Servers
Servers power many organisations and are even making their way into homes (even if it is a simple NAS box). With more RAM then you could even imagine (I have to admit I’m a RAM addict) and processors that make the latest and greatest gaming PC look minuscule in comparison it is these mighty machines that make the world go round.
After deploying a number of HP printers using the HP Universal Printing Driver PCL 6 (61.141.1.15198 for anyone who might be counting) I found that a number of users were getting the error message
hpmsn141.dll has stopped working
when trying to print, although they can click close program and the print goes through fine it is quite an annoyance.
Although more of a workaround I found that the fix in this situation was to turn off a feature called Printer Status Notification (described by HP at this link here). A short guide can be found in the screen shots below.
For a few days I’ve found that printers that have been published in Active Directory (from our 2008 R2 printer server) were not appearing in the directory or find printers tabs (see above). With about 120 printers deployed and only 5 showing up there had to be something wrong.
As it turns out the Printer Service was starting before the Server service which was causing a whole load of Errors in event log with error Event 315, PrintService being logged.
The printer spooler failed to share printer <printer name> with shared resource name <printer share name> Error 2114. The printer cannot be used by others on the network.
The fix in this case was to restart the Server service (and if the printers do not appear for a few minutes in directory restart the Printer Spooler service as well).
The reasoning behind this is the server service was starting up after the printer spooler service; because of this the printer service was trying to share out the printers and couldn’t (because the server service needs to be running to do this). A simple reboot of the whole server wouldn’t fix this as the same could just happen again where the services start up in the wrong order.
More details can be seen in the screen shots below.
I’ve recently been testing our disaster recovery abilities particularly in restoring servers from the bare metal recovery feature of System Centre Data Protection Manager 2012.
When restoring one of our servers (that is a virtual machine) I was getting the error message below just before the drive data starts to copy over.
The system image restore failed.
Error details: Element not found. (0×80070490)
As it turns out this error message relates to the restore program not detecting the required number of hard drives attached to the VM that I am restoring the data to.
The fix is simple – assign the extra drives required. The slide show below goes into this in a little more detail.
On further thought I remembered that this particular VM was originally on a physical machine – hence the extra drive came from the tiny partition (usually 100-500MB depending on OS) that Windows creates when doing a first time install that’s used for bitlocker/bootloader stuff. Either way your server won’t work without it and neither will the restore.
One of the little niggles that you can get with Windows Server (2008 SP2 in my case) is a remote desktop connection will not let you use saved credentials to login remotely with the following error message.
Your credentials did not work
The server’s authentication policy does not allow connection requests using saved credentials. Please enter new credentials.
The fix to this can be found in local or group group policy settings by going to one of the two places
Server 2008 (and previous)
Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Terminal Services > Terminal Server > Security.
Server 2008 R2 (and onwards)
Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Session Host > Security.
Then set ‘Always prompt for password upon connection‘ to disabled. This will then allow you into your server using cached credentials.
Its a long shot that many people will have this issue but hey why not!
If you have one of the uber new AMD FX Processors (e.g. the 6 core 6100BE) and have tried to run a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine on it you may have seen this error message.
An error occurred while attempting to start the selected virtual machine(s).
‘<VM name>’ could not initialize.
The virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running.
The cause of this issue is well documented in Microsoft KB 2568088 (link), the short version is the newer AMD CPUs have a feature called AVX included that Hyper-V does not like very much.
As such you can sort this issue out by running the command bcdedit /set xsavedisable 1 at a elevated command prompt.
Just make sure you restart your PC after and boom you will be able to run your virtual machines again!
This time its the turn of Windows Update (powered by WSUS on Server 2008 R2) error 80244022 (sometimes seen as 8024402c).
Had this error on my own Admin PC a few days ago while trying to run monthly updates, there is very little information about this error message out there however the main cause seems to be linked to the client PC being unable to communicate with the server due to invalid proxy setting.
One thing to remember is that Windows Update (on your clients) communicates with the WSUS server over HTTP (or HTTPS if you have it setup like this) and so needs to be able to communicate with it over HTTP – because of this Windows Update must know to not use a proxy server to talk to your internal WSUS server.
If you are having this error on multiple PCs and you have only just setup WSUS I would suggest that you check your network wide proxy settings (proxy.pac or wpad.dat) making sure that an exception is made for your WSUS server.
The same applies if you are configuring your proxy using group policy just make sure an exception is made for your WSUS server.
If you are having this error on a single PC then the two places to check are
- Internet Explorer Proxy Settings (if locally defined)
- Under system wide proxy settings (netsh winhttp)
Internet Explorer Proxy Settings
To check these settings (click for screen shot) go to Start > Control Panel > Internet Options > Connections > LAN Settings if you have use a proxy server ticked make sure under Advanced settings and Exceptions you have your WSUS server listed.
System Wide Proxy Settings
It is possible to set a proxy server other than the one used in IE for some applications. In my case this was the problem as I had set the proxy up but without any exceptions and so Windows Update could not talk to the WSUS server.
You can check if this is the same for you by running the command netsh winhttp show proxy from the command prompt.
If you do have a proxy setting in here you can remove it by running netsh winhttp reset proxy.
To find out more about this command (and also how to include a bypass proxy list) just run netsh winhttp set proxy /?
For a long time we’ve been using the built in features of Windows Server to allow users to recover their own work through the ‘Previous Versions’ tab in Windows Explorer (which works on the Volume Snapshot service) however the long term plan has been to get our DPM 2012 server to do the heavy lifting instead.
When trying to extend the AD schema (as per this Technet Article) we were coming across this error message
Active Directory could not be configured because the Active Directory domain could not be found. Make sure that the domain name is properly constructed. The following example shows a properly constructed domain name: city.corp.company.com
The best fix I have found is to manually extend the schema by copying the EXE that DPM uses to extend the schema right onto your domain controller that runs the Schema Master role and running it there.
In my case that file can be found here C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012\DPM\DPM\End User Recovery
The screenshots below show how to do this in a little more detail
NB about DFS shares: If you intend on using end user recovery against shares that are using DFS you will need Hotfix KB2466048. Why this is a hotfix and not included with Windows 7 SP1 I do not know – I just hope it comes along in SP2.
They have blinky light parties! (click to see bigger pictures)
Its looking like we got our sizing for our custom RDS servers right and we may well have answered (at least for own internal use) ‘how many users can you get on a RDS server?’.
The video shows our RDS farm under normal load with 24 clients remotely logged in (excluding the admin session I was using) with the CPU usage being either low or idle on occasion.
Having recently setup DFS-R and DFS name spaces we found that our users were reporting that a security warning was popping up every time they opened any file from our DFS shares (example above).
The warning in Word 2010 was
The file originated from an Internet location and might be unsafe. Click for more details.
The silly thing about it is its not an Internet location its an Intranet one.
As it turns out because I was using a FQDN to connect to our DFS shares Windows was picking up the files as coming from the Internet.
This issue is in fact documented on the Microsoft KB and details can be seen here – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303650 (but with no pictures).
The simple solution to this problem is to manually define your FQDN as a Intranet Zone in Internet Explorer (screen shots below show how to do this via GPO).
