Fun with Service Packs again

Well, if you haven’t heard Microsoft have released Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. Better yet it appears as a critical update for Small Business Server. best of all, even for systems without SBS Service Pack 1 it appears as a critical update. Oh joy of joys. This is just like the fiasco when Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 appeared as a critical update. If was installed on your system then it would break a whole heap of things. You need to apply Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 as part of the Small Business Server 2003 Service Pack 1. So if your SBS system was set to automatically download and install the service pack, guess what? On the next reboot of your server you had a broken SBS.

So did Microsoft learn by this experience? Obviously not, because Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 is available as a critical update. Who knows what havoc it will reek on systems with Service Pack 1 already installed. It is our guess that Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 should work alright on SBS 2003 R2 or SBS 2003 with SBS Service Pack 1 but systems not meeting this criteria? Who knows? Problem is, someone out there is going to find out the hard way.

This is why we recommend that you don’t download and automatically install Windows Updates on your server. We recommend that you set it to only notify, then you apply the updates and service packs manually.

We are in the process of test Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 on our internal systems and we’ll provide feedback when we know more. Until then we would recommend you hang back from installing Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 just yet. In our books best let someone else bleed.

HP Lights-out 100c Remote Management Card

Had some fun and games getting this to work on a new HP ML110G4 server. Installing the hardware is simple enough but getting access to card via the network proved very interesting. Supposedly, the iLO card gets an IP address from a DHCP server by default according to the manual. Nope – sorry, card had a static IP address assigned, which we had to change. It also took us quite a while to locate the actual IP address settings in the server BIOS (as a hint look under the Advanced menu in the system BIOS which you get to via F10 at boot).

The biggest problem we found is that we could browse to the IP address of the iLO card but couldn’t log in? Hmmm… hours later after checking we had the right login, talking to HP ( who didn’t know ) turns out the iLO card doesn’t like IE7! Luckily it works with Mozilla ( sorry Microsoft ). HP’s response to this? “We don’t support IE7”.

Why is everything so hard?

Windows Update error 0x8DDD0001

We’ve been seeing a lot of Windows Update errors after apply Internet Explorer 7.0 to SBS 2003 servers. Typically the error tells you that you don’t have some of the Microsoft Update sites in your trusted sites. Problem is that when you look these sites are already in there. The quick fix is simply to go into you Internet Browser, then Tools | Internet Options | Security and select the button “Reset all zones to default levels”. If you restart your browser then Windows Update runs normally.

Unsure, whether this affects any browser security issues but really the only browsing on the server should be for Microsoft Updates and should only be done by someone responsible.

Windows Update Error 0x800A0007

Recently trying to use Windows Update at a customers site that has SBS 2003 Premium R2 (with ISA) and received the following Windows Update error 0x800A0007 on every machine. Hmmm…this wasn’t happening last time, what’s changed? Did some searching on the Net and found a multitude of solutions from simple clearing of the IE cache to reformatting. The common point seemed that this issue was caused by Microsoft Genuine Advantage (yuk!).

So we went to the Microsoft download site and installed Windows Genuine Advantage on the machines manually. The secret is then to reboot the machines and try Windows Update again. Worked on all the machines.

Nice isn’t it that a piece of software designed to ensure you have a legal copy of Windows stuffs up keeping the software up to date? Gotta admit with all the problems that we have had of late we are no fans of Windows Genuine Advantage. We think that perhaps Microsoft should test this sorta thing more thoroughly, but hey that’s just us.

SBS2003 and Windows server SP2

Ok, bottom line at this point of the game is don’t do it. There seem to be plenty of things that Windows Server SP2 could break ( including network connectivity, backups, SBS console and more ). There also seems to be issues with uninstalling the sucker. Since there doesn’t appear to be any real burning need to install this service pack on your SBS server I’d just hang back and let someone else bleed to death.

Even though it appears quite a few (unknowing) folks have installed SP2 on their machines ( thanks mainly to automatic updates and WSUS ) there doesn’t really seem to be any concrete information about what or how the best way to install (or uninstall) the service pack or what needs to be upgraded before hand. It appears that things like HP broadcomm network cards needs to be upgraded but even that appears to be vague.

The hardest issues to resolve are related to certain chipsets of network cards, typically the Broadcom chipset. Here’s an overview of this and some other problems:

• VPN, network and connectivity issues. You may find issues with your ISA 2004 firewall, Outlook connectivity, Remote Desktop, or VPN (Virtual Private Network). If you have Broadcom NICs (network interface cards), first make sure you have the latest drivers installed. Then, use the Registry to disable RSS (Receive Side Scaling) and Task Offloading, as discussed in the SBS blog and the ISA Server blog.

• Help and Support Service missing. Seemingly the largest issue, and one that’s easily fixed, is that the Help and Support Service appears to be missing. The instructions to reinstall this service are discussed on the SBS blog for that platform.

• Issues caused by uninstallation of SP2. Issues caused by removing SP2 include scheduled tasks being altered so you must reenter your passwords. Also, unless you have Windows 2003 R2 or SBS 2003 R2, removing SP2 causes the rollback of MMC 2.0 to have issues. To resolve this, review the known issues in the release notes and remove the files from the %APPDATA%\Microsoft\MMC\ folder.

For the time being, hold off installing Windows Server SP2 on your SBS 2003 servers.

Getting – RTHDCPL.EXE Illegal System DLL?

And a nasty message like :

The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly. The relocation occurred because the DLL C:\Windows\System32\Hhctrl.ocx occupied an address range reserved for Windows system DLLs. The vendor supplying the DLL should be contacted for a new DLL.

(Especially on HP workstations)? See this article from Microsoft for fixes and reasons. It is caused after you install security update 925902 (MS07-017).

Another bad encounter with Windows Genuine Advantage

For those that don’t know, Windows Genuine Advantage is software that Microsoft installs on your machine, usually via Microsoft Update, that checks to see whether you have genuine Microsoft software installed. If you don’t then you receive all kinds of messages to rectify the problem. Alternatively, if you have legitimate Microsoft software, then you SHOULD have no problems.

Our experience is that more and more problems are being caused by Windows Genuine Advantage. Prior to this recent incident we had an issues where Genuine Advantage wouldn’t allow Microsoft Update to function. The solution was to install Genuine Advantage manually. A definite pain having to manually install Genuine Advantage on all the workstations for our client.

Just recently we had yet another problem where Genuine Advantage prevented us from doing our jobs. We wanted to install the latest Outlook patch because it really speeds up your system :

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c262bcfd-1e09-49b6-9003-c4c47539df66&DisplayLang=en

However, when we went to install it we needed to run Genuine Advantage to check our software again. With no other option we ran validation and were surprised to discover that it failed. Why? because we hadn’t as yet activated a version of Microsoft Project on the machine. So we couldn’t download the patch until we first ran Project and Activated it.

Now really, if Microsoft really wants us to install Genuine Advantage then they have gotta prevent things like this were we are totally prevent us from getting on with our work. How *@&*(@*(‘ing stupid is it to prevent us from installing a patch until we activate all Microsoft software?

Come on Microsoft, stopping making it so hard.

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.