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Author Archive for KW – Page 4

Cannot RDP into Windows 10 Computer

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 17 2016

Working with a customer that has SBS 2008 and upgraded a local computer to Windows 10. We discovered that we could not RDP into that workstation either locally using “mstsc” nor remotely using Remote Web Workplace (RWW).

Turns out the fix is very easy.

By default, Windows 10 has Remote Desktop turned off in the firewall settings for the local workstation.

Here’s how to fix it:

  • Open up Control Panel and go to System & Security –> Windows Firewall
  • Click on “Allow an app or feature through Windows Firewall” option located in the left frame
  • Click on the Change settings button
  • If you do not have administrator access to this workstation, you will be prompted to enter an administrator username and password
  • Scroll down and locate Remote Desktop. Click on the box to select it, and then click on the appropriate boxes under the Domain and Private columns.
    image
  • Click OK.
  • I suggest you then run gpupdate /force from a command prompt, first on the server, and then from the workstation. For the workstation, you may be prompted to logout to apply the update.
Comments (0)
Categories : Group Policy, Network, SBS, Servers, Windows 10
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Analysis of a Ransomware

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 04 2016

Ransonware (often referred to as Cryptolocker) is a malicious virus threat in today’s environment.

If the virus gets onto your computer, it will begin locking down files on your computer by writing a hidden secured password to those files. It will then display a message that you have XX number of hours or days to pay the ransom to get the password to unlock your files.

Unless you have solid backup, your two options are: pay the ransom or lose all your files. The ransom could be in the hundreds of dollars. For a California hospital, that ransom was to the tune of $17,000 dollars!

MalwareBytes has a blog post on their site dated March 1, 2016 which gives an in-depth analysis of how such a ransomware virus works.

I found it an interesting read, and thought I would pass it along.

You can go directly to the blog post and read it, or I saved it as a PDF file that you might find easier to read.

Kudos to MalwareBytes!

Comments (0)
Categories : Malware, News, Security
Tags : , ,

Error 30143-37 When Installing Office 365 (Office 2016)

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 23 2016

Customer had Office 2010 on his computer, and was upgrading to Office 2016 via his GoDaddy Office 365 account. But the installation would fail half way through  with error code 30143-37

image

GoDaddy support said it was because anti-virus was running. We stopped A/V but still encountered the error. I then right clicked on the downloaded setup executable, selected Properties, and clicked to “unblock” the file. That did not help either.

I found a couple of web sites that suggested deleting (or at least renaming) the folder “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15”.

That seemed to do the trick, as I was able to then install Office 365. Note: I did NOT reboot the computer after deleting the folder.

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Categories : Office 2016, Office 365, Windows
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Hard Drive Reliability Report for 2015

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 18 2016

2015-4tb-drive-fails-barchart[1]Backblaze, a cloud storage company, recently posted their 2015 hard drive statistics and reliability report (click here), which may be interesting reading for some.

Backblaze

Keep in mind this is a report based on their own internal findings and use of disk drives in their datacenter, and is not a broad survey of hard drive reliability from various users and organizations.

So, for example, if you read through the report, you will see that they have nearly 30,000 various Seagate hard drives in use, versus over 12,000 HGST drives, but only 46 Western Digital drives.

This is not to knock their report … in fact, I found it quite enlightening.

Enjoy!

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Categories : News, Servers
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Windows 10 for IT Professionals Free Ebook

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 18 2016

win10ebookAn updated version of the free ebook Windows 10 for IT Professionals from Microsoft Press is now available as a PDF download.

This version of the book includes features of the November 2015 Windows 10 version 1511 update.

Hat’s off to Jeff Alexander (Technical Evangelist) for this information

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Categories : News, Windows 10
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Two Real Time Savers with Outlook 2016

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 11 2016

I’ve been using Office 2016 now for quite awhile, and nearly every day I find myself nodding my head in agreement with two new features in Outlook 2016 that are real time savers for me:

  • Outlook automatically detects if I was supposed to attach a file to the email, but clicked Send without doing so. It then prompts me with a nice reminder. That has saved me multiple times from sending an email without the attachment!
  • Then, when I go to attach a file, Outlook now presents me with a list of recent files that I have accessed or created. No more drilling down through directories for the PDF file I just created and wish to attach. This is a huge time saver for me.

