Just a quick note to mark the fact that I’ve updated the look and feel of the blog - hopefully with a bit more space and cleaner lines. It’s still teething, so report any bugs you see! I’ve had a bit of a cleanup of the categories to remove some of the less “category” like ones - they were being a bit blurred with the tags. Lastly, I’m really quite amazed to say that my blog is now well over 100 visitors a day on a weekday, so thank you for visiting!

We have a folder redirection policy in place for all of our users in combination with a roaming profile policy - this policy is applied to the OU that contains our users. Unfortunately this policy was accidently linked to the root of our domain too, causing our Domain Admin users to be redirected too - something we do not want. When the mistake was discovered, the policy was unlinked, but the redirection remained (despite being set to revert when users fall out of scope).

Having just rebooted my laptop, I clicked on the link to open VMWare Infrastructure Web Access in the my browser and was slightly puzzled by the “page cannot be displayed” error. I figured it was probably the VMWare Server Web Access service not starting for some reason, so I opened services.msc and checked it out. The Web Access service was actually running, but the Host Agent service was not, so I tried to start it - it failed.

Just a quick note on a little error I had installing OCS 2007. We have a lot of users that are set up to run services for applications - as such we have a fairly tightly controlled group policy regarding the permissions required to run as a service. This causes the error above to occur because the newly created users aren’t given permissions to run a service. The solution is to add the newly created users to our Application Service group.

Our development SQL server is a monster…there are many many databases, and hundreds, if not thousands of backup files. With each patch tested on the software we sell, there is a new backup. With each client deployment, a new database. With each new major version, a new database. Backups of the new databases inevitably occur, and so we have more files, in more folders - most of which need to be kept in case of roll-backs, bugs or deployment issues.

I was just installing PowerShell on one of my Windows Server 2003 servers, when I encountered the error “You do not have permission to update Windows Server 2003. Please contact your system administrator.” Odd, especially considering that I was installing as the Domain Administrator, and that user should have more than enough permissions. A little bit of digging led me to MSKB 888791 which shows the permissions that are required in Group Policy to install the update.

If you’re getting a error on your LAN connection it’s possible that your network connection is attempting 802.11 authentication on your wired network. Unfortunately, it seems that Vista/Server 2008 both attempt it before reverting. As far as I can see, it’s not causing any issues, other than irritating me with a “failed” and a red question mark. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to fix! The authentication is handled by the Wired AutoConfig service, so it’s just a case of disabling it.

I’ve just had a frustrating few days trying to downgrade 4 Dell Latitude E6500 laptops to XP. The problem was, whenever you booted to the XP cd you would get to the point just before you agree to the license and then hit a blue screen with a SATA error code. It seems that the bundled driver for the SATA storage controller incorrectly identifies it and causes a fatal error as it’s loaded.

Having recently installed an ESXi server, I am getting to grips with the management and administration of it, one of the things that I wanted to be able to do was connect to the remote terminal through SSH. I downloaded my SSH client of choice, PuTTY, and set about connecting, however the server refused the connection. It seems that SSH is not enabled out of the box for ESXi and you need to go through some steps to get there - I found some helpful hints here.

If anyone visits here regularly, rather than by google search, you’ll have noticed that I haven’t posted much lately. This is because of a major office move at work which I have been managing from the technical side of things, and moving a 25 server operation isn’t an easy job. I’ve upgraded the entire network infrastructure throughout from SOHO to enterprise products. Normal service will resume shortly!