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I’ve stumbled across a rather odd issue where users were starting to complain that all of the sudden they were running a previous version of IE again, even though IE8 had been installed previously in the environment.  Also, they were complaining that when starting IE, it would simply close right after the UI was displayed.  In troubleshooting the issue, we went back and looked at the IE8*.log files and found out that IE8’s setup had been run twice on these machines for some reason (still haven’t figured out why yet – that’s for another day), and had uninstalled IE8 during the second run of the installer!

The upgrade was not a painless process, and I had to hack my site back together after the upgrade.  If you run into any issues, let me know.

OK, vacation’s over.  Back to work, but enjoyed the time off.  Hopefully I’ll get something useful up here again soon, but so far I’ve not come across anything useful enough to post about recently.  Oh well, guess those are the lazy days of summer for you!

Wrote up a very small vbscript to handle paging file creation/deletion/modification on Vista/Win7 systems (as PageFileConfig.vbs doesn’t exist inbox, and it didn’t have the ability to handle some of the situations that can arise during setup), and it ended up morphing into this.  Figured I’d save someone the time if they had a need for it, so here it is:

Microsoft supports running SCCM 2007 SP2 on a 2008 R2 server, but I’m doubting whether or not running SCCM 2007 SP2 in Native mode in an environment using a 2008 R2 CA is supported (and if so, there’s an issue to be aware of).  Specifically, it seems like client certificates created with a 2008 R2 CA (following the instructions on Technet for a 2008 CA) do not work by default in SCCM 2007 when running a site in Native mode (you’ll get MP errors stating that it cannot connect via HTTP, and mpcontrol.log will contain errors that the SAN2 fields have errors).  It seems if you create your 2008 R2 CA with the default Key store provider, the client certificates just do not work.  However, if you create your 2008 R2 CA with the Microsoft Strong cryptography provider (which is the default for 2003 and 2008 CAs), magically the certs created work fine.  If you look at the contents of the certs created between a 2008 and 2008 R2 CA, they “look” identical, but something else must be happening I haven’t dug into yet.

I finally got around to downloading Storage Server 2008 for some hyper-v / iscsi tests I am working on, and after installing Storage Server it did not ask for me to create a password like other Server 2008 / Server 2008 R2 server installs do on first boot.  It appears the default password is “wSS2008!” (minus the quotes, of course).  I found it from a bing search, here.  I figured maybe someone else will run across it and read this, and not have to resort to using DaRT to reset the password offline as I did.

Obviously, if you’re using SS 2008, you’ll want to change this password anyway – not sure why this was done this way, but it was.

OK, ran across this today, and there are a few ways to fix it.  The most time-consuming way (but seems to me to be the least invasive) is to remove 976569 and 976570, install 974417 (reboot), and then re-install 976569 and 976570.  I do not know what it is about those two updates that seems to cause the failure, but since I’m building images I don’t really care either – the workaround “fixes” it well enough for me.

I’ve been fairly silent recently, and the reason is I’m involved in rollouts of Win7, Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010, SCCM 2007 R2, and Office 2007 with 2 distinct organizations (not to mention the movement of physical to hyper-v servers at the same time).  I’ll probably blog something about this later, but I wanted to give http://www.windows-noob.com some credit for getting me “unstuck” when the Microsoft documentation is lacking on SCCM 2007.  Bravo .

EDIT 9th January 2010 – the script has gone a fairly major revision due to changes in the Office 2010 product key storage location, as well as migrating this to a class-based script for speed.

Again, another side project – a computer info VBScript. I’ve modified it a bit to output information to screen (execute with cscript from a cmd prompt), but this could be modified to do a lot more. This is just a simple script template, and as usual I’m posting here for consumption in the event anyone finds this useful:

Had to work on one of these for a client, and decided that while there’s a whole host of documentation out there, there aren’t a lot of good working examples of how to use the proxy auto config functions properly in a complex file.

Since I spent the better part of 8 hours getting something that works properly in the environment (including site blocking to a custom server), I figured I’d share it with the users of this series of tubes in the hope it helps someone.