BICTT

 

Something we come across a lot is how antivirus can affect MOM and SCOM agents and management servers. Mostly the database servers have already been thought of. Microsoft released a KB article listing files, directories and extensions that can be excluded for MOM and SCOM to work better. It can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975931.

 

Posted on the Microsoft download site is a series of videos on administration of MED-V. The download can be found here.

The Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) video series is designed to help IT professionals wishing to learn more about the administrative and management tasks in MED-V. This series provides step-by-step guidance around common tasks that would be performed by IT professionals to deploy MED-V. Intended to be consumed sequentially, these videos will help you get up to speed with key MED-V administrator tasks and accelerate the deployment of MED-V in your organization. This series covers the following topircs:

1 - Preparing a MED-V Image - Learn how to prepare a virtual PC image for use with MED-V.
2 - Testing, Packing, and Uploading a MED-V Image - After completing the preparation, an image will be tested, then packaged, and finally uploaded to the MED-V Server for distribution.
3 - MED-V Workspace Walkthrough - See how to configure a MED-V workspace (policies for the virtual machine) and watch a demonstration of the key features so that you can evaluate and learn the key capabilities of MED-V.
4 - Publishing Different Applications to Different Users of the Same MED-V Image - This demonstration will show you how to use a common MED-V image to serve multiple users or groups while presenting different applications.
5 - Creating a MED-V Installation Package - Deploying MED-V packages can be streamlined by creating an installation package that includes all of the prerequisite technologies (Virtual PC, VM Additions update, and MED-V client) as well as a MED-V Workspace.
6 - MED-V First Time Setup with Domain Join - Taking workspace images and configuring them to join the organization Active Directory domain is a critical part of managing, controlling and updating the virtual machines deployed, and is easy with MED-V first time setup.
7 - Monitoring and Troubleshooting Tools in MED-V - Having the right tools to gain status, detect errors, and analyze problems is important when planning a MED-V infrastructure.
8 - Updating a MED-V Image - MED-V workspaces will require updates as any other machine on the network, this walkthrough of updating the master image and distributing to users can be used if machines are not joined to the domain and managed by typical system management tools.

 

Martin Dey, the MMS event owner started a blog on organizing the Microsoft Management Summit event for 2010. He also welcomes questions and suggestions. You can find his fresh blog at http://martindey.spaces.live.com/default.aspx. Very nice to hear from somebody behind the screens of this great event! Looking forward to his future posts.

Bob Cornelissen

 

I have been sick 4 times during the last 6 weeks. Nothing too serious, but still it kept me from blogging. I ahve so many things in my watchlist that I want to mention or refer to. So I guess I am going to do that for a number and perhaps just compress a lot of them into a few posts. Also some ideas for content came up that I will create very soon.
So lets get going

Was at a customer site a few days back and encountered a problem with SQL 2008 reporting services on windows 2008 r2.

Installed the reporting services and checked http://localhost/reports and found that it did show me a page, but I seemed to miss the possibilities to manage it (site settings). When going to http://localhost/reportserver it did not even let me access it and gave me the following:
The permissions granted to user 'domain\user' are insufficient for performing this operation. (rsAccessDenied).

I was 100% sure I had all
rights needed.

Also the SCOM web console would not show up. It did show the login form, but when it entered the page it first gave an error and upon refreshing it gave a few words and icons, but nothing much.

In the end the solution was as simple as killing UAC.
These programs work with UAC user account control and if you start explorer as administrator you will see it gives you the pages correctly. So I stopped UAC and all problems went away. And could continue quickly with the SCOM Reporting installations.

Bob Cornelissen

 

Was funny after my last post I discovered what the installer was doing after entering the key. It was removing Outlook

In the end it was just the broken office 2007 underneath it that caused the whole mess.
And removing office 2007 the normal way was not possible. So... I followed the procedure for manually removing the whole office 2007 installation.

This also took care of the 32 bit office programs stuff. SO I cold go for Office 2010 64 bit now.

After installation just start up MS Word. Go for File - Help. There is a link there to change the product key and activate the product. This time this worked! It was just the broken office 2007 that kept everything from working.

Anyway, was happy for the manual removal procedure for the 2007 version to solve all problems.

Bob Cornelissen

 

I was soo happy with my new Office 2010 beta that I installed immediately yesterday. And of course had some set-backs. If you are looking for the conclusion for all of this it is at the bottom of the post.

Started out with the 64 bits version. That did not like the fact that there was a 32 bit version of office 2010 CTP beta and office 2007 32 bit on there. SO had to switch to 32 bit version installer.

The 32 bit installer told me to remove the CTP beta of office 2010 first. So I did (same for Project and Visio). After that (and a reboot) it asked me if I wanted to upgrade office. Great. I can not get rid of the old office 2007 somehow, so go ahead. It did finish without problems, but it seems to have left the references to ofice 2007 intact. Hmmm. Ah well, as long as it works first right?

