How to query the Microsoft Knowledge Base by using keywords and query words

Maybe I should have known more about this years ago - I actually have thought about it - just never investigated it. Nevertheless, you can use predefined keywords to make a more precise search for you KB articles. Not all keywords are in the help article. Some, you have to figure out yourself.
Two useful ones are Windows SP2 fixes kbwinxpsp3fix and Office 2003 SP 2 ones kboffice2003presp2fix.

New Permission Objects in SMS 2003 SP1.

While creating a script setting up permissions in SMS, I realized that there are some a new kids in town – the manage folder permission and the software updates class. But the binary value of those are not documented in the SDK!

Manage folder is bit 17 hex 0x20000 decimal 131072. Software Updates is class value 10. Both are the next available bit/value - makes sense.

Software Updates has read, modify, delete, administer, create and delegate permissions.

Guest OS Slow - Give It More RAM

Playing around with Virtual Server 2005, I ran into some very slow guest OS’s – some reacted very, very slowly, so here’s a hint:
If you are experiencing that one or a few of your guest OS’s are slow but the others are running as expected, you probably have starved the slow ones. Give them more RAM to speed things up. The easy way to check whether a guest is starved is to compare the assigned RAM to the Commit Level (Task Manager) and at the same time look at the page fault delta values (Task Manager, Processes tab, select columns). If you want to get the most out of your RAM, you probably will run with the Commit Level some above the amount of RAM – but too much paging will slow you down.

MOM 2005 Core MP Updated

An update of the MOM 2005 Management Pack versioned v05.0.2803.0000 was released February 9th. My existing is 2746. You can get it here. The changes can be viewed by using the MP2XML and MPDiff tools of the Resource Kit -

• Convert the old and the new AKM files to XML with MP2XML AKM-file XML-file
• Run MPDiff.Console.exe /src:old.xml /tgt:new.xml /v:cad. You can also run it with one of the cad (changed, added, deleted) letters at a time.
• View the output or view diffout.xml with Internet Explorer

Virtual Server 2005 and InCd are not best friends!

I found the solution to the problem in my earlier post. InCd conflicts with Virtual Server 2005. Uninstalling InCd made the problem go away.

Indigo - Applications on Longhorn

If Microsoft is able to hold the schedule, we need to start considering how managing and running Longhorn applications is going to be. Applications utilizing Longhorn will be based on the Indigo application framework. I stumbled across this article about Indigo. It is worth reading! And as the article ends -
The impact of this technology will not be small. Anyone who builds distributed applications on Windows, especially applications that must interoperate with those on other platforms, should pay close attention. Indigo will significantly change their world.

Nokia and Exchange Server ActiveSync

According to this press release (and a lot of blogs - too many to mention) Nokia has licensed EAS for their Nokia 60 and 80 Series. This is interesting news especially for Service Providers offering Hosting based on Exchange 2003 as one the advantages of this platform is the integrated mobile features (Be it ActiveSync or OMA) - the problem is that the penetration rate of Windows Mobile Devices was and probably still is very low compared to that of e.g. Nokia Mobiles (In Scandinavia anyway).
And IMHO Nokia Mobiles is still a better choice than the Windows Mobile powered devices I’ve used so far (Qtek 2020 and lately iPAQ 6340) and even though the battery lifetime and impressing feature set of the latter is very attractive – I’d prefer a stable PDA/Phone (I've had my Wireless repaired 2 times and its broke again; furthermore I've had issues with bluetooth and stability problems). According to a Danish news source there should be an update on the way to fix the Wireless/Bluetooth problems with the iPAQ 6340 – when/if that comes and if it fixes the problems I’d probably change my mind as the iPAQ 6340 is very close to be the perfect Mobile/PDA device for me (I love the Wireless features and my TomTom Navigator 3 with Bluetooth GPS).

