Boost Outlook 2007’s speed

Strange that this patch is not “critical” for Outlook because it is one of the few patches we have seen that really, really makes a difference. If you install the patch we mentioned a few days ago for Outlook 2007, then you should find that Outlook now running at turbo speeds. It really is amazing at how much quicker Outlook 2007 is after applying this patch.

Our advice, if you haven’t got it, go and download it now. You won’t be sorry.

Apply service packs manually

So we have been testing ISA Service pack 3 on our virtual machines without issue. Next stage was to load it onto our production machine. Normally, we recommend that any service pack be manually downloaded and installed rather than being applied from Windows Update. However, since we’d had such success at installing the service pack from Windows Update we thought, “What the hell?”

During the installation via Windows Update we got the following nasty error :

Error 0xc004038b

The Microsoft server storage service is unavailable

What the? Ok, now the firewall service is stopped and won’t restart. Hmmm…ok reboot. When the system reboots we get a failure to find a boot device. Ok, so now this is looking really bad.

Well, it turns out the CDROM was faulty and being the first boot device it was working just enough to allow the system to think that it could boot to it but failing enough to prevent it booting. So after replacing the CDROM we could boot to the server console screen again – Phew. Problem was the Firewall service still wouldn’t start. So we had to download ISA 2004 Service Pack 3 via another machine and then apply it to the server.

One more reboot later and everything is back the way it should be functioning happily. Lessons learnt :

– Only apply service packs for applications after downloading them manually

– A faulty CDROM can cause your system not to boot.

Now we just waiting on patch Tuesday from Microsoft. There should be a few updates tomorrow for us to install – again.

Shadowprotect IP address not "sticking"

We have been using Shadowprotect of late to image server hard disks. Typically, before we do a major upgrade or service pack install we boot to the Serverprotect CDROM and image the contents of the disk to an external USB hard disk. Now this is great provided the machine supports USB2 (480MB/sec transfers) but really bad if it only has USB1 (11MB/sec transfers). So whatta you do if the machine only has USB1, which many “older” servers have.

You can typically do a transfer via the network card, since network cards in servers typically support 1,000MB (Gigabit). With Shadowprotect you can enable networking and make use of Windows networking to image to another machine. Problem is when we booted to the latest version of Shadowprotect the IP address we wanted wouldn’t seem to “stick”. Turns out there is a bug in the latest version of the networking. The way that you overcome this is simply to boot into the “legacy” environment (which is an option during the boot of the Shadowprotect CDROM). Once in the legacy environment you set an IP address, map a network drive and then backup/restore data at high transfer speeds.

PC vs MAC ads – a new perspective

Ok, so we have all seen those really cool Mac ads? You know the ones that show how cool Macs are and how boring, difficult, cumbersome and so forth PC’s are right? if not then click here to go to the Apple web site and view them.

Yes, they are funny and clever but are they totally true? Well..maybe not. Have a look at these send ups of the Mac ads but from a PC perspective. Click here to view the “alternate” PC vs Mac ads (from the PC’s prespective).

Enjoy.

ISA 2004 trace files

Was recently checking free space on the C: drive of a server and discovered two HUGE (>400MB) files. ISALOG.BIN and ISALOG.BAK. I wonder what these are? Well :

ISA Service Pack 2 includes an error-level tracing mechanism that operates continually in the background. If necessary, the tracing information is available for Microsoft Product Support Services. The tracing mechanism does not collect personally identifiable information.

Tracing takes place in the background, and has a negligible affect on ISA Server performance. A 400 megabyte (MB) file (%windir%\debug\isalog.bin) is created by Service Pack 2 on each computer running ISA Server services, to contain the tracing information.

We recommend that you use the default settings for this feature. However, if you want to modify the tracing mechanism, you can do so through the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ISATrace. To change the size of the file used by tracing, change the value of CircularlLogSizeMB. To disable tracing, change the BootTracing value to 0. This does not delete the file, which has to be deleted manually. After registry changes, restart the computer so that the changes take effect. If you create the registry key before installing Service Pack 2, and set the BootTracing value to 0, the tracing file will not be added during the installation, and tracing will not be enabled.

Full info – http://www.microsoft.com/technet/isa/2004/plan/sp2.mspx

Interestingly they reside on the C: drive of our server even though ISA is on D:. We can’t really see the need for them so perhaps we’ll reduce their size since space is currently a bit of a premium.

It would have been nice to know that we’d lose almost 1GB of free space by installing ISA 2004 SP2! But now we do right?

Uninstalling Symantec Livestate 6.x

Recently attempted to uninstall Symantec Livestate Recovery V6.0 so we could upgrade to V7.0 and it failed withe the following error : Internal Error 2343. After contacting Symantec support it turns out that they have a special batch file that “uninstalls” V6.0. Beware that there is a different batch file if you want to uninstall V6.5 so make sure that you ask Symantec Support for the right version.

We ran the batch file and rebooted the server and came up with a services not started error. When we went into Administrative Tools | Services we found that there was still a Livestate service. We would have thought that the batch file removed this. Symantec tech support also confirmed that this should have happened. It wasn’t until we mentioned that we have installed Livestate on drive D: that Symantec tech support informed us that the batch file assumes that Livestate is on C: drive. D’oh.

So if you have installed Livestate 6.X on anything but the C: drive you’ll need to make the following changes after you run the batch file Symantec tech support provide :

1.Run Regedit and delete following entries:
     HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall – Find LiveState Recovery entries and delete them.
     HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Symantec LiveState Recovery
     HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Symantec\LiveState Recovery

2. Delete LiveState folder in Program Files

3. Restart server

Determining whether your machine has USB 2.0

Been installing a lot of Stroragecraft disk imaging software onto machines of late. To get the best performance via an external USB device you need to ensure that the machine supports the newer USB 2.0 rather than USB 1.1. How do you know if your machine has USB 2.0? Generally, you’d just plug in the drive and see if it is slow but here’s a better way :

    1. Right-click the My Computer icon and select Manage.

      Note: Windows XP users may need to click Start to access the My Computer icon.

    2. Click the Device Manager icon.
    3. Click the plus (+) sign next to Universal Serial Bus Controllers.

      Note: If Universal Serial Bus Controllers is not listed, there is a problem with the USB controller or the USB controller is not enabled in the computer’s BIOS. Please contact the computer or card manufacturer for updated drivers and/or for information on how to fix or enable the USB controller.

    • If Enhanced Host Controller and/or USB 2.0 Root Hub Device is listed, then the computer has USB 2.0 ports.
    • If Universal Host Controller and/or Open Host Controller is listed, then the computer has USB 1.1 ports.

You’ll find this info here.