So I started up Outlook and Word. Seemed to work fine. But it asked me to register/activate. Well no problem, but I haven't written the key anywhere yet. Lucky there was a button saying "Change key". However that gave me an error. Actually it looked like the activation just crashed.

I do not have a KMS setup on the network (too small), so there must be a way to manually activate. Yes there is:
open an elevated command prompt and
slmgr -ipk xyxyx-xyxyx-xyxyx-xyxyx-xyxyx

Should be as easy as that.
Next error!
error 0xC004F050 The Software Licensing Service reported that the product key is invalid

Tried this several times.

How to activate this Office 2010 beta?

Next try. Perhaps I have to Repair it or something like that. So go to the control panel and find the programs and go to the uninstall programs part. Find Office 2010 and click the Change button.

What????? Check this screen

It has 4 options (add/remove features, repair, remove, Enter a product key). This must be what we want!
So I went for the last option to enter a product key and enter it there. Next next and a long wait. Argh, it asks me to reboot. No time! I just open Word.

Great an activation wizard! But this one is different from the old one. This one gives me possibility to activate over the internet now. Yes! This one does not complain. Have to restart Word though. After restarting Word... no more popups and problems. It works!

So conclusion:

• remove early CTP beta versions from your machine before installing this beta version released yesterday 16 nov 2009).
• Make sure to use the right number of bits for the installer (32 or 64)
• Install office
• Try to activate from the wizard that pops up
• If that fails go to control panel - programs - uninstall programs and find office 2010 and click the Change button
• Enter the product key and go through the wizard and reboot when asked
• Open a program (I used Word) and find anotehr activation wizard and choose to activate over the internet now
• When success it will ask for a restart of the office program, so close the program
• start the office program again and it should be activated

Enjoy!

Bob Cornelissen

I just a message in my rss feeds from the MSDN site that Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta has been posted in the English language.
Great!
Also Visio Premium 2010, Sharepoint Designer 2010, Project Professional 2010 have been posted. All in 32 and 64 bit versions.

The Office Professional Plus version contains:
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Publisher, Infopath, Communicator, SharePoint Workspace, and Office Web Apps.

I am sure the public downloads at officebeta.microsoft.com will be enabled today or tomorrow.

 

Ah, it has been much too long and I have so many things I want to blog about and things to make you aware about. They are all marked, but due to having been sick two times in two weeks I have not gotten round to blogging yet. But....

This weekend I have upgraded a windows 2008 machine to windows 2008 R2. It was a domain controller. I am using DPM 2010 beta to backup my environment.

I noticed that since the upgrade the dpm backup of the system state failed. It could not create a replica and it could not do a consistency check either.

So onwards to the aplication event log on the domain controller:

The backup operation attempted at 'ý2009ý-ý11ý-ý14T19:00:33.965515400Z' has failed to start, error code '2155348032' (The backup storage location is invalid. You cannot use a volume that is included in the backup as a storage location. ). Please review the event details for a solution, and then rerun the backup operation once the issue is resolved.

SO, it is complinaing that I am making a backup to the same volume. This machine only has one disk and always worked before the upgrade.

Well, the solution was to add a registry entry to make it not complain about system state backups to the same volume. This is from kb article 944530:

To enable the system state backup files to be targeted to critical volumes, you must set the value of the AllowSSBToAnyVolume registry entry under the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wbengine
Create a key called "SystemStateBackup"

Set the value of this entry as follows:
Name: AllowSSBToAnyVolume
Data type: DWORD
Value data: 1

In my case the SystemStateBackup key was not even there. But after creating this a simple Check Consistency in DPM caused it to sync the whole lot.

Bob Cornelissen

The Infrastructure Planning and Design team has released a new guide: DirectAccess.

This IPD guide provides actionable guidance for designing a DirectAccess infrastructure. The guide’s easy-to-follow, four-step process gives a straightforward explanation of the infrastructure required for clients to be connected from the Internet to resources on the corporate network, whether or not the organization has begun deploying IPv6.

The guide covers four key steps in the design process for DirectAccess:

• Aligning the project scope with the business requirements.
• Determining whether IPv6, Teredo, 6to4, and IP-HTTPS connectivity will be supported for Internet-based clients.
• Assessing the need for IPv6/IPv4 network address translation service and ISATAP for internal communication.
• Determining the number and placement of servers, the certificate services requirements, and location of CRL distribution points.

Download the IPD Guide for DirectAccess at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=164151.

Infrastructure Planning and Design streamlines the planning process by:

• Defining the technical decision flow through the planning process.
• Listing the decisions to be made and the commonly available options and considerations.
• Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics.
• Framing decisions in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive alignment with the appropriate business landscape.

From the blogger: These guides are really good and give sufficient information to get a head start. Have fun accessing your network from anywhere!
Bob Cornelissen