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During the testing of Hyper-V live migration on a freshly built failover cluster (2008 R2), all seemed to work well apart from one Linux (CentOS) VM. It had been running fine on a single Hyper-V server with the integration components installed, however when I tried to do a live migration it failed, not giving much clue why.

Moving the VM to the other node and starting it using the Hyper-V manager, generated the following error…

‘SV04′ failed to start.
Microsoft Emulated IDE controller (Instance GUID): Failed to power on with error ‘a device attached to the system is not functioning’

Failed to open attachment: C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\Hyper-V\Virtual Hard Disks\SV04.vhd. Error – A device attached to the system is not functioning. (0x8007001F)

After some investigation, I found that the VM would only start on whichever cluster node was the owner of the CSV (Custer Shared Volume). I later discovered that disabling the AV (Sophos in this case) on the node that wasn’t the CSV owner resolved the issue – Odd, as I had added an exclusion for scanning on c:\ClusterStorage\*, seems that the exclusion didn’t quite work with it being CSV due to the way it links into the filesystem… Adding an exclusion for *.vhd, then renabling the AV fixed the issue.

There used to be an auto logoff screensaver (winExit.scr) in the Windows 2000/2003 resource kit, although it doesn’t appear to play too well with Windows 7/Vista. I needed the functionality that this provided for the systems in our meeting rooms, as people have a habit of leaving the systems logged on in there then leaving the room!

As I couldn’t find anything (for free!) that did this, I thought it was time for a bit of D.I.Y! So here we have my AutoLogoff Screensaver for Windows 7/Vista. Dead simple, drop in your C:\Windows\System32 folder, then probably use group policy to force it onto certain machines, or the local policy with gpedit.msc! Dims the screen like a UAC prompt in order to try and get the users attention a bit more, there’s no configurable options at the moment, just 60 seconds warning until logoff. If I get alot of requests I might add some additional funtionality, but it’s serving my requirements now, so I’m happy ;)

Download – AutoLogoff_v1.2.zip (144KB)

The default forms based login for OWA (Outlook Web Access) on Exchange 2010 requires users to login with the username in ‘DOMAIN\Username’ format. Show stopper for most of our users – they just type thier username on its own every morning, and won’t read the instructions. If you’re running in a single domain, you can set the default domain using the Exchange Management Console.

Navigate to ‘Server Configuration’ > ‘Client Access’, select your client access server, then the OWA tab below, right click on your OWA entry then view the properties. In the authentication tab of this window, you can select the logon format… Select username only, specify your domain, click ok – you’ll need to restart IIS for the change to come into operation.

Or you can do it even more quickly with the Exchange PowerShell:
Set-owavirtualdirectory -identity “owa (default web site)” -Sign-inFormat UserName -DefaultDomain “Home.local”

Over the last few days, I have been having a lot of problems trying to write Lotus Notes .NET applications in Windows Vista. I had no problems writing the apps under XP, but since upgrading I kept getting error messages like “Unable to find user id file” when trying to initiate a Notes Session. The problem was with Windows Vista Virtual Store!

Installing Lotus Notes on Windows Vista, seems to be a normal installation. But when you launch Lotus Notes for the first time, it will start to write the notes.ini file and your id file (plus some other user related files…) to the following location: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\lotus\. I never realised this before, until a colleague told me that Lotus Notes wrote files to this folder! With Lotus Notes writing to this folder, it made my .NET applications stop working!

The way to fix this, is to browse to: C:\Program Files, right click on “lotus”, go to the security tab and Edit the permissions for “Users” to Full Control. Apply the security settings. If you then copy the lotus folder from the VirtualStore to the normal Program Files folder, you will not lose any of your setting:

Copy: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\lotus\ To: C:\Program Files

You should now be able to delete the lotus folder from the VirtualStore (or just rename the lotus folder to lotus.old if you are worried about losing the data – this would be useful to see Lotus Notes recreates the folder in the VirtualStore).

Lotus Notes should now not use the Virtual Store, and your .NET apps should run without any error.

When creating a some system inventory groups in Altiris, I noticed that it didn’t seem to be collecting information for certain exe’s that had been deployed onto the system.

After a bit of reading, I found out the the software audit scan can run in two modes… Package and file mode. In package mode, it only reports on a single exe from each package, which makes reporting faster and keeps your Altiris database much smaller. This is what runs from a vanilla installation. The second type of can is file scan, where every exe is audited, you can set this by editing ‘AeXInvSolnAdm2.ini ‘ in the NSCap folder to run the following:

AeXAuditPls.exe /file /hidden /output xml

You’ll have to wait a day or two for all your systems to re-run the inventory, but after you should be able to report on alot more!

I came across a peculiar issue today with Lotus Notes 7, running on my newish Vista system, I was doing some c# development with the Notes COM objects, but was having some trouble, and needed to edit my notes.ini file to try and fix something.

The peculiar part was that in my program files directory, there was a notes.ini file – but with no real config in it, only a few lines – this files usually full of stuff! I also couldn’t see my ID file in the notes data directory when using explorer, but Notes could see it and access it fine!

After a bit of Googling, it turned out it was Vista redirecting application write access to the program files folder to “C:\Users\ %USERNAME% \AppData\Local\VirtualStore’. When the app reads from the program files folder it sees a merged version of the real program files folder and the users VirtualStore, so in essence forces apps to support multi users by the looks of it.

Ever get tired of having seperate windows for Active Directory, DHCP, Group Policy etc etc???

Sick of trawling through Administrative Tools & browsing to your Company website/intranet???

This post details how to create your own custom Admin Toolbar complete with snap-ins that will manage a wide array of your day to day IT administrative duties. You can even embed frequently visitied URL’s such as your Spam filter.

Step 1:

Go to Start>Run>mmc.exe

This opens a blank Windows management console that is ready to be customized

Step 2:

Click File>Add/Remove Snap-in

You can now add items to view on your toolbar I tend to add my frequently accessed stuff rather that everything from Admin Tools as this defeats the point.

Step 3:

Click File>Save As MyAdminPack.msc

I tend to add the file into my Startup folder so it launches first thing in the morning and leave it open throughout the day then there is no need to go trawling through menus each time you want to use Active Directory or check your Spam filter

You will find that this tool saves a lot of time through the day – why not email your Admin Pack to the rest of your IT department so you can all use it?!

Enjoy

If you’re having a problem where collections on your Altiris server are not updating, despite them being set to Membership update: automatic, and the options in ‘Configuration > Server Settings > Notification Server Settings > Automatic Collection updating’ are correctly set…. Take a look at the scheduled tasks on the server… Ours weren’t updating, turned out it was due to the scheduled tasks trying to run with invalid credentials.

Sometimes when trying to uninstall a foobar’d installation of the Symantec antivirus client, the uninstall password isn’t accepted, despite entering the correct one… The default is usually ‘symantec’.

A little work around is to disable the uninstall password by altering a registry key:
HKLM \ SOFTWARE \ INTEL \ LANDesk \ VirusProtect6 \ CurrentVersion \ AdministratorOnly \ Security
Then set ‘UseVPUninstallPassword’ to 0.