Category: Microsoft

Microsoft Technologies

Fixing the Outlook Web Access web application failed to initialize error

John Leave a comment

During the Christmas break many still wish to check their e-mails whilst enjoying their holidays.  One of my Clients who don’t use OWA are now taking the plunge and going to be checking their e-mail (great feature). With SBS 2008 (so Exchange 2007), OWA is enabled by default, so I thought there would be nothing that I needed to do, I was wrong.

After loading up OWA on the server and my laptop I received the following error:

The Outlook Web Access web application failed to initialize.
..
Exception
Exception type: Microsoft.Exchange.Clients.Owa.Core.OwaThemeManagerInitializationException

The fix I’ve worked out for this is to copy the original files in the theme directory from your installation media (x:\Setup\ServerRoles\ClientAccess\owa\version\) back into the OWA working directory.

The cause, I suspect a corrupt file, not too sure exactly and didn’t have much time to investigate seeing as it’s holiday time, but believe something had changed the theme configuration causing OWA to look elsewhere for theme files, I also have a suspicion that an update might have caused this, but can’t confirm.

Moving your SUSDB when it is running under MSDE

John 1 Comment

During my morning rounds of looking after clients’ servers, running SBS 2008. I noticed one was running out of space.  It had recently been updated to WSUS 3.0 SP2, after doing a quick hard drive space check I found that SUSDB was over five gigabytes in size. Generally this database should be around one gig.  Until I had some time to investigate I thought the best thing to do was to move it to another hard drive, easier said than done.

Just a little tip, if you are running under Windows SBS 2008 then you will need to Run as Administratorwill need to run the Management Studio as an Administrative user by right clicking and selecting “Run as Administrator”. This will allow you to connect to the Internal Database as your SBS Admin user doesn’t have permission to do so.

Once the logon screen appears, your first thought would be to simply select the Microsoft##SSEE instance seeing as that is what the internal database is called but it still won’t connect. You need to connect via named pipes. Do so by typing the following into the server name field:
\\.\pipe\MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE\sql\query
Once connected you should be able to SUSDB under the Databases list.  To move the database is quite simple, we will detach, move the database files and then re-attach the database. Best to stop the Update Services Service before continuing (via the Services Snap-In).

Detach Database DialogOnce in Management Studio, expand Databases and right click on the SUSDB database. From there click on Tasks and select ‘Detach…’ a dialog window will pop up. We will want to ensure that SQL Server drops any connections to the database to ensure a successful detachment of the database, so tick ‘Drop Connections’. Once the process is complete, minimise the Management Studio and navigate to the databases location (usually under ‘c:\wsus\SUSDB’) and move the folder to a location with more space.

Once that is done, we can re-attach the database. Maximise the Management Studio and right click on Databases and select ‘Attach…’. From here you are presented with another dialog box, click on the Add button and select the new location of the SUSDB that we just moved. Once you have selected the database simply click on Ok and SQL Server will do the rest.

Start the Update Services service and WSUS should be fine and work just as it was before the move.

Office 2010 and Windows Sysprep Adventures

John 2 Comments

For our new roll out next year, we are deploying Microsoft Office 2010 and using KMS as our licensing method. Througthe use of sysprep’s generalize command, Windows will flush its Activation Status and associated hardware ID as well as rearming the activation state to its fresh install state (grace period).

With the introduction of Office 2010 brings improved piracy protection.  On our test deployment we found that our KMS Client count for Office 2010 wasn’t increasing and therefore wouldn’t reach the required count of 5 for activation, what was going on!  After a little bit of digging and the use of the Office 2010 Software Protection VB Script (ospp.vbs under the Office14 folder) we were able to see that the five of our test machines had the same CMID, therefore KMS thought that each was the same client. After a quick look through Technet we found out the issue.  When you run an Office Product it would automatically attempt to activate via KMS. Our Office installer also had its own activate upon installation command as well.

The fix for this issue and getting the count to increase (and finally activate) was to run a re-arm utility provided under program files (or program files x86, depending on your installed flavor):OSPP with DCMID

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform\ospprearm.exe

Running the utility under an elevated command prompt will then show completed successfully. If you wish to double check you can then run ospp.vbs with the /dcmid switch and find that there is now no Client Machine ID.

Once this is compelte, run your sysprep as you would and you will find that for each client that you activate from now on for your KMS will increase your count.  You will also find that if you have some clients with the same ID then they will also all activate.

I plan on having some other articles covering articles regarding Windows 7 sysprep so stay tuned.

Remotely enable Remote Desktop to connect to a remote PC

John 1 Comment

Occasionally you need to get something done on a remote computer (or a clients computer) but the computer doesn’t have an easy way for you to connect to it. Luckily, if you have admin rights to the remote computer, you can still connect without needing to turn on remote desktop before hand. To do that you will just need to download a little tool called PsExec (Available here). PsExec is a Microsoft tool part of their PsTools, the beauty of it is that it is portable and can be run from anywhere.

Once you have PsExec download you just need to open a command prompt and browse to the folder with psexec.exe. Once the command prompt is open, type in this command and it will enable remote desktop on the machine you specify.

psexec \\machinename reg add “hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\terminal server” /f /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0

Make sure you replace “machinename” with the computer you are trying to control remotely. Once this command has run you should now be able to connect with the Remote Desktop client (mstsc.exe) to the remote computer.

Fix client machines not appearing in WSUS Console

John Leave a comment

Depending on your imaging method some clients may not show up on your WSUS console, and refuse to check for updates. Since starting my new job I’ve seen this occur on machines which have been imaged with a non-sysprepped image. I quickly whipped up a script to reset some settings and forcing the machine to contact your WSUS server and retrieve a new Client Id and thus show up in your console.

