February 2006 - Posts
This one caused me a little grief...
I reinstalled my PC over the weekend and that included an install of Internet Explorer Beta 2 Preview as I love the new features it gives us. I then installed Flight Simulator 9 and the 9.1 patch. To my horror the game started to load and then crashed out to the desktop. I did not initially think of the IE7 install as FS9 had been working before with that installed. Of course the difference was that FS9 was installed before IE7 in that case.
I got some strange errors in the event logs that had no real meaning (EventID 0), and on another test machine I got this error:
Faulting application fs9.exe, version 9.1.0.40901, faulting module mfc70.dll, version 7.0.9466.0, fault address 0x0004a536.
I searched support.microsoft.com and could find nothing... then I searched the blogroll. Of course, the answer came up on Mike's busy blog! Delete the OLEACC.DLL file from the root of the Flight Simulator directory and you are good to go.
(Oh Sean.... this is another one of those times I could really do with FS being on the Infopath forms for support.microsoft.com. I'd have a tech article up within minutes.)
This has already been mentioned on a couple of the other blogs, but
welcome Paul Lange to the blogroll
. Paul is the lead game designer for Flight Simulator X.
Can anyone translate this? What are they saying about me? Hope its not bad :)
Double Dutch
About 4 years ago I got chatting to Arno Gerretsen. I knew immediately that I had to make good friends with this guy as he makes my animation for Flight Simulator.... well.... work :) His tools, all available on www.scenerydesign.org, have been a massive help to designers worldwide. Best thing is they are all free!
We worked together on many tools. Well... I say that, but he did the work, I simply hassled him with ideas and concepts ;) Sometime around the release of FS2002 I asked Arno if he could figure a way to get around the 1024 frame limitation of animations from GMAX / Flight Simulator so that we could do cool stuff like easier animation of vehicles and other FS "world" things.
The good news is that today he managed to figure it out! This is great news for us FS designers that want to produce longer animations :) Nice one Arno!
In general, I'm a fan of Dell. I am not a fan of their "home selling" techniques that confuse basic users.... but I am a fan of their business products and Gold Support that they provide my end users.
However, I have one major gripe with them at the moment. Mr. Michael Dell, where is your tablet pc product! I know that I would never go back to a laptop after my Fujitsu Siemens “Slate” Tablet PC. I know of others that would not go back after using a “swivel screen” tablet PC. The laptop is dead….
Get a move on, it is no longer a niche market!
Jason just posted about this which reminded me to do the same....
Corrected (Brain not functioning) Nice new FSX screenshots!
I was just doing a checkup on my machine and I noticed a program had "Hung on starting" in the event viewer. Kservice.
What the hell is that I thought... well, without the boring details that is the file sharing (P2P) part of Sky by Broadband, sitting there even though I uninstalled it ages ago. Agh! WHY do companies do that... when you remove a program, it should remove everything and not leave a file sharing application sitting on my PC thanks!
I have since found a couple of other comments on the subject:
http://idunno.org/displayBlog.aspx/2006011101
http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/Blog/blogentry=00175/Blog.aspx
About once a month, I get asked why "When I log off my machine, why do I get a load of sync errors?”
Well, that is because Microsoft offline files is attempting to protect you from syncing files such as database (mdb) files, or outlook data files (pst).
I looked to see if there was a way to tell the system to stop showing the error on the sync when you logoff your PC (because I would prefer not to synchronise unsupported files), but that is not possible.
Therefore you have only one option and that is explained in this Microsoft Article. It explains how to create a policy which you can add to the "Small Business Server Folder Redirection" policy, or create a new one specifically for this.
I see that Microsoft have just released Windows Defender, which you will see integrated into the new Vista Operating System. I would suggest updating to this new version as soon as possible, I have been using it for a while on my Vista desktop and am impressed!
I would not however, as I have heard some doing, install Antispyware or Defender on your server :)
Well, I have been having great fun with ISA 2004 on SBS the past week. Another issue that came up on a site is the SBS ISA2004 setup kept on installing, rolling back the install, and then rebooting the server without prompting. Whilst I never did find out why the server autorebooted I did get the following information together on why the installation was failing.
