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Author Archive for KW – Page 17

Windows 2012 No Remote Desktop License Servers Available

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 26 2014

Customer site is running Windows Server 2012 Essentials and a Windows 2012 Terminal Server. User contacts me to report that she was unable to connect into the Terminal Server from Remote Web Access (RWA). I tried, and got the same error message when I tried to access the Terminal Server:

The remote session was disconnected because there are no Remote Desktop License Servers available to provide a license. Please contact the server administrator

I knew it was not an RWA issue because I could RWA into the 2012 Essentials server. A quick search and I found a post that indicates that there is a bug with 2012 RDS session hosts where they will not look to the licensing server for CALs when the grace period ends. Although I would like a permanent fix, the following solution resolved the crisis at hand.

The solution is to delete a specific registry key relating to the grace period, and then reboot the server.

  1. Open up the registry editor on the Terminal Server
  2. Browse down to: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\RCM
  3. Make a backup copy of the GracePeriod registry key
  4. Then you can Delete the GracePeriod registry key
    image
  5. Note: if you are not able to delete the key, you need to give yourself permission:
    Right click on the GracePeriod key and assign ‘full control’ permission to the administrator account.
    You should then be able to delete the key.
    image
  6. Reboot the server and check it out.
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Categories : Servers, Terminal Server, Windows
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Ballad of a WiFi Hero

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 20 2014

I don’t normally post a video on this site, but anyone who has helped a parent or grandparent or friend with an Internet issue at home will get a good laugh over this very clever animated video. Enjoy!

 

Comments (0)
Categories : Humor, Network
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Roboform for Windows 8 Phone

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 10 2014

I’ve used Roboform on my main desktop for years to store and manage my logins and passwords to web sites. So, when I purchased my Windows 8 Phone (Lumia 920) back in November 2012, I was disappointed (to say the least) when I discovered that Roboform did not have an app for my phone.

Lo and behold, after waiting for more than a year, Roboform finally released version 1.0 of their Windows 8 Phone app. I will let you read all the complaints and criticisms from people about this first release.

For me, it installed and worked without a hitch. Intuitive? No, but if I can figure out how to make it work, I’m sure you can. Here are some actual screenshots of my first attempt at using the new Roboform app v1.0:

Step 1

Go to the Windows Store on your phone, and search for Roboform and download the app.

wp_ss_20140309_0001  wp_ss_20140309_0002

Step 2

Next, login using your Roboform login name and password. The settings page is pretty sparse, and I did not change them from the default.

wp_ss_20140309_0003  wp_ss_20140309_0004

Step 3

For my first attempt, I decided to see if I could access my Twitter web page, which I hardly do. Type in the Twitter URL, and it then takes me to the mobile version of their login page.

wp_ss_20140309_0005  wp_ss_20140309_0006

Step 4

Look down at the bottom of the screen, and when I press the left icon (highlighted by the arrow), it displays for me the two Twitter login accounts that I have previously saved in Roboform from my desktop.

wp_ss_20140309_0007a  wp_ss_20140309_0008

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Categories : News, Phones, Tools, Windows
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Free eBook on Migrating and Managing Office 365

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 08 2014

imageThe folks at apress have made available as a free download the eBook titled “Office 365: Migrating and Managing Your Business in the Cloud”. The book is jammed-pack with information, including a hands-on tutorial of Office 365, and covers in-depth what you need to do to migrate to Office 365/

This 680 page book is available in EPUB, MOBI and PDF format.

Here is a partial list of chapter titles:

  imageimage

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Categories : News, Office 365
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Outlook 2010 displays Autodiscover Security Certificate Alert window at startup

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 06 2014

I had a customer with an SBS 2008 server who called this past week to say that they were getting the following popup alert when starting up Outlook 2010:

The name on the security certificate is invalid or does not match the name of the site

SNAGHTML17ae3bd2

I ran the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer to test Autodiscover for this customer. And sure enough, it was failing the test to validate the server name.