Here are screen shots of these features in action:

Step 1: Create an email and make a reference to an attachment, like this:

image

Step 2: Click Send without attaching a file, and you’ll get the following notification window:

image

Step 3: Click on Insert –> Attach File and Outlook will display a list of recent files:

image

image

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Categories : Office, Office 2016, Tools
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SBS 2011, Windows Server Backup, and VSSAdmin List Writers Issue

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 10 2016

One of my customers runs a SBS 2011 server with Exchange 2010. I consider it a very clean server. Suddenly, after three years, I had issues with the Windows Server Backup.

Opening the WSB console, I would get the message Reading Data, please wait….

I knew that the first thing I should check was the VSS writers. When I tried to run vssadmin list writers from an admin level command prompt,  I would get the message: Waiting for responses. These may be delayed if a shadow copy is being prepared.

Rebooting the server didn’t help.

I tried the wbadmin delete catalog command, but that didn’t help.

I then found this blog post from ServerFault.com which provided instructions for stopping specific services, reregistering VSS related DLL’s, and then restarting service. Eventually this solution worked for me!

Here’s a look at each of the looking at each of these three parts of the solution:

Step 1 – Stop specific services

You can run these commands one at a time from a command line prompt, or put them into a  batch file and run them:

net stop “System Event Notification Service”
net stop “Background Intelligent Transfer Service”
net stop “COM+ Event System”
net stop “Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider”
net stop “Volume Shadow Copy”
net stop VSS
net stop SWPRV

Note #1: Stopping the COM+ Event System will also cause several other dependent services to be stopped. Take a note of these dependent services so you can make sure they are restarted later on

Note #2: When I ran these commands, the COM+ Event System service did not successfully stop — it will have a status of  “Stopping…”. But it needs to be successfully stopped for the rest of the solution to work. If this happens to you, here’s how to stop it:

    • Open up another command prompt window
    • Type: sc queryex eventsystem and press Enter
    • Note the associated PID# for this service. Let’s say the PID# is 408
    • Next type:  taskkill /pid 408 /F  and press enter’’

Step 2 – Reregister DLLs

Now copy the following commands into a batch file and run it from the command line

regsvr32 /s ATL.DLL
regsvr32 /s comsvcs.DLL
regsvr32 /s credui.DLL
regsvr32 /s CRYPTNET.DLL
regsvr32 /s CRYPTUI.DLL
regsvr32 /s dhcpqec.DLL
regsvr32 /s dssenh.DLL
regsvr32 /s eapqec.DLL
regsvr32 /s esscli.DLL
regsvr32 /s FastProx.DLL
regsvr32 /s FirewallAPI.DLL
regsvr32 /s kmsvc.DLL
regsvr32 /s lsmproxy.DLL
regsvr32 /s MSCTF.DLL
regsvr32 /s msi.DLL
regsvr32 /s msxml3.DLL
regsvr32 /s ncprov.DLL
regsvr32 /s ole32.DLL
regsvr32 /s OLEACC.DLL
regsvr32 /s OLEAUT32.DLL
regsvr32 /s PROPSYS.DLL
regsvr32 /s QAgent.DLL
regsvr32 /s qagentrt.DLL
regsvr32 /s QUtil.DLL
regsvr32 /s raschap.DLL
regsvr32 /s RASQEC.DLL
regsvr32 /s rastls.DLL
regsvr32 /s repdrvfs.DLL
regsvr32 /s RPCRT4.DLL
regsvr32 /s rsaenh.DLL
regsvr32 /s SHELL32.DLL
regsvr32 /s shsvcs.DLL
regsvr32 /s /i swprv.DLL
regsvr32 /s tschannel.DLL
regsvr32 /s USERENV.DLL
regsvr32 /s vss_ps.DLL
regsvr32 /s wbemcons.DLL
regsvr32 /s wbemcore.DLL
regsvr32 /s wbemess.DLL
regsvr32 /s wbemsvc.DLL
regsvr32 /s WINHTTP.DLL
regsvr32 /s WINTRUST.DLL
regsvr32 /s wmiprvsd.DLL
regsvr32 /s wmisvc.DLL
regsvr32 /s wmiutils.DLL
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.DLL