Basically, in the c:\windows\temp\isawrap*.* log files, I found the following error:
Deleting previous MSDE installation directory <C:\Program Files\microsoft sql server\MSSQL$MSFW>
Setup failed. Error returned: 0x643
MSDE Installation failed, hr=80070643
Performing rollback (uninstall) of firewall
The issue, as you can see, is that the ISA 2004 MSDE Database instance is failing. Unfortunately the Event logs do not show you this. So, here is the way we got the system to install:
There was a hidden, system directory on the root of the C: drive named config.msi. Remove this directory. If this directory is present, it can/will cause MSI installations to fail. This directory is created when an MSI package fails to install and contains some rollback and recover information about the failure.
Only if that does not resolve the issue, read on....
Remove the following registry keys: (Take note of the GUID from the logs)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\Component Set\InstanceComponentSet2 value was {E09B48B5-E141-427A-AB0C-D3605127224A} - this is the GUID that MSFW was referring to in the MSDE instance logs.
Removed the following registry key - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server Setup.{689404D2-1C94-44B3-9203-BEC5594FDA7A}
Thanks to John Bay in PSS! I would never have figured this by myself :)
Does this sound familiar? Well it should because all the symptoms are exactly the same as my good friend Chad Gross’s post.
However, there is one key difference. On the three sites that we started to see this on, we had already ensured that the Local Address Table included “255” for DHCP Broadcasts. Yet, no matter what we tried, DHCP leases were expiring and clients were loosing connection to the network.
I knew that all of these sites had recently had GFI Webmonitor 3 installed, but even uninstalling this did not rectify the issue. After a call to the Partner line in GFI, we still could not see the issue. Therefore, we opened a case with the excellent SBS support team in Microsoft and found the following:
"This can happen if there is an access rule set to apply to all protocols for a destination/to that are made up of URL Sets. If this access rule is before the access rule that allows traffic from the Internal to the LocalHost (SBS Protected Networks Access Rule), the broadcast traffic will be dropped as ISA cannot properly do a reverse lookup on the broadcast traffic to determine if it belongs to the URL Set or not."
Ah ha! Of course, how did I miss it…? (Maybe I'm stoopid). As part of the GFI Webmonitor setup, you are instructed to install a rule based upon a URL set to block Adult sites. This rule, by default, is put above the SBS Protected Networks rule. Of course, the uninstall of GFI Webmonitor does not actually remove this rule, you have to do that manually.
Resolution Options include, but are not limited to:
Create a DHCP access rule above the access rules that apply to specific URL sets.
See here
Modify the access rules that apply to specific URL sets to apply to HTTP/HTTPS traffic instead of all protocols.
See Here
Move the access rules that apply to specific URL sets below the SBS Protected Networks access rule and above the SBS Internet Access rule.
See here
I am on to GFI to hopefully get them to update their documentation. Also, thanks to Chris Puckett in Microsoft for his usual excellent support.
The Airbus A380 is a large plane... a very large plane. A friend pointed me to this video of its first flight for Emirates Airlines. It is a must see...
http://fs2.flightsim.com/cineplex/
Now I know that all you SBS users have your servers patched already.... don't you..... ;)
Well, just in case you don't, Microsoft have upgraded this important patch to "High Priority" on Microsoft Update which is great news to get those final SBS Spammers fixed ;)
The official statement is:
Now that this update has been released on Microsoft Update (MU) it has become more discoverable. We have heard from a few customers that although it is now available through MU, it should be even more obvious to the SBS 2003 customer than it currently is. So after listening to these customers and re-evaluating the importance of this fix, we decided to simply re-release the exact same update package, but to release it in a way that it will show up as a “High Priority” update on the MU web site and it will be offered through Automatic Update.
This update will not be reoffered to those running SBS 2003 who have already have it installed. This change is just to focus on those customers still running SBS 2003 who have not installed this update. This update is not offered if you are running SBS 2003 SP1.
Today I had a call from a client; some joker had set the monitor to display at 90 degrees.
First, it should be understood that I know well this client and I would not have said this to an "unknown" ;)
For a laugh, I told them that this was a known issue and that Microsoft had released a supported technical article that basically explained how to position your monitor on its side. I did not think they would fall for it, but they did. They now have a CRT sitting on its side in the office. Classic!
I'll call them tomorrow with the real fix.