SBS 2008 Updated Roll-up 2 (KB960911) Released

The Official SBS Blog has a new blog post on SBS 2008 Update Rollup 2.  This update fixes a few known issues discovered by our test team, as well as the general SBS community.  These issues are:

Issue 1

• After you configure Windows Small Business Server 2008, you manually change the Favorites and Links setting for Internet Explorer in the default domain group policy by using the Group Policy Management console. When you run the Internet Address Management Wizard, the wizard exits unexpectedly.

Issue 2

• You may receive the "HTTP ERROR 401.1" error when you visit the following Web site from Windows Small Business Server 2008: http://companyweb

Issue 3

• In the Add a New User Account Wizard, the order of the Last Name field and the First Name field is reversed. This problem occurs in the following language versions of Windows Small Business Server 2008:
  • Chinese (Simplified)
  • Chinese (Traditional)
  • Japanese
  • Korean

Issue 4

• In the Italian versions of Windows Small Business Server 2008, when you click Connect to a Computer in the Remote Web Workplace, you navigate to an invalid Web page.

Issue 5

• The Windows SBS Console may stops responding if duplicate entries of Anti-Virus programs were reported in client WMI database.

Issue 6

• The Windows SBS Console may report "unknown" for some firewall applications that are installed on client computers.

You can read and download the update manual by going to KB960911 directly.  This update also includes Update Roll-up 1 (KB958715).

UPDATE: The SBS Official Blog has posted what they know about the failure to date.

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Connect to the Internet Wizard Won't Finish in SBS 2008

I got forwarded an issue the other day where in Windows Small Business Server 2008, the Connect to the Internet Wizard will take longer than 5 minutes to finish.  5 minutes is about the maximum this wizard should take (although there are rare cases when it takes longer), but this customer had waited 20 or 30 minutes for the wizard to finish.  The wizard just sits at this page:

If it is taking a long time, and you kill the wizard and check out the log file at c:\program files\windows small business server\logs\ctiw.log, and see the following:

[6208] 090421.222228.6798: CoreNet: New random IPv6 Address is fe80::51db:7007:45d6:ada1
[6208] 090421.222228.6798: CoreNet: Checking the IP conflicts for new address.
[6208] 090421.222233.6803: CoreNet: New random IPv6 Address is fe80::8e85:4dd0:e65d:e1d6
[6208] 090421.222233.6803: CoreNet: Checking the IP conflicts for new address.

The IPv6 network discovery on your network is not working.  This could be a number of items, including networking components you have on your network.  A nice work around is to choose one of the IPv6 addresses recommended in the log file, and ping it to verify it’s not in use, then if it’s not in use, simply set it as a static IP address and re-run the Connect to the Internet Wizard.

Don’t disable IPv6, there are definitely issues with that as well.

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Using OpenDNS with Windows Home Server

 

 

I recently started using OpenDNS on my networks, because I like to track DNS stats, and prevent bad sites from resolving.  OpenDNS has cataloged over 5 million sites into buckets, and you can either block a specific site, like limeware.com, or block a group of sites, like “P2P file sharing” sites.  I also love that you can add and customize multiple networks, so I can have my grandfather’s network more locked down than my site.

Once I made this adjustment on my network, I noticed that my Home Server stopped responding to the home server client when I wanted to connect to the server.  It showed the error:

This computer cannot connect to your home server. Check your network connection and make sure your home server is powered on. If your home server has recently restarted, try again in a few minutes.

The problem is that the router is passing every name resolution to the DNS servers.  With normal DNS servers, they ignore single hosts such as “SERVER”.  With Open DNS, they go ahead and slap the ISPs domain name on it and resolve it for you (e.g. SERVER.comcast.net), and of course your console wouldn’t connect to that.

You can simply work around this issue by making your internal LAN a “VPN” network.  The OpenDNS community asked the question, which pointed me OpenDNS KB Article.  The steps are simple:

1. On your client computer, run ipconfig /all, and copy down the domain name
2. Sign in to your Open DNS account.
3. Add a network, if you haven't already.
4. Go to the Settings tab.
5. Click Advanced Settings.
6. Click Manage under Manage VPN Exceptions in the Domain Typos section.
7. Add your internal domain(s) to this list, which was copied down in the first step
8. Wait 3 minutes (worst case) and all should be well.

That’s all there is to it.  Home Server starts acting like a Home Server again.

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Customize the Win7 Logon Page

Windows 7 Beta is out, and the Windows 7 Release Candidate is just around the corner.  I’ve been running Windows 7 for quite a while now, in production on all of my computers.  It’s been pretty rock solid, with no blue-screens, and all of my devices found save for a few, until recently it’s all of them! 