Dim objShell, strKeyPath, strValueName,strComputer

set objShell = wscript.createObject("wscript.shell")

const HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = &H80000002

strComputer = "."

Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set objRegistry = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\default:StdRegProv")

strKeyPath = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate"
strValueName = "SUSClientIdReset"


objRegistry.GetStringValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, strKeyPath, strValueName, dwValue
IF (dwValue = "1") Then
            'do nothing
      Else
            objRegistry.DeleteValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,strKeyPath,"SusClientId"
            objRegistry.DeleteValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,strKeyPath,"SusClientIdValidation"

   Set colServiceList = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("Select * from Win32_Service where Name = 'wuauserv'")

   For Each objService in colServiceList
     If objService.State = "Running" Then
     objService.StopService()
     Wscript.Sleep 10000
     objService.StartService()
     End If
   Next
        objShell.Run("wuauclt /resetauthorization /detectnow ")
   	Wscript.Sleep 10000   
        objShell.Run("wuauclt /r /reportnow")

        'Set reg value for SUSClientIdReset for checking against later.
   	dwValue = "1"
        objRegistry.SetStringValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, strKeyPath, strValueName, dwValue
End If

Run that on the effected machine with Admin Rights and the client will eventually appear in your WSUS Console.

As for the cause, the master image was joined to the domain and tested. During that time received group policy settings which included WSUS and contacted the server settings it’s clientId.

Hope that helps.

Configuring SharePoint 2007 to accept blocked file types

John 1 Comment

One of my clients using SharePoint 2007 were uploading some files to their site recently and got the following error:

The following file(s) have been blocked by the administrator

By going through Central Administration, I was able to unblock the file and allow them to upload the particular file to the library they were wanting uploading to. After opening up Central Admin, Click on the Operations Tab and look at the Security Configuration Section. Under it you will see Blocked File types (Forth Down), click on it. This by default selects your default site, if required change this. You will now have a large list showing all of the blocked file extensions, allowing you to add and remove them from the list.

In this case we wanted to allow MSI files so they could deploy a setup file through SharePoint as a storage point should users need to re-install. Remove the offending file type and click OK which takes you back to the operations page.

Simple as that, now going back into your SharePoint site, you can see that the file type has now been allowed and can be uploaded to the libraries you are using under the site it was enabled for.

Check to see if your KMS can be contacted

John Leave a comment

Sometimes when deploying computers in our organisation, they don’t see our KMS server and automatically activate (even though they are told to do so via our unattend.xml). 9 times out of 10 it’s the client itself having issues just talking to your KMS server. To check and see if you can contact it, you can perform a DNS lookup for the KMS Host. Open a command prompt window and type in the following:

nslookup -type=srv _vlmcs._tcp.<FQDN>

replacing the <fqdn> with your fully qualified domain name. It will look up the DNS record which the Software Licensing service checks to contact a KMS host. From here you can try and ping the machine using the above DNS entry.

You can also use some other commands on the KMS host to ensure that it is working correctly and accepting clients and activating them. Opening an elevated command prompt window on your host machine you can use the following:

slmgr /dli
slmgr /dlv

These two commands will show you detailed information about your KMS host machine such as the number of failed/successful activations as well as client counts.

BackupExec unable to read or write to the Database

John 3 Comments

Today when checking one of the servers I manage, I got an error when opening up the BackupExec 12.5 management console. The error was “Unable to read or write to the Database” which I found a bit puzzling. I checked to make sure SQL Server which hosted the BE database was running, and it was.

After having a quick look in the Application Event Log, I found an error relating to the issue I was experiencing. Event ID: 33152.  Thankfully the fix for this error is quite simple.

Open up the Backup Exec Services Manager and click on Stop All Services. Now open up the SQL Server Configuration Manager and restart the instance of SQL Server hosting your Backup Exec database. Once it restarts, return to the Backup Exec Services Manager and click on Start All Services to start them all up again. Once they’re up, open the management console.  If all went well it should now log you in successfully and show you the current status of your server.

Letting Exchange accept Mail from other domains

John Leave a comment

One of the usual things I perform as an IT Consultant is maintenance and configuration tasks on Exchange. One of the most requested tasks is accepting e-mail for more than one domain. Most of my clients run Windows SBS Server 2008 which comes with Exchange 2007. In this article I will walk through accepting mail from other domains.

Firstly, open up the management console, expand Organization Configuration, click on Hub Transport and finally select the Accepted Domains tab. Now under the Actions for Hub Transport click New Accepted Domain…

The New Accepted Domain window now pops up. Configure it with your new domain.  The domain must be yours and  its MX record configured to point to your exchange server. After you enter your domain, there are three options to tell exchange how to handle mail. Authoritative Domain tells the exchange server to accept ALL e-mail for this domain, if a user doesn’t exist then an NDR is generated and sent to the sender. The Internal and External relay options are handy, if you have multiple domains with multiple exchange servers, you can choose the Internal Relay option, which will look for other exchange servers under the forest for your entire organisation.

The third option is the External Relay. This is useful for those domains which you don’t ‘own’.  A prime example are franchise companies. Which may have one e-mail for a particular store or location, allowing you to send and receive for that domain to users not on your exchange server.

And That’s it. Simply ensure that the domain’s MX Record is pointing to your server, or if you are using the SBS POP3 Connector this will now properly process e-mails for that particular domain.