Virtual Server 2005 Events are OK (now)

This is a follow-up to my earlier blog. After uninstalling Virtual PC 2004 and rebooting the server, eventlogging works. Events are logged in the Virtual Server eventlog and they also appear in the Virtual Server Web interface. Looks like a conflict with (the unsupported on Windows Server 2003) Virtual PC 2004. Think I will clean up the registry...

Could not See Virtual Server 2005 Events

Playing around with Virtual Server 2003 eval edition, I had problems starting one of my guest OS'es. I went into eventvwr to analyze the problem and discovered that Virtual Server creates its own eventlog like e.g. DNS does. This was empty. The events were in the Application log but they were not translated correctly -
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Virtual Server
Event Category: (2)
Event ID: 1061
Date: 12-02-2005
Time: 11:32:54
User: HOST\Administrator
Computer: HOST
Description: The description for Event ID ( 1061 ) in Source ( Virtual Server ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: po-sql2000.

Not very useful! So I decided to fix the registry to get these events translated correctly. This is how I did that -

• First I looked below HKLM\SYSTEM\CCS\Services\Eventlog\Virtual Server\Virtual Server
• Here I found the pointer for the resource DLL C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Server Trial\Event Log\VirtualServerLogMessages.dll.
• I verified that the file was on my system.
• Having done so, I exported the above key to a .REG file.
• Replaced the first \Virtual Server\ string with \Application\ using notepad.
• Saved the file.
• Loaded it by double-clicking it

This got the messages translated corrected in event viewer -

"po-sql2000" could not be started because there is not enough physical memory or system resources available.

Now I only have to figure out what it means by that - I have 1.5 GB available!

Windows Server 2003 SP1 RC2 released

Microsoft has released SP1 RC2 for download - you can find the information about SP1 here and download RC2 here.

Enable Remote Desktop Connections remotely #2

I've received a few comments on my earlier post - one of them is that you can just wait a minute or 2 after changing the registry key instead of rebooting (Patience is a virtue ;-) another one is that the "authorized" way to do this is through WMI -

wmic /node:"Computer Name (FQDN)" /USER:"username" RDTOGGLE WHERE ServerName="Computer Name" CALL SetAllowTSConnections 1

This by the way only works from Windows Server 2003 (Thanks to Per Ø. for pointing this out) - if you need to this from Windows XP it looks like this -

wmic /node:"Computer Name (FQDN)" /USER:"username" PATH win32_terminalservicesetting WHERE (__Class!="") CALL SetAllowTSConnections 1

It's a good suggestion to use WMI (Except that it's easier - for me anyway - to remember the registry key ;-)

SMS 2003 SDK Version 2

V2 was out in August last year so this is not brand new stuff. Anyway, things like these may not be the first to look at until you have a reason, so treat this as a reminder. The new version contains .NET examples, console folder documentation and the Management Point (MP) API. As always it contains a wealth of information useful for the SMS nerd :) - the extensibility of SMS is one of its best features.

LogParser v2.2

LogParser was recently updated. LogParser is a cool tool and it also have an object interface for scripting. Read the excellent Tales from the Script article on scripting it. Read the help file to see other uses - it is very versatile.

Scriptomatic 2.0

For those doing automation - and who doesn't? - Scriptomatic from Microsoft just got a major overhaul: Support for multiple scripting langauges and output formats. Use it to jumpstart your scripts. It is a very useful product - although there are still improvements wanted - at least for the VBScript version. I think a global On error resume next is considered bad programming. Likewise a missing Option Explicit is bad. I am aware that Scriptomatic is intended to get you going and it does that very well, but learning scripters bad habits is not a good thing. Normally, on error resume next / goto 0 should only surround statements throwing an error you want to catch. Without Option Explicit, you can risk all sorts of side effects in your code if it grows beyound a few lines. An example:
dim lngCounter
lngCounter=1
wscript.echo lngCounter
IncreaseCounter
wscript.echo lngCounter

sub IncreaseCounter
lngCounter=lngCounte+1
end sub

This will echo 1 and 1 and and not 1 and 2 as expected. This is caused by a spelling mistake in the statement in IncreaseCounter. Option Explicit would have caught this error.