As I move from build to build, things just keep getting better, and I’m once again inspired to start customizing Windows like I used to have time for in College with Windows 98!  One of the new features of Windows 7 for OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) is to change the backdrop on the logon page.  That means, unlike with Vista, you’re not stuck with the same graphic, because it’s easy to change!  LifeHacker.com has the original steps I copied mine from.

You can easily turn this:

Into this:

(Pictures courtesy of LifeHacker.com) 

In order to do this, you simply find a JPEG file that you like, ensure that it’s less than 256kb (this part is important, and snagged me at first). Copy it to the appropriate location and flip a registry key.  Here is what I do:

1. Create the folder c:\windows\system32\oobe\Info\Backgrounds
2. Copy your file in there and call it “backgroundDefault.jpg
3. Add a DWORD called OEMBackground to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background

That’s it!  If the picture doesn’t match the current resolution, the PC will stretch it to match your primary monitor resolution.  The LifeHacker post extends this to ensure each resolution is crisp.

Now you can be the cool kid on the block, right from the start.  Thanks Life Hacker!

Update: LifeHacker.com has come through again with another post on Customizing the Logon Button Set, in case you have a light or dark background, you can make sure your buttons are visible!

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“Quick Parts” for re-using text

Using Microsoft Office 2007, Outlook 2007 has a new feature called “Quick Parts”.  Quick Parts allow you to save text you type a lot, allowing you to easily dump that text into a new email without having to re-type it.  I discovered this over at LifeHacker’s Blog on Saving Time with Outlook 2007’s Quick Parts.

Once you save text to the gallery, you can simply go to the Insert tab and drop that text in anywhere in an email.  Use it for signatures, or templates, or any type of repetitive text.

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ISA 2006 with SBS 2008 Whitepaper Available

If you enjoyed your SBS 2003 with ISA 2004, and you’re hesitant to upgrade to SBS 2008 because ISA 2006 is not included with the product, then there is good news for you. (whoa, that sounds like the welcome email from SBS 2003!) 

Available today is the white paper on how to Deploy Microsoft Internet Security & Acceleration Server (ISA) 2006 with Windows Small Business Server 2008.

The whitepaper will appear in the SBS documentation library sometime tonight, specifically in the MVP corner.  This particular whitepaper was written by Eriq Neale, a long standing SBS MVP.  Today you can get the whitepaper directly from the download center.

The whitepaper covers how to install, configure and deploy ISA 2006 on a Windows Server 2003 server as the edge outside of the SBS network.  You can (currently) downgrade the additional server you obtain with SBS 2008 Premium edition, to Windows Server 2003 and use it as your ISA server, all that’s needed is a copy of ISA 2006. 

While writing the paper, Eriq worked very closely with both the SBS team (myself included) and the ISA team.  This paper is sanctioned by both of these teams and is very well written.  I’m sure we’ll see more papers from the MVPs as time goes on.  Thanks to Eriq for his hard work bringing this paper to the MVP Corner!

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Windows Server 2008 Foundation Help Documentation

With the release of Windows Server 2008 Foundation edition, so comes the help documentation for said release.  Oddly enough, you can find this documentation next to the Small Business Server documentation up on Technet, just point your browser here.  Currently the documentation is focused on introducing the new server sku.

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Viewing RSS feeds by Webpage with Windows Live Reader

I use the Windows Live Mail client (available from Live Downloads) to read all of my RSS feeds.  One of the things that bothers me about RSS is how the feed doesn’t contain the entire item, so you get something like this:

The strangest thing happened the other day when I combined an olive, a cyclist and a … (read more)

Now you’re forced to view it online, and you have to open a web browser.  Windows Live Mail has a feature that allows you to view the webpage in the mail reader.

Simply check the “Show articles as web page, instead of summary”.  Now instead of loading in the RSS feed summary, that blog post opens directly in the mail client.  I find this works out great for those short feeds as above, or perhaps as a photo blog where they show their small un-viewable thumbnail in the feed. 

Where it breaks down is when the post has a lot of comments, they are all loaded as if you were looking at the webpage.  Additionally, I don’t think this works with offline viewing, but it’s a time saver while you’re connected!

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Ask Iain – World Premiere!

Iain McDonald, the General Manager of Windows Server at Microsoft has started a new “Ask Iain”.  Iain dedicates this first episode of Ask Iain to Windows Server 2008 Foundation Edition, a newly released server sku from Microsoft.  This was released yesterday, but it is not an April Fool’s joke, as Iain comments

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:06833065-c7a5-451c-a3ed-844ba0994b79&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Ask Iain World Premiere">Video: Ask Iain World Premiere</a>

You can find the full post here on the Windows Server Division Weblog.