Certificate name validation failed. Host name xxx.com doesn’t match any name found on the server certificate.

The first article I reviewed was KB 940726. Although the title of this KB article indicates that it was written for Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007, it is also applicable to Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010. It covers how to change the internal URL for the Autodiscover service stored inside Exchange via Exchange PowerShell commands.

However, in my case, the PowerShell command get-ClientAccessServer | fl was showing that the AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri field was showing the correct URL.

SNAGHTML17bae007

In talking with other MVPs, it appears that the issue may have to do with someone making changes to the domain name “A” or “cName”. I am still tracking that down.

But meanwhile, I was looking for a quick solution to at least suppress those popup alerts on a short-term basis, as I was going to be traveling for the next several days.

More research lead me to this blog post from Tipst3r titled: “Turn off Autodiscover for Outlook”, which was a recommendation for adding a registry key called “Exclude ScpLookup”. I gave it a try, but it did not appear to work. Also, I wanted more information as to what this registry key did, and why.

So, on further searching, I found Microsoft’s KB 2212902 titled: “Unexpected Autodiscover behavior when you have registry settings under the \Autodiscover key”. This article listed seven different optional registry settings that one might create and use.

I started working with these options, and found that using the following three options (setting them to a value of “1”) would disable the “security certificate is invalid or does not match” popup window from appearing:

  • ExcludeScpLookup
  • ExcludeHttpsAutoDiscoverDomain
  • ExcludeSrvRecord

image

I’m not one to generally implement a workaround. So part of this was just a desire to understand more what was going on “under the covers”, so to speak. I will be testing out making the recommended changes to the domain records later, but since I will be gone for a week, I did not want to make such changes at this time.

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Categories : Exchange, Outlook, SBS
Tags : ,

SVCHOST.exe spiking CPU

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 05 2014

I see this from time to time, on both workstations and servers. Your system seems to be extremely sluggish or unresponsive. So you open up task manager and you see that a svchost.exe process using 50% or more of CPU. To complicate the matter, there are more than one svchost.exe processes running.

What is one to do???

In many cases, a recent Windows update may be the cause. But it’s hard to track down which update might be the culprit.

Meanwhile, here is what I will often do to at least quickly address and resolve the issue:

  1. Identify the PID of the spiking svchost
  2. Identify a list of services associated with that svchost occurrence
  3. Stop each service until you find the offender

Here’s the blow-by-blow:

Identify PID of svchost.exe that is spiking

  • Open up Task Manager
  • Click on View –> Select Columns… –> then click to check PID (Process identified)
    image    
    image
  • Click on the Image Name column to sort by name
  • Scroll down and find the PID number associated with the spiking svchost.exe service. In my case, it was PID 844.
    image

Identify list of services associated with that svchost.exe process

  • Leave Task Manager window open
  • Open up a command prompt window, and type TASKLIST /SVC and press enter
  • This will give you a list of specific services associated with each svchost.exe
  • Locate your PID and note all the actual services running under that instance.
    image

Identify specific service causing the spike

  • Open up Services console (Start –> Run –> services.msc)
  • Position the Services and Task Manager windows side by side
  • Now, one by one, from the Services window, locate each service listed for the associated PID, and stop or pause the service.
  • Then see if from the Task Manager window, if the svchost.exe suddenly drops back to normal. If so, you found your problem service!
  • In my case, I often find that Automatic Updates (wuauserv) Windows Management Instrumentation (winmgmt) to be the culprit. In this particular case, it was wuauserv causing the spike
    image

 

* These screenshots were taken from a Windows 2003 server, but the process is that same for other Windows platform. The only big difference is that the Task Manager window has a new format with Windows 8/2012, and they display the PID# automatically, saving you one step!

Comments (0)
Categories : SBS, Servers, Tools, Windows
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Watch out for the date changing on Surface 2!

