I've been using VMWare Server 2 on a Vista 64 host to simulate a network environment for testing our operating procedures. Everything was working fine before I got on holiday. Now I am back for 2 weeks, and suddenly, VMWare thorws a wobbler. Using the server console, I can start and stop local virtual machines, but whenever I try to connect to the console, I got the following error: 'Error opening the remote virtual machine machinename:8333\16: An unexplained error occured. ' Brilliant

It's been a while since I blogged here. Lack of inspiration, lack of time, lack of interest... Over the past couple of months, I've been occupied with other stuff. The guest bathroom needed finishing, and my wife had a number of creative ideas that looked great but also needed a lot of time. I have started doing martial arts again, and I have been practising 2 times per week, so that is another 2 evenings no available for doing tech stuff. And the little time that I had left, I didn;t feel

When I was spelunking through the ATL header for my previous articles (the class object plumbing) I discovered that there is a serious race condition in the server lifetime management. I contacted the Microsoft C++ folks, and someone from the libraries group told me that this problem has already been fixed in the next release of Visual C++. But since the issue still exists in all current ATL projects, I decided to write something about it and publish the fix which will circumvent the problem in the

Could not create NTDS settings yadayadayada on domain controller CN=yadayadayada. The RPC server is unavailable. This was the error message greeting me (with some meaningful text instead of the yadayadayada of course :)) when I tried to add a backup domain controller to the domain of our test and development network. It was the first time I encountered an error at the DC promotion stage. I checked the usual things (network connections, privileges, etc) but nothing jumped out at me. Now, if an error

This is what I got in the event logs yesterday afternoon: Event Type: Error Event Source: Kerberos Event Category: None Event ID: 4 Computer: SE-SMURF01 Description: The kerberos client received a KRB_AP_ERR_MODIFIED error from the server PC-BLABLA09$. The target name used was . This indicates that the password used to encrypt the kerberos service ticket is different than that on the target server. Commonly, this is due to identically named machine accounts in the target realm (FOO.BAR.STRIPE.LOCAL

The scheduled task for running ntbackup on our fileserver would not run anymore. It would stop with a return code of 0x80, and nothing worthwhile in the log file or event log. It ran fine for months, apart from the occasional hickup such as having no more free tapes in the loader, or a tape not being imported correctly. I tried running the backup batch file manually, and that worked fine. I ran it under the dedicated backup account, and that worked fine too. But it wouldn't run automatically

In my previous article in this series, I explained how class objects are associated with COM objects, and how it all fits together. Armed with that knowledge, I can now demonstrate how to provide a custom class object that will allow us to support parameterized construction. If you haven’t already read my previous article on class objects, please do so first because I am going to assume you did J The non-standard class object interface: IStuffCreator A class object can have any interface you

In my previous article in this series, I explained how to create a simple COM server and implement a method that returns an enumerator object. It was all done very easily, but the ATL wizards hide some of the things that you really ought to know for my next article. For starters: where is the class object? The class object is the COM object responsible for creating new instances of the CStuff COM object that I demonstrated in a previous article. But we didn’t have to write any code for it,

Before I publish my next article, I should explain something else about the black magic aspect of ATL / COM: Marshalling. The Stuff server we made in the previous article is an out-of-proc server. This means that the arguments being passed to / from a stuff instance have to be somehow moved back and forth between different process contexts (or different threading apartments). In the case of IStuff, we don’t really have to bother, because IStuff derives from IDispatch. And in that case, there

If you find a bug in Visual Studio, report it on http://connect.microsoft.com If the bug affects the version of VS that is in development at that time, there is a significant chance it will get fixed before the next release. Just this week I got confirmation that all 3 bugs that I filed in the last months have been resolved. The first one is a nasty one. If you add an ATL project to an existing, non-empty solution, the ATL wizards will either hang the IDE or fail to work when adding an ATL object