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My Favorite Digital April Fools Joke

Tom’s Hardware put on my favorite April Fool’s Joke this year, threatening to switch to all Apple news. At the end, it turns out to be an elaborate April Fool’s joke.  However, I found the sarcasm throughout the post to be absolutely hilarious, and somewhat true.  I’ll repost the news article here.

Tom's to Transition to All Apple News

6:01 AM - April 1, 2009 by Tuan Nguyen

We at Tom's Hardware have been covering hardware and technology from all aspects of the industry for years. However, there was always one big gap.

Going forward, Tom's Hardware will focus primarily on covering more Apple news. Apple is a huge player in the industry now, no longer the one in the corner. Several factors have contributed to this decision. Here are our top 10 reasons for transitioning to all Apple content.

1. Built to order - Who wants to build computers these days? Building your own computer is old school. Going out and buying a pre-built Mac? That's what's in these days. Especially if you get one that's not upgradeable. You will be the envy of others.

2. Upgrades -Upgrade your hardware? Who wants that? No one.  Don't upgrade. This is too costly. It's better to invest heavily into a Mac, and then toss it out and buy a new one not too far into the future.

3. Choice. It's better to be told what you need, and have decisions made for you - There are just too many good choices in hardware to choose from when looking at PCs. Tom's Hardware will eliminate the confusion. Everyday, we'll come up with new reasons for you to look at 3 desktop machines, and 4 main lines of laptops.

Desktops: Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro
Laptops: MacBook, MacBook Pro 15-inch, MacBook Pro 17-inch and MacBook Air

All in all, a fantastic selection. We realize they're all cut from the same hardware that are available in more affordable PCs, but you simply cannot ignore the aluminum chassis, severely glossy laptop screens, and new Display Port in the Apple laptop that don't really offer support anywhere yet. But fear not, Apple has a Display Port LCD panel ready for purchase.

4. Cool-factor - Realistically, it's all about the "cool," style, and looks.  Looks go a long way in computing. When you're cool, you work better, and play better. Who doesn't want to be cool? I can't find any logical reasons for number 4, but Apple says so--so that's the way it is.

5. Reliability - My MacBook Pro has a white blotch on the inside of the LCD screen on the left side of the laptop, and despite having an extended warranty, Apple refused to fix it, saying it was my fault--so it must be true. Besides, it's just a big annoying blotch that's always white. I can live with it because the aluminum chassis is really pretty.

6. Compatibility - Who says Macs aren't compatible? I can run Windows XP or Vista on my Mac. And when it comes to hardware? I can attach any USB keyboard or mouse to my Mac no problems--and I'll get more than 1 button for my mouse. What about high performance video cards for gaming? The Nvidia GeForce GT 120 that comes with the Mac Pro is great. I don't need to have SLI or anything fancy to play the latest games--since they're not available for Mac anyway. Problem solved!

7. Macs hold roughly 10-percent of the market - Collaboration is key. All my friends use Macs. Actually, no, they all use home built PCs that cost less. But their quad-core, SLI, fully customized systems that can play the latest games can't hold a candle to the aluminum chassis of my iMac.

8. Cutting edge hardware - Apple always puts the latest gear in its computers. Don't think the GeForce GT 120 is the latest in graphics hardware? Just cut back on all the latest games. With the savings you get on not being able to play the latest games, you can put that back into upgrading to not just two, but four GeForce GT 120's for the Mac Pro! You can't SLI them, so it's a total waste of money, but you can play older games and manage pictures in iPhoto, create a neat website in iWeb and talk to your buddies using iChat--all at the same time. Do that with Call of Duty 2 maximized.

9. It just works - When you buy a Mac, everything just works--right out of the box. Even though my first MacBook Pro had both internal fans die on me in a month and I had to have it repaired, it really did work when I got it...

10. Price. We're in a recession - It's time to help out by spending more than necessary. $1100 for 8 GB of RAM? Now we're talking economic stimulus.

April fools. We'll be back to our regular news programming shortly.

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Replacing Windows Applications – the Safe Way

[This post courtesy of Ian Prest]

Many folks are probably familiar with the System Internals Process Explorer, which enables users to see all the processes on the system, and provides much more detail than the built in Task Manager that comes with Windows.

One of the neat features of Process Explorer is the option to replace Task Manager so when you (or the system) launches Task Manager, Process Explorer opens instead:

You may also notice that once you have replaced it, that you can simply un-replace it.  You might think that under the covers this is replacing taskman.exe with procexp.exe.  It is not.  Windows Protection will replace procexp.exe with taskman.exe at it’s next available chance.  What Process Explorer is actually doing, is “faking” to debug Task Manager.