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 19 2014

I had a nice (?) surprise today when I tried to go to the Windows Store on my Surface 2. It told me that there was an issue in connecting and to try again later. Well, I knew my wireless connection was good, because I had just been browsing the web.

I decided to totally shutdown and restart my S2. That’s when I discovered that the date and time were incorrect. And not by just a few minutes or a few days, but 111 years into the future – June 15, 2125 to be exact!

image

Easy enough, I thought – just click  on the Change button and fix the date and time. Wrong. Not only could I not change it, the drop downs for month, day and year were totally blank!

So, I switched over to the Desktop interface, and opened up the Date & Time Settings option. That’s when I noticed that two different dates were showing. The big calendar section showed the date as Dec 31, 2099, but down below that, it showed the current date as June 15, 2125.

image

It took some doing, but I finally got the date and time set correctly. I first had to change the date to something prior to 12/31/2099. Then, I flipped over to the Windows Tile and from the Time and Language option, I could use the drop down to change the date. But I could not just scroll from 2099 back to 2014. It looks like it gave me about 30 years at a time in the drop down box. So, I first changed the date to 2069 and saved it, then to 2039, and then finally to 2014.

Now, what caused the date to change?

Who knows. I’ve heard reports that it may be related to a recent Windows Update. If I find out, I will let you know.

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Categories : Tablet, Windows
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Upcoming Rate Change to Microsoft’s Action Pack Subscription

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 13 2014

For small I.T. owners and developers who are Microsoft Partners, the Microsoft Action Pack subscription has been a huge blessing financially. For one low annual cost, Microsoft provides us access to almost all iof their current product offerings, from Windows 8 to Windows Server 2012, from Office 2013 to Visual Studio.

Microsoft recently announced changes to the Action Pack subscription model, effective February 24, 2014.

image

The change that many will focus on is the price increase, going from $329US to $475US, which is a 30% increase. I agree that that’s a big hike. But before you decide to just walk away from this, here are my thoughts:

  1. The $475 fee is still an inexpensive and easy way to have access to Microsoft’s full line of products – all for the comparable cost of a single Windows Server license. That’s less than $40 a month!
  2. If you are new to the Action Pack program, you may not be aware, but this is only the second price adjustment that Microsoft has made since I first signed up for an Action Pack subscription 12 years ago. The Action Pack subscription fee remained flat at $299 for the years 2003-2010. For years 2011-2013, the price went up to $329.

If you sign up or renew your subscription before February 24th, you can do so at the current $329, thus giving you savings for your first year.

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Categories : Microsoft, SBS, Servers, Tools, Windows
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Two Factor Authentication for Office 365

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 12 2014

imageMicrosoft announced this week that their “multi-factor” authentication is now available for the majority of Office 365 plans – midsize, enterprise, academic, non-profit and even standalone plans for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. I guess that just leaves out the “P” plans.

More importantly, there will be no extra charge for this new feature, and it is purely optional whether you implement it at all.

Microsoft is calling it “multi-factor” instead of “two factor” authentication because you have multiple options for getting that second authentication.

Check out the Microsoft Office Blog for details and screen shots!

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Categories : News, Office 365
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Error 0x8024402c When Installing Windows Store Apps

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 08 2014

I truthfully don’t use many apps, whether it’s with my Windows 8.1 desktop, Surface 2, or my Windows 8 Phone or Surface2. But I did want to download an app today to my desktop, and I immediately encountered error 0x8024402c.

The first recommendations I found when doing a Bing search was to open Internet Explorer and make sure that the ‘Use a proxy server for your LAN” was unchecked. Which it was in my case.

Then I found this suggestion to reset Store Cache, which worked immediately, and with no rebooting of my desktop computer:

  1. Press Windows Flag key + R to open the Run box
  2. Type: wsreset.exe and press OK
  3. Wait until it’s finished, then try downloading your app!
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Categories : Tools, Windows
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