Step 3 – Scan these DLL’s

Next, we will check the integrity of the following three DLLs

sfc /SCANFILE=%windir%\system32\catsrv.DLL
sfc /SCANFILE=%windir%\system32\catsrvut.DLL
sfc /SCANFILE=%windir%\system32\CLBCatQ.DLL

Step 4 – Restart Services

Finally, let’s restart the services we stopped

net start “COM+ Event System”
net start “System Event Notification Service”
net start “Background Intelligent Transfer Service”
net start “Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider”
net start “Volume Shadow Copy”

Step 5 – Rerun VSSADMIN

Go ahead and try to rerun the vssadmin list writers command and see if it works.

Comments (0)
Categories : Backup, SBS, Servers, SMB
Tags : , ,

Long Live Exchange Public Folders!

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 05 2016

Back in 1996, Microsoft introduced Public Folders as a replacement for social aliases, and was “designed from the ground up to enhance group collaboration applications” (per this Lane Severson blog post)

By the time that Exchange 2003 was released (13 years ago!), however,  the rumors that public folders would be discontinued in a future release of Exchange were swirling around. Take for instance this WindowsIT Pro post from 2004:

The handwriting has been on the wall for public folders for a year or two. I first heard a Microsoft speaker strongly discourage use of public folders at the MEC 2002 conference. An administrator who attended the same session was in a state of near panic because her university has thousands of public folders in active use.

In a TechRepublic 2010 post it was declared that public folders would probably be gone by Exchange 2013:

Since before the release of Exchange 2007, Microsoft has been telling us that public folders will eventually be discontinued. This hasn’t happened just yet though. Public folders are alive and well in Exchange 2010. Even so, public folders probably won’t be supported in the next version of Exchange.

So here we are in 2016, and guess what? Not only are public folders still around, Microsoft has decided that “public folders are great” per this Microsoft Technet FAQ:

No. Public folders are great for Outlook integration, simple sharing scenarios, and for allowing large audiences to access the same data.

And on February 1, 2016, Microsoft announced they will be increasing the number of public folder mailboxes in Exchange 2016 from 100 to 1,000!

Happy 20th birthday to Public Folders!

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Categories : Exchange, Microsoft, Outlook, SBS
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Windows Live Mail Leaves Empty Temp Folders Behind

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 04 2016

Are you using Windows Live Mail?

If so, you may have discovered lots of strange subfolders within your user’s Temp folder on your computer, with a name format like this {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxx} :

image

The clue is that all these folders are empty, and there is one for every day that you use Windows Mail. Apparently, the Windows Mail app does not properly clean up after itself.

As these folders all are empty (zero) in size, they really are not taking up disk space.

But, if you’re like me, I just don’t like seeing junk files hanging around. It’s perfectly fine to delete those empty folders:

  • Drill down to C: –> Users –> your username –> AppData –> Local
  • Highlight all those folders and click Delete.

If you got time on your hands, I’m sure there’s a powerscript or batch file somewhere on the Internet that you could use to do the same thing, and schedule it to run once a week. If you find one that works, please let me know!

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Categories : Tools, Windows
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This computer will soon stop receiving Google Chrome updates

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 01 2016

If you are using Windows XP or Windows Vista or Windows 2003 Server, and using the Google Chrome browser, you may have noticed a new warning (nag) message displaying every time you start up Chrome:

The computer will soon stop receiving Google Chrome updates because Windows XP and windows Vista will no longer be supported.

image

There is a simple way to disable this warning message, by adding: –disable-infobars” option to your Google Chrome shortcut icon.

Here are the steps to do this:

  • Right click on your Google Chrome shortcut icon (either on your desktop or the desktop’s taskbar) and then click Properties
    image
  • In the Target box, go to the end of the line, press the spacebar once and then type:  –disable-infobars
  • To be very clear, what you will type is:
    spacebar dash dash, the word disable, another dash, then the word infobars
  • Click Apply, then OK
    image
  • Restart Google Chrome
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Categories : Browsers, News, Tools
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