After many years, giving this blog a rebirth.
I lost my backup files and only found very few posts and those mainly about ConfigMgr 2012. Will post them below anyway; better few than nothing.
Next planned articles will be about e-books and plain html maybe, we shall see 
Stay tuned!
Also need to create/update “About” page. Things have happened, so to speak… jobs changed, places changed etc.
Actually I just attended a local event organized by Microsoft Romania and the last session was Useful Hacker Techniques: Which Part of Hackers’ Knowledge Will Help You in Efficient IT Administration held by polish Enterprise Security MVP – Paula Januszkiewicz.
Geez… this girl presented some things that, I can bet, made half of all admins go home/work and revise their server’s security and configuration.
After seeing this presentation and demos, I will repeat what I said a couple of years ago: Romanian MVP’s still have to learn from the foreign ones. A lot!
Yesterday I was trying to install a network printer on Windows Server 2008 system. After typing printer’s IP address, I received an “Access denied” error.
The problem was that I tried to install the printer while I was logged on with a user that had domain admin privileges, but not the default domain Administrator account.
When I logged in with domain admin user – Administrator – I was able to install the printer successfully.
Searching the internet, I saw that some people are saying that this error appears only when having UAC turned on.
Today a client called me and said that his second domain controller, which is on Hyper-V, is having connectivity problems. For example, running the ping command from DC2 results in very bad response times or timed out requests.
Searching the event viewer, I saw many errors with Event ID 1054: “Description: Windows cannot obtain the domain controller name for your computer network. (The specified domain either does not exist or exist or could not be contacted). Group Policy processing aborted.”
Found a Knowledge Base article on Microsoft website that basically says this is happening if the computer has some AMD technology enabled in the BIOS. Well, my client only has computers with Intel Xeon processors, so this is not the case. Anyway, having experience with such articles vs. errors, I read the article till the end. This way I found similarities with my client’s environment: computers with more than one processors.
Basically, Dual Core or multiprocessor processors may encounter Time Stamp Counter (TSC) drift if certain conditions are met:
This conditions can affect important operations like network communications and performance monitoring tasks that are sensitive to system time
Windows XP, 2000 and 2003 servers use the TSC as a timekeeping source. Each processor core (whether it is a single-core processor or dual-core processor) includes a TSC. When the TSC for different processor cores are not synchronized, the above symptoms and behaviors can occur if the operating system is using the TSC as a timekeeping source.
The KB article’s resolution is to install a newer CPU driver that modifies the boot.ini file by adding a switch in order to force the computer to use the PM_Timer instead of TSC. Also, it says that the boot.ini file can be manually modified.
So, to manually modify boot.ini file follow the following steps:
This resolved the connectivity problem, however I wanted to test one more thing. As DC2 was a virtual machine with 2 cores assigned, I changed it to use only one processor and modified the boot.ini file to its original state. After restarting the VM and monitoring the server for bout 20 minutes, looks like the problem went away. So this can also be a workaround. I used the first method as client preferred this one.
These are the articles I read during troubleshooting and used now to write this post:
Following the post regarding how to install drivers based on computer model using WMI query, here is another query you can use in your task sequences to install some processor specific software for example.
To find the processor manufacturer during a task sequence, insert a condition for the step you need, and select Query WMI. Then, for WMI Namespace use root\cimv2. For WQL Query use SELECT * FROM Win32_Processor WHERE Manufacturer like “%GenuineIntel%” or SELECT * FROM Win32_Processor WHERE Manufacturer like “%AuthenticAMD%” depending on what you need.
To find the processor manufacturer of your computer, open a command prompt and type the following: WMIC CPU GET Manufacturer.
Some time ago I used Admin Tools and RSAT for Vista and it saved my time from using remote desktop to log on to several servers. Now it is available (RTM, not RC or something…) for Windows 7 x86/x64.
Using RSAT for Win7, you can manage the following roles and features from Windows Server 2008 R2, 2008 and 2003:
After installing it, you can enable the roles and features you want to manage, by doing the following steps:
Now you’ll find the tools in Administrative Tools menu.
My last post (Using Group Policy to deploy Office 2007) was quoted on TechEdBloggers site.
Something I have learned the other day…
I had to install a small .msi using Group Policy, using a logon script. As it was a small package and not very important, I used a User Configuration Logon script.I created and linked a new GPO to a specific OU with some users (with no admin privileges) and client computers only. The script run well and the package installed very quickly on all machines in that OU.
The problem was that I have another OU with member servers and at the moment I logged on to one server using a normal user account, I had the package installed right after first logon. This is because I configured User Configuration logon script instead of Computer Configuration startup script.
What I’ve learned? That I should plan more careful even the installation of a small package.
During “troubleshooting period”, I have found a very nice website with error codes’ descriptions. Now, every time I get an error in any program, I check the list from this blog http://blogs.msdn.com/joshpoley/pages/errors-009-facility-sspi.aspx.
This is how the table with error codes looks like:
|
Code |
HRESULT |
Description |
#define |
| 1 | 0xC0090001 | The specified event is currently not being audited. | ERROR_AUDITING_DISABLED |
| 1 | 0x80090001 | Bad UID. | NTE_BAD_UID |
| 2 | 0xC0090002 | The SID filtering operation removed all SIDs. | ERROR_ALL_SIDS_FILTERED |
| 2 | 0x80090002 | Bad Hash. | NTE_BAD_HASH |
| 4103 | 0x80091007 | The hash value is not correct. | CRYPT_E_HASH_VALUE |
The last row shows an error I got the day before yesterday and reading this description helped me understand the problem I was having.
Thought it might help you sometimes…