Searching for my lost shaker of salt

Found this out the hard way doing a demo this morning.  I am using VMWare Workstation 6.5 running on Windows 7 Ultimate.  The guest OS is Windows Server 2003.  The issue is the mouse pointer actual location was not the same as where the pointer was on the screen (a parallax error).

I’ve rebooted both OS’s and ensured the screen resolutions made sense.

The issue appears to be with the host OS, Windows 7.  For demo’s I often increase the font scaling of both my guest and host operating systems, so things are readable on projector screens.  The moment I restored the Windows 7 (host) font scaling back down to 100% everything was fine.

There is a setting on Outlook Express that forces all messages to be displayed as plain text.  This is especially true on Windows Server 2003.

Now, before I get flamed the ONLY reason I am running Outlook Express on a server is for a demo.  I do not, would not recommend running OE on a server unless you have a really good reason.

This is the perfect reference that lists all versions of SharePoint, the various cumulative updates, patches, and service packs, links and all.

The easy way to determine what version number you are running is to go into Central Administration | Operations, then click "Servers in Farm".  You'll see the version number next to the server name and roles.

 

This past weekend I finally upgraded my laptop from Windows 7 release candidate (build 7100) to the letterbox version (ultimate). Somehow I manage to find an excuse to reload my operating system every 6 months or so, so I have the pattern down pat. Image the hard disk, write down all my installed apps, copy over the data folders, export bookmarks, e-mail settings and rules, etc. Then wipe the drive and install clean. I will say that the Windows 7 install process was probably the most smooth I've had to date. I was reinstalled and fully patched within an hour, taking only another two to reload my apps and copy over data.

The only hitch was on Outlook 2007, which I use with my GMail account. It installed fine. I changed the data file over to my backed up copy and all my e-mail was fine. But for some reason, every time I would connect to GMail and download, it would download two copies. Reading online I found posts that suggested you check the box to leave mail on the server, which was already the case. I deleted my GMail account and recreated it in Outlook, still nothing.

Then I noticed something... it wasn't downloading e-mail for every folder, just the ones with rules on them. Bingo!

Sure enough, as part of my restore process I reimported my Outlook rules for moving things to various folders. That, it turns out, is now unnecessary. In prior versions of Outlook (and possibly pre SP2) the rules were stored as part of the application and didn't carry over with the data file. That's no longer the case; your rules are now stored in the data file and backed up when you back e-mail up. Kinda cool. So once I removed the duplicate rules everything started working as expected.

I remote into servers... a lot.  And by default, Server 2003 only allows two concurrent connections at any given time.  There are plenty of other posts on how to configure this, but it doesn't do any good if you can't get to the server.

Fortunately, there is a brute force way to bypass this.

If you receive the error "The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections", simply launch remote desktop from the command line as such:

mstsc -v:0.0.0.0 /f -console

Where 0.0.0.0 is the IP address or server name of the server you want to remote into.

If that doesn't work, another option is to go into admin mode.

mstsc /admin

And remote in like normal.

You can also use this nice little tool to find out who is logged in:

qwinsta /server:[servername] 

Welcome to the new blog.  Or really the old blog with a new blog engine and a new host.

I've been wanting to get back into blogging with numerous reasons preventing me.  Mostly because I didn't have the time, but there were legit issues with the old WordPress blog on my old host.  Or just call it laziness.

So the new blog engine is BlogEngine.NET, not surprisingly a .NET based blog engine (guess you figured that by the name, huh).  I must say this has been the EASIEST blog engine I've worked with to date.  Conversion couldn't be easier, working with layouts was a snap.  So far its been a very positive experience... including a 1.4.5 upgrade to 1.5.x which took 5 minutes.  Good stuff.

I've also left WebHost4Life as my webhost.  Their renewal was simply too expensive.  I'll continue to give them props for available features but not at their price point.  So I am going to the other end of the spectrum and going with Godaddy.  The price verses feature set seemed right, and so far their control panels have been pretty easy to work with.  Not a single ticket needed to get my site working and fully transferred.  The hardest part was getting DNS transferred, which took me 10 minutes to figure out.   If you can read this, well, guess it worked.  So the total site migration took about 2 hours. 

Oh, and if you were looking for the consulting part of GP Consulting, well, that part of my business has been closed down for years except to service my prior customers.  That doesn't mean there won't be new things coming... 

Hopefully this will the beginning of new rants and raves.

 

We had troubles installing SP1, which consists of two components; WSS 3.0 SP1 and MOSS SP1.  The WSS 3.0 SP1 failed toward the end of the set up process, for a familiar yet troubling reason.  Once upon a time several past lives below, I blogged about the loss of intellisense because I had used the ASP.NET Configuration utility.  Well, apparently that little helper app is completely evil since it caused this error as well when it changes the schema in your web.config.  Here are all the ugly details from my co-worker, Denise:

The install for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 failed when it attempted to update an extended site that was using a host header.  If we removed the site from SharePoint, the install completed successfully.  We initially thought the issue was because we were using an extended site.  After some troubleshooting, we discovered the problem was in the web.config for the site. The second line of the web.config contained:  <configuration xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0">.  As soon as we removed the schema reference from the <configuration> tag, the install completed successfully.  The altered tag was in only one of our sites and, after further research, we discovered that it was inserted when we ran the Web Site Administration Tool in Visual Studio 2005.  It does not appear to be a valid schema and the sites work without it.

 

This is a great article, worth 5 minutes of your day to read and digest. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Books/story?id=3035262&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

What is this? Greg has updated his professional blog? Yes, the rumors are true that I've fallen to a different side of The Force and are on a focused management track. While I do miss some aspects of coding, this new opportunity has its own set of challenges and rewards that are just as compelling. Today I came across this excellent blog post describing many of the issues I now face, filled with good ideas and advice. I plan to study it in detail... http://www.projectmanagementsource.com/2006/08/lessons_from_pr.html

http://www.krugle.com/ File this under sweet!  Type in the keywords for what you are trying to code and poof!  Tons of code listings.  Filter by platform and language.  Time will tell how useful this will truly become, but it certainly has promise.