
Thanks to finding this article, I downloaded the CSCCMD app and recovered the offline files!
Phew!
Since the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, there have been a lot of questions surrounding SBS "Next" and if there will be another version.
The good news is YES....
From - http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2009/10/01/remote-access-smbs-will-continue-to-get-enterprise-caliber-capabilities-with-sbs-and-ebs.aspx
"In fact, we are currently hard at work building the next versions of Windows SBS and Windows EBS. We'll have more on that at a later date."
Further to my last post, showing iLinX in use, I have just found out that the guys over at www.ilinx.info have released “iLinX View”. Here is an explanation of it…
“A number of dealers and end users have asked us for a demo version of iLinX so that they can try it out before shelling out $150. The problem has been that the Apple App Store explicitly bans demo versions of applications, so we've had a three month wrangle figuring out how to work round these restrictions while still publishing something useful. Now, we've finally got there!
So, please welcome iLinX View, a free version of iLinX. In terms of control it only allows you to select sources and change the volume and it also shows "VIEW" faintly over everything to highlight the fact you're using iLinX View and not the real thing. Other than that, it does everything that the real iLinX does, so you can check out all the services, browse the media libraries and generally get a feel for the capabilities of iLinX.
Here is a direct link to the Appstore
The only other thing to note is that the App Store lists the version as 1.1. This is because that was the version of iLinX at the time when we originally submitted iLinX View and there is no way to change the version number during the approval process. iLinX View is in fact version 1.3 and is compatible with iLinX 1.3. As of the next release of the two apps the version numbers should get back in step.”
Well, I just blew a fuse. It seems to me that there is no route back with logmein, and they have no interest in listening to their users. The only answer I can see is to cancel any paid for services with them.
My post may be deleted on their forum, so here is what I wrote:
“I just lost it with my account manager. So much so that I started shouting. Unbelievable.
This company simply does not give a monkey about its clients, and looks to me like they are not going to change a thing.
I have asked for a credit on my LogMeIn ignition for PC and iPhone as it is now usless without the central product, and I am cancelling my logmein rescue accounts.
I am expecting a call back from a "boss" of somekind, but I suspect nothing will change.
A company like logmein are allowed to make mistakes, but what makes a good company is when the realise they have made a mistake and rectify it.
I would have paid 300 or even 500 a year for the old interface, with groups, secondary users. The crap logmein have offloaded here is just absolutely unbelievable.”
For the people that follow me for the Netstreams DigiLinX updates, here is a YouTube video I have “thrown” together of the iLinX Application. It’s seriously impressive! I only touch on the features, there are more in there!
OK, here is one for you…..
If you have recently upgraded to Sage Line 50 Version 2010, and you are getting the two errors:
"The Data Area Passed to a system call is too small" and “Out of Memory”
….when printing invoices or reports to email. The issue, for me anyway, was that the remnants of the older PDF driver from Amyuni that Sage use were left on the system.
To fix, close sage, then go into the C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\x64 (on Windows 7 x64) and delete the Amyuni driver files for the older 2.5.x version. In my case those files were:
acpdf251.dll
acpdf251.drv
pdfui251.dll
but there may be more! You may also want to delete the newer Version 4 drivers as well, they will reinstall when you print later.
Then reload Sage 50, and all should be good! Fingers crossed!
and I am probably going to be one of them…. they are scamming users, even the ones like me who pay!
http://community.logmein.com/logmein/board/message?board.id=29&thread.id=555
http://community.logmein.com/logmein/board/message?board.id=29&thread.id=411
Personally, am livid… cheeky bastards.
I am looking at teamviewer right now, whom will now most likely get my companies money!
Coming this Friday, Apple are releasing the latest version of OSX, Snow Leopard. Mine is on order, specifically so I can test the Exchange “out of the box” experience they promise.
What I did find interesting other than that was this nugget of information from Donna! Malware protection in OSX! Who’d have thought that day would come 
http://msmvps.com/blogs/donna/archive/2009/08/26/apple-sneaks-malware-protection-into-snow-leopard.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2009/08/25/how-to-install-exchange-2007-service-pack-2-on-windows-small-business-server-2008.aspx
FAIL
Sheesh! This saddens me. I fear we have taken a huge backwards step here in SBS land. I detest when a service pack comes out that causes specific issues with SBS, its like the days of SBS 4.x all over again.
My advice… Wait…
and lets hope that the SBS team build something that makes this process easier.
Oh, and to you guys on the Exchange team… whatever you were thinking when you released this without a *proper* fix being available for SBS first, please don’t do that again. I may have to beat you with a large stick.
Hoorah!
Now, I am hoping that someone from Microsoft is going to correct this, but I believe that Windows 7 special pricing is only available in the UK and not Ireland!
Like WTF!
Surely not! Someone tell me otherwise!
Yeah, me too…. and it is only since Sonicwall updated the firmware to fix this DNS vulnerability.
The problem is, as you know if you are reading this, it means that you cannot play online games in “full” as the video or voice with other Xbox gamers will not work correctly etc. If you read this article from Microsoft, it explains the issue further.
It will not matter, even if you open up the ports detailed in this article, you are still going to get the “Strict NAT” result from the Xbox Live test.
Now the good news…
I have been… well for lack of a better word… “Bitching” at Sonicwall, and in fairness to them they have engineering working on seeing if they can get this fixed, while at the same time not opening up the DNS vulnerability again.
Fingers crossed people!
Nick.
Today I am installing the Unified Messaging role on my SBS2008 Exchange 2007 install. I am going to be implementing the excellent 3CX Phone software on our network for test (more on that later!).
During the installation of the Unified Messaging service I got prompted for the EXCHANGESERVER.MSI file because the SBS2008 installation gets rid of the files it temporarily creates during setup in C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Bin\CMPNENTS\EXCHSRVR80
Simple, I thought… just point it to the CDDRIVE:\CMPNENTS\Exchange12 directory and we should be good to go… but alas, this is not the case. I ended up with this error:
Installing product E:\CMPNENTS\Exchange12\exchangeserver.msi failed. Fatal error during installation. Error code is 1603. Last error reported by the MSI package is 'An installation package for the product Microsoft Exchange Server cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package 'EXCHANGESERVER.msi’
Very odd.
After some research and general screwing around with things, I copied the Exchange12 directory from the CD to the hard drive, and pointed to that instead…. sure enough, the installation continued on without issue!
You MUST watch this video to see what cool stuff is coming for the Xbox 
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/
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