August 2005 - Posts
The time has come! Tomorrow will be the first SBS Ireland usergroup meeting. www.sbsireland.com
Thanks to Dave Houston who has tirelessly worked on getting the group setup, we will by the looks of it, have over 20 people at the first event! Nice one! Also to Microsoft Ireland who are letting us use their premisies and food :)
More information on the meeting can be found on www.sbsireland.com but I will be there to do a Q&A session, and I also have some information on the SBS Swing migration method that I will tell all about...
If you are not registered, and do want to come along, email Dave Houston
Today, I implemented my first "proper" and "non screw around" swing migration (www.sbsmigration.com).
Jeff, who last night drove away from the hurricanes approaching his home town in America and basically uplifted his entire life and work still made time for me. That deserves a mention....
A guy who can handle me messaging him every 30 minutes with issues just because I did not read his excellent migration documentation properly, and not loose the plot, is a good guy in my book. (Not that I have a book... yet... but you get what I mean).
For all those who want to migrate SBS, I cannot recommend a better company. Use him and spend the best few hundred bucks ever.....
To download WSUS installer to your computer
- On the computer running Windows SBS, create a folder named WSUSFiles on your local hard disk.
- Register to download the latest version of WSUSSetup.exe from the Microsoft Web site for Windows Server Update Services here
- Answer all required questions on the Windows Server Update Services Registration Wizard Web page and click Continue.
- When you see the file download security warning prompt, select Save.
- In the Save As dialog, browse to the WSUSFiles folder and then click Save.
To prepare the WSUS database
- Extract the WSUS Setup files.
- Click Start, click Run, and then type C:\WSUSFiles\WSUSSetup.exe /X, where C: is the letter of your local hard disk.
- When prompted for a location to extract the files, select the WSUSFiles folder.
- Type the following command, where C: is the letter of your local hard disk, and then press Enter:
CD C:\WSUSFiles\wmsde
- Type the following command with consideration to the points listed below, and then press Enter:
Sqlrun03.msi InstanceName=WSUS BlankSAPwd=1 Reboot=ReallySuppress DisableNetworkProtocols=1 DisableAgentStartup=1 DisableThrottle=1
Notes
- If you want to specify the drive letter where the database instance will be located, you must add the DataDir="Path" argument to the command line, where Path is the path to the target directory in the file system.
- The command line implies that your WSUS database will have a blank password. However, during the actual installation of WSUS, a randomly generated password is set. You do not need to specify a password.
- The command line is not case sensitive.
I found an interesting article today that some of you may want to read... from Mark Grote
A First Look at Exchange 2003 SP2
In the article, there is the mention of the increase (at last) of the 16GB Limit on the store to 75GB. That means 1GB each for your users mailboxes! Yay!
But, in the article, Mark has mentioned that SBS2003 users will have to wait for an update to allow us to use this new limit... I cannot figure out why, but I am assuming that it will be a quick patch or something. (My test SBS box is down at the moment, and I am too chicken to put SP2 on the production box).
Anyhow.. have a read, and have faith that I for one will be pushing the SBS team to get any required updates out ASAP.
Some emails really do make my day, I found this one today on a clean out..
One of my clients was waiting on licences that had been "lost in the system". I had sent a few emails complaining, and my account manager contacted the despatch department and replied to me with this:
Hi
I tried to impress on them the importance of the product and how it impacted the business. It took ages but finally an analogy of Gandhi running out of goat stew seemed to work. Your customer will either get new licences or a new turban.
Regards
G.......
Well... I thought it was funny :)
I popped in to see a friend (and coder for my company) today. He had this Aurora adware rubbish on his machine. Now, I don't know how the rest of you feel about adware, but as far as I am concerned these people should be arrested and the key thrown away. I hear a lot about things being "done" against these companies / coders that write this crap, but as of yet I do not see any real action.... If you want to know who released this adware, well they are here: http://www.direct-revenue.com/news6.php - I have never read so much crap in my life! Grrrrrr....
Anyway.... I would consider both my friend and I resonably good technical people. We run the latest patches, the latest antivirus, the latest spyware scanners.... but since my friend shares his machine with others, obviously a site was visited by another user and this stuff got on the machine. Probably something like "Your machine is infected with blah blah blah.... click here to save yourself" Click..... Ummm urrr.... whats this new casino software? (I am sure the user probably clicked on the X and it still installed....)
So, I before I give you some info on removing this Aurora (nail.exe) rubbish, let me pose a question...... If people like me, and people like my coder friend can get infected, and can have 4 hours of our lives destroyed trying to remove this adware, what hope has the average home user got? The answer is of course simple.... They have NO hope.
The Nail.exe process loads on the back of explorer.exe in the Winlogon Shell registry entry. Therefore removal is a disaster. Basically you must crash the explorer to remove the process... how can this be allowed to happen? What can Microsoft / Antispyware companies do about this? Hell... I don't know, I install servers....
I managed to get this spyware off the machine after many hours, but some key points you should know are:
- MS Antispyware, Adaware, Spybot and some other antispyware programs did not remove it, even though they reported they had. All they did was get rid of the registry entries and older EXE's the adware had created.
- There is a service that you need to kill called "System Startup Service" c:\windows\svcproc.exe
- There is an EXE that you need to kill called c:\windows\nail.exe
- This program, even when you kill the process or RANDOM exe it creates will keep reloading because it is "tagged" on the back of explorer.exe
- You will need to reset the shell entry in the Winlogon registry key to "explorer.exe", but to do this, you must be in safe mode and AFTER loading your tool to clean and scan end the explorer.exe process using CTRL-ALT-DEL.
As well as the antispyware scanners, the other tools I used were ProcessExplorer and Autoruns from www.sysinternals.com as well as HiJackThis.
Oh, and by the way.... I just found this blog post on the same subject where you can get the telephone numbers and contact details for the CEO of this company and tell him how annoyed you are directly.
Edit:
There is yet more on this blog... http://netrn.net/spywareblog/archives/2005/07/31/aurora-explodes-again/
I tell you... I REALLY hope that some other big corporation, like Microsoft, helps us users fight and destroy these companies... it is so annoying!
Oh Man.... why do I always convince myself that putting on the latest version of software is a good thing... Too used to patching I presume.
Tonight, I upgraded from Nokia PC Sync 6.4 to the new 6.6 version. I thought to myself that this would be an easy process, and in Nokia's defence it has been in the past. But then the trouble started.
I synced up with Outlook 2003, and to my amazement only 83 of my 500+ contacts transferred to the phone. So, I deleted the contacts on the phone, and even setup a new sync profile but still no joy. I then Googled this thread and saw I was not the only one with the issue. I tell ya, I agree with some of the posters on that forum... never again will I get one of these phones with this OS. Smart Phones for me all the way :)
Anyway, the answer to the contact issue is to export your contacts from outlook to an Access Database (must be that format for some reason), then delete the contacts and re-import back to outlook. (I used the default mapping for export and import). Then all works again.
I do hope that Nokia pull the finger out and patch this issue.
I did. Even though the very lovely Ms Bradley reminded me a month ago.
All hell broke loose and I could not find the answer to my problems until I remembered her email. Anyway... I wrote a quick technote on the issue for others:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555386
P.S.. Sorry for the lack of posts lately, it has been a busy time :)