This is a much better way to replace applications in Windows, because it doesn’t actually touch the original executable.  Instead it launches the “debugger” application and passes in the path to the original executable as the first argument.  Process Explorer just swallows this argument and launches itself instead.

So let’s say that you’re more of a fan of Notepad2 instead of Notepad (due to the awesome text highlighting), and you’d rather windows launch Notepad2 instead of Notepad when opening things in clear text.  You can manually do what Process Explorer does programmatically.

Warning: Editing the Registry can cause serious problems and the utmost care should be taken.  I am not responsible for a broken machine.

Here is how we can do this.  Assuming you downloaded and installed Notepad2, follow these steps:

1. Open Regedit, and navigate to this location: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\
2. Create a new KEY for the name of the executable, for example “Notepad.exe” (without the quotes).
3. In this new Key, create a new string value called “Debugger” without the quotes, and give it the value of the path to Notepad2. E.g. “c:\Program Files\Notepad 2\Notepad2.exe”

At this point you can run “Notepad.exe” and you’ll notice that Notepad2 opens with all sorts of garbage in it.  This is because Notepad2.exe is passed the path of Notepad.exe, and Notepad2 is opening Notepad.exe for editing.  Clearly we don’t want this, so we can use a “/g” which is a Notepad2 command to go-to line.

1. Change the “Debugger” string to “c:\Program Files\Notepad 2\Notepad2.exe /g”

Now Notepad2 will be launched with the command to go to line “c:\windows\notepad.exe” which it translate to line 0, and you have a blank document. Voila!

Moral of the story, if you can tell the application your launching to ignore the argument after it, you can launch the application instead of the built in Windows Application, such as Notepad.exe

Want to go back to the built in application? simply delete the “Debugger” string-value.

Why is this better than replacing the executable itself?

1. You keep the original file, so you can always go back to it
2. You don’t have to worry about Windows Protection
3. You don’t have to reboot

You might also want to note that this affects all users on the system, and if you ever have another executable called the same thing, it’ll override that as well.

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Scripting Hot Keys & Making Life Easier

This past weekend, I had a fellow geek in town visiting and I noticed he was doing some pretty wild things without touching his mouse.  When diving in deeper, I figured out he was using a program called AutoHotKey.

AutoHotKey is a small (2mb RAM footprint) program that intercepts keys from the keyboard and can perform actions on those hot keys.  It’s pretty flexible too! you can have it execute hot keys only on specific applications, or globally to the system.  The hot keys are all controlled and programmed by you, so you can add or remove any specific ones that you want.  You can have it change text for you, so if you say “BRB”, it’ll can automatically expand it to “Be Right Back”, and so on.  Once you’ve mastered the easy stuff, you can also use it create GUI!

What caught my intention was the ability to write a short script to “Paste as Clear Text”, if you want to strip out all that rich text for an email or some other purpose.  I find myself having to use specific clear text all the time!

You can download AutoHotKey and start immediately using their documentation.

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Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer

The Official Exchange Team Blog just announced the release of their Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer. The connectivity check will allow you to choose what type of Exchange protocol you want to talk to your Windows Small Business Server on and prompt you for a particular user and it will tell you what the problem is for connecting to that server.

Overview

The Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer is a web site for IT Administrators to validate and diagnose end-to-end Exchange scenarios.  The site simulates multiple Exchange client access and inbound SMTP scenarios from outside the customer’s infrastructure and reports whether the test was successful.  If the test fails, we tell the IT Admin exactly where in the process it failed as well as provide troubleshooting tips on resolving the issue.  See the screenshot below.

In this version, the tool provides the following end-to-end tests:

• Exchange ActiveSync (v2.5 and greater… including AutoDiscover)
• Outlook Anywhere (OL2003 and greater… including AutoDiscover)
• Inbound SMTP

Note: The Outlook Anywhere test will fail when the server is running MOMT (e.g. an Outlook.com mailbox) since the tool doesn’t currently test encrypted RPC… but check out the detailed and clear error message!

Coming Soon

We will be expanding the Exchange scenarios in the next few months to include the following:

• Outlook Web Access
• IMAP
• POP
• Exchange Web Services

Quick demo

 

Check out the short video describing the tool on TechNet Edge.  Or try the high quality version.

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Support Earth Hour

Earth Hour is a symbolic event. Turning off our lights for an hour won’t stop climate change but it does demonstrate that our individual action is important and adds up to make a big difference. More importantly, it sends a very powerful message to government and world leaders that people want policies and regulations put in place that can achieve meaningful emission reduction to help fight climate change

On March 28, 2009 at 8:30 pm, tens of millions of people around the world will turn out their lights for one hour

Let us demonstrate our concern for our living planet and send a loud message to our leaders that they support action on climate change.

Find out more at the Earth Hour Website.

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