Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

"American Man" off Velvet Revolver's Libertad album reminds me a lot of Back-in-the-USA-era MC5.

Strangely enough, MC5's last album is my favorite of theirs.

Typical server deployments will not get much from enabling SuperFetch, especially if you run disk defrag a decent amount, or use a 'in-the-background' defragment tool like Diskeeper. If you are using 2008 as a desktop operating system, it becomes more compelling.

By default, the Superfetch service is installed on a Server 2008 system but left disabled. If you try to enable it, the service won't start. This is easily fixed with 2 registry entries lifted from a Vista installation.

The registry entries in question are:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
"EnableSuperfetch"=dword:00000003
"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000001

If you want a cookie-cutter premade .REG file, you can download it here.

For those following my '2008 as a Desktop' saga, I'm happy to report I have Diskeeper running under Server 2008 now too. The only thing I am missing from Vista these days is Dreamscene.

I *almost* have the Hyper-V Integration Services running on a XP instance, but I suspect that won't be functional until at least the release candidate or later.

If you see http://www.msftncsi.com if your firewall logs, it is due to the Network Connectivity Status Indicator feature in Vista. It typically puts the little "earth" near the network interface icon in the tray bar, like this:

Normally this doesn't cause any problems, but there have been instances when captive portals (the landing pages you go to, to agree to their terms of use, like WifiDog or NoCat) will only respond to the first HTTP request from an unknown system. In those cases, I've had to jump through hoops to get online properly. It is a rare case, but I've had it happen at a few hotels.

For those curious, what it is doing is requesting a file from http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt and looking for it to return a response of Microsoft NCSI. If the operating system receives that, it puts the little 'earth' graphic next to the network interface.

You can, thankfully, disable this behavior with a registry setting. If you set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NlaSvc\Parameters\Internet\EnableActiveProbing to 0, the OS will no longer probe for internet connectivity, but you also lose the pretty 'earth' graphic.

This topic hasn't talked about very much, and I found it interesting after looking at some network traces and finding the Microsoft page related to it. Hopefully people will find this information helpful and/or interesting.

The Windows Server 2003 Certificate Services Web enrollment functionality relies on an ActiveX control that is named Xenroll. This ActiveX control is available in Microsoft Windows 2000 and in later versions of Windows. However, Xenroll has been deprecated in Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008. The sample certificate enrollment Web pages that are included with the original release version of Microsoft Windows Server 2003, with Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1), and with Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) are not designed to handle the change in how Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 perform Web-based certificate enrollment operations.

Read more about this at KB 922706.

You can download the updated web pages for 2003 x86 here and 2003 x64 here.

SYMPTOMS
When you use a USB-to-Serial converter to connect a device to a Windows XP-based computer, the data transfer from the computer to the device is slower than expected.

CAUSE
This issue occurs because the Usbser.sys driver does not follow the USB specification. When the computer transfers data to a mobile device, the transfer process is based on the Usbser.sys driver. The Usbser.sys driver does not send zero-length packets when the total transfer size is an integer multiple of the packet size. However, zero-length packets are required by the USB specification so that the device can recognize when the packet transfer is finished.

Thankfully, this is now a public download and no longer requires requesting the hotfix. You can download the hotfix here.

Or, you could install XP SP3 RC2, which includes this fix already.

Suppose you receive the dreaded This update does not apply to this system. message when attempting to install a .MSU package, but you know for a fact that it really does apply.

You can, to a certain extent, short circuit the update process by doing the following:

Suppose you are trying to install a patch from KB article 667668 (currently not a valid KB) for a 32-bit install:
expand -F:* Windows6.0-KB667668-x86.msu %temp%\kb667668\

start /w %SystemRoot%\system32\pkgmgr.exe /ip /m:%temp%\kb667668\Windows6.0-KB667668-x86.cab

Thanks go to Ottó Horváth for the tip, slightly modified.

You can also uninstall updates this way too, by changing the /ip to /up.

Update: One thing I forgot to mention, is that if you need to install multiple updates this way, you will need to use a different directory for each update, which is sort of hinted at by my use of \kb667668\. It is documented why here in KB 932224.

Although the official blog doesn't mention it, this seems to be affecting people upgrading to the newest version of Symantec Anti-Virus. So far, there isn't a clear-cut fix but this is something to be aware of.

There are 2 products I know of that can encapsulate USB traffic and stuff it across Ethernet frames. Very cool concept.

There is this product by KernelPro and this product by FabulaTech.

Both are prohibitively expensive for what I want to use it for.

Call me crazy, or call me creative, this is one way of getting USB support into Virtual Server / Virtual PC / Hyper-V virtual machines.

I haven’t tested my theory with a trial version of one of the above but it sure seems like it should work. If anyone has real world experience with either of those above products, please leave a comment!

Why do I want USB support in a VM?
So I can run a 32-bit instance of XP under Hyper-V, that uses the Cisco VPN client to connect into my work network using PDANet connected to my Motorola Q as a client inside the XP VM. Right now I can do that with VMWare just fine, but not with Hyper-V natively due to the lack of USB support for guests.

Countdown until MS buys one of the above and puts USB support into Hyper-V R2.

Bottom line: After upgrading your server to SCOM 2007 SP1, upgrade your agents from RTM to SP1 or they will leak 4MB of memory a day.

Read more about it here. Originally posted here.

It just involves sending an email from your mobile phone. Read more about it here, and here, and the official site here.

I must admit the Princeton paper on cold boot attacks on encryption keys is very clever.

There is now a great resource on making Bitlocker a bit more secure. Pretty much anyone with a system capable of running Bitlocker should be using TPM and a PIN, along with AES 256 bit with Diffuser.

Read in much more detail here.

Read more about it here and download it from here.

Lots of products work out of the box without change, while others will need updates, and some will probably never run on Server 2008.

To stay up to date on what works and what doesn't, check out KB 948680.

Current list of incompatible products:
BizTalk 2004 and earlier versions of BizTalk
Commerce Server 2002 and earlier versions of Commerce Server
Compute Cluster Server 2003
Dynamics CRM 3.0 and earlier versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Exchange Server 2003
Host Integration Server 2004 and earlier versions of Host Integration Server
Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006 and earlier versions of ISA Server
Office Communications Server 2007
Speech Server 2004 R2
SQL Server 2000 and earlier versions of SQL Server
System Center Reporting Manager 2006
Systems Management Server 2003

I'm doing a lot with Server 2008 lately so expect many Server 2008-centric posts for a while.

This website provides information on SPS and Windows 2008.

Their description describes the site better than I can, which is:
This page provides IT pros with resources to help deploy Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to Windows Server 2008.

As of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with SP1, you can install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008. You cannot install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 without service packs on Windows Server 2008.

Windows SBS 2000/2003 enforce a limitation that permits only one Windows SBS domain controller in the domain. This software update extends the allowable grace period for the supported scenarios from 7 days to 21 days.

I suspect "Cougar", aka SBS 2008, will have the same 21 day limitation.