Windows 8.1

RPC Server

An interesting quirk of running Virtual Machines for this post… the background is my ‘main work PC’ is currently running Windows 7; in order to remotely manage a Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 machine I had installed Oracle VirtualBox onto my main PC and inside that had setup a Windows 8.1 VM to remotely manage the Hyper-V Server instance.

However after setting up remote management I found that I could connect to all of the remote management tools on my Hyper-V machine with the exception of Disk Management and Hyper-V Manager with the following error message generated in Hyper-V Manager.

RPC Server unavailable. Unable to establish connection between <Hyper-V Host> and <Client PC>.

After much investigation into this issue (and after following a number of dead ends relating to firewall settings, the hosts file and COM security) it transpires that the issue was related to the way that I had setup the network adapter within VirtualBox.

In particular the adapter had been set to NAT mode, now given the properties of NAT it seems plausible that some vital information might have been mangled in the process – if anyone feels like doing some Wireshark on this to discover the cause then please do!

The resolution was simple – setting the adapter to bridged mode instead which allowed the traffic to pass through the virtual adapter just fine.

A few days ago I went out and bought Fallout 3 having heard that its a good game to try if you like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro series games.

However when trying to run the game or update it to the latest available patch version on my Windows 8.1 PC I kept getting the error message-

The ordinal 5359 could not be located in the dynamic link library C:\Program Files (x86)\Bethesda Softworks\Fallout 3\Fallout3.exe.

The simple and easy fix to this problem? Download, install and login to the latest Games for Windows Marketplace Client.

You can download the client from this link here – http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/Live/PC/DownloadClient.

When trying to capture a Windows 8.1 (Enterprise 64bit for anyone that wants to keep track) using the System Centre Configuration Manager Capture Image ISO I kept getting the error message

Task Sequence: Image Capture Wizard has failed with the error code (0x00004005).
For more information, contact your system administrator or helpdesk operator.

The image was as normal as any other Windows 7 image that I had captured and included Office/some LOB applications. In addition I had used a powershell command to remove some of the built in Windows 8.1 apps.

As it turns out this error message was being generated by sysprep as I hadn’t removed the Windows 8 applications in the supported manner (as detailed here – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2769827).

As a work around I decided to capture the image with the apps included and then remove them as part of the SCCM task sequence.

To see how I did this take a look at the screen shot sequence below.