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New post soon

February 2nd, 2011 No comments

I’ve been meaning to post an updated MDT 2010 post dealing with drivers, language packs, and selection profiles (probably the most asked-for thing since I posted about MDT back in 2009!), so I’m working on it.  However, I do travel quite a bit for a living, and you’d be surprised how little time there is at the end of the day to do any writing.  I promise it’s coming soon, but I can’t quatify exactly how long “soon” is going to be!

Categories: Uncategorized Tags:

Debian + Sendmail + SpamAssassin + MimeDefang config for inbound mail host

November 18th, 2010 No comments

Honestly, this is more of an “I’m posting this here for my reference” post than anything else, but searching google and bing for something similar yesterday (which is prompting me to put this here) came up with old, outdated, and frankly useless, results (at least in my opinion).

I’m not going to go into how to install Debian or software (honestly, running “apt-get install sendmail spamassassin mimedefang” can’t be that hard), but I have this sendmail.mc on my current Debian Lenny installation, and it deals with spam and ham with very good results:

Categories: Scripts Tags:

WordPress updated to 3.0.1

November 15th, 2010 No comments

Sorry for the delays and odd behavior today – as with the last upgrade to 3.0, this upgrade wasn’t 100% smooth either.  Thankfully it didn’t require total site maintenance, but it did cause some plugins to misbehave.  I believe this is all sorted now, and the last post does appear to have gone out successfully and the server errors are gone.

I know you probably don’t care, but it’s cathartic to document a job (not exactly well) done ;) .

Categories: Uncategorized Tags:

Disk2VHD, XP, and Hyper-V – problems installing Integration Components

November 15th, 2010 5 comments

After taking a Disk2VHD image of an XP SP3 machine, I noticed that I could not install the Integration Components after copying the VHD to my Hyper-V machine and running the Integration Components setup off vmguest.iso.  It would attempt to upgrade the HAL, tell me I needed to reboot to upgrade the HAL, and then reboot and get to the same place.  If I clicked “OK” again to upgrade the HAL, it would reboot – if I hit “cancel”, the installation would fail.

After some fiddling, I figured out that Disk2VHD added the /HAL=halacpi.dll string to boot.ini for the default boot option, whereas the Integration Components setup was trying to upgrade the HAL to an APIC hal (halaacpi.dll).  I changed the boot option in boot.ini to remove the /KERNEL=ntkrpuni.exe string, changed the /HAL=halacpi.dll string to /HAL=halaacpi.dll, and copied halaacpi.dll from sp3.cab on my XP SP3 media to %windir%\system32.  Once I rebooted, the IC’s installed successfully.  I then went back and removed the /HAL switch from boot.ini entirely and rebooted, and all is well.

Categories: Deployment, Windows Tags:

MS10-049 (980436) + wininet application == potential problems with older web servers

September 4th, 2010 No comments

Seems like there are some wininet issues with the latest schannel update for Windows XP.  If you’ve got an older web server that is not compliant with IETF RFC 5746, and you use applications that connect to that old web server via wininet (like WCF apps, IE, etc), you are going to have issues.  Microsoft has posted KB 2384778 on how to work around this, so I thought I’d save some people some time if they start seeing this.

Categories: Internet Explorer, Windows Tags:

Internet Explorer 8 uninstalls itself if setup is run a second time?

July 29th, 2010 1 comment

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!

Categories: Internet Explorer, Windows Tags:

WordPress upgraded to 3.0

July 22nd, 2010 No comments

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.

Categories: Uncategorized Tags:

Vacation over, back to work

July 19th, 2010 No comments

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!

Categories: Uncategorized Tags:

PageFile vbs for Vista/Win7 systems (may work on XP/2003, not tested)

June 17th, 2010 No comments

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:

Categories: Scripts, Windows Tags:

SCCM 2007 client certificate issues with 2008 R2 CA

May 24th, 2010 No comments

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.

Categories: Deployment, Windows Tags:

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