IMF update has arrived

As I reported in an earlier post Microsoft has released a long awaited update to the SmartScreen filter in IMF (Before the technology update coming in SP2) - you can find it here.

Enable Remote Desktop Connections remotely

How many times have you went back to your Desk or home after installing a brand new Windows 2003 Server just to find that you forgot to enable Remote Desktop Connections? Jim McBee has found the registry key to remotely enable this –

HKLM\System\CCS\Control\Terminal Server\fDenyTSConnection

Just change it from 1 to 0 and reboot.

It's the Little Things in Life ... (Like Google or Regmon ;-)

How to Run a WMI Query from the Command Line

If you have some WMI Query you can use wbemtest *) to run it. But this is a little tedious as you first have to connect to the namespace etc.
An alternative is to do it from the command line using WMIC. Take this statement - it was part of an SMS error message I got:
SELECT __CLASS, __PATH, __RELPATH, Description, Manufacturer, Name, Status FROM Win32_NetworkClient
You can not use the statement directly, but it can easily be converted to WMIC style:
wmic path Win32_NetworkClient get __CLASS, __PATH, __RELPATH, Description, Manufacturer, Name, Status
Use the /Format switch to make the output more readable.

*) In case you do not know wbemtest, play around with it. Just search the Help and Support Center for wbemtest.

Domain Trust and "The operation can not be performed on the current domain"

I was trying to setup a trust between two domains across ISA2004. Everything running in Virtual PC. But it did not work. Whenever I tried, I got the message The operation can not be performed on the current domain. I was not able to find this message anywhere on the Internet and the message gave no hint as to why it wasn't possible. Trying to explain the problem to my colleague, I realized the problem myself: I had copied the original Windows Server 2003 disk (file) in a workgroup state. DCPromo seems to reuse the SID of the original server for the domain, so the problem was caused by the fact that both Active Directory domains were having the same SID. Hmmm - I knew that I should not just copy the disk, but a decent error messages would have helped a lot. Demote, sysprep and promote removed the problem.

If you by chance should experience the same situation on NT4, the error is also a strange one. As I'm not 100% sure, I'm not going to provide the message but it had something to do with file/record already exists.

Hosted Messaging And Collaboration 3.0

The next version of Hosted Exchange 2003 (HE2003), Krakatoa, now renamed to Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 3.0 (HMC 3.0) has been released. It continues the evolution from HE2003 and adds "true" support for Sharepoint Services and Live Communications Server 2005. Furthermore the reference architecture has been updated significantly with -

Support for running on MPS on Windows Server 2003 (As opposed to HE2003)
SQL Reporting Services
Microsoft Operations Manager 2005
Migration tools from to migrate users from other platforms
ISA 2004
Intelligent Message Filtering
Resource Manager Rebuilder Tool (Used when AD and MPS is out of sync)
OAB Migration Tool (Used when moving from "standard" Exchange OAB implementation to dedicated OAB servers)

And much more - I will be back with further info when I've had the time to test and use the product. Until then you can check links to the press release here and what the press has to say about it here.

Virtual PC 2004 SP1.27 Upgrade Experiences

This is a follow-up to my earlier post.
So I tried to update. But the SP1.27 (as I now call it) said the software already was installed. I went into Add/Remove Programs and uninstalled SP1. Planning on rebooting later, I found that the uninstall made all my network adapters unusuable. Normally, the install disables networking temporary, but this time they simply did not work afterwards.
After rebooting, I realized that Virtual PC was completely uninstalled. I installed the RTM version again and applied SP1.27.
Now both Help, About and Add/Remove Programs, Support Information claims that I'm running 5.3.582.27 as expected.