I have recently come across an issue that is happening on 2 of my Windows 2000 servers in the office where for some reason they loose all authentication to the domain. I get the following events appearing in the Event Log:

In the Application I get:

Type: Error
Source: Userenv
Event ID: 1000
User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Description: Windows cannot determine the user or computer name. Return value (1722).

In the System Log I get:

Type: Warning
Source: MrxSmb
Event ID: 3034
User: N/A
Description: The redirector was unable to initialize security context or query context attributes.

and:

Type: Warning
Source: w32time
Event ID: 11
User: N/A
Description: The NTP server \\tmsrv-dc1.law-desk.com didn't respond

I am still looking in to these errors and warnings, as at present we have to restart the servers in the morning to get them operational, but then 24 hrs or so from when the first error and warnings were logged they start happening again. So it narrows it down to something running on those 2 servers.

All the Events point to a DNS issue so I have looked at DNS but it looks ok, just on a glance with a quick look at one of my DC's the next thing to do is run a dcdiag and netdiag I guess to see if DNS and the domain is functioning with no problems.

In the mean time watch this space.

I hope to have an answer soon.

I have tried several things already including removing the servers from the Domain, deleting the computer accounts in AD and then re-joining the domain. but that did not work.

I have been playing around with MAC OS X on my PC, I managed to get a copy that runs on a PC, and once it was installed one thing I did like was the Dock, I mean I liked the whole thing, but the Dock was very useful.

So I did some digging around the net and found RocketDock, I know that there are more out there but this was the one that I installed and it seemed to go on very easily.

Once installed you can put it into your systems startup or just run it as and when you want to.

I then downloaded the Vista Icon Pack for it and changed the Icons so they looked like the windows Icons instead of the default RocketDock icons.

The beauty of this is, to add more icons it is just a simple drag and drop of the Icon onto the Dock.

Also if you do want to change the look and feel of it you can download more skins from the RocketDock Website.

I have been using Google Apps for some time time and I cannot fault it, the space they give you for your email and all the services that you get with it.

However I was just looking around on the net and using MSN and then I thought surely MSN offer the same kind of services and they do it is called Windows Live Community Builder So I thought I would give it ago. So I changed my MX records over from the Google Mail servers to the WLCB server and the change was pretty much instant. I set up a new account for me and away I went. it was that simple. I will post something a bit more informative up later once I have been playing around with it. But I do like the look and feel of Windows Live, Google Mail was very good but the interface I found wasn't that nice.

More to follow.....

OK So I do not usually put rants up here but one thing that really annoys me up here in Edinburgh is the public transport, more specifically the busses.

I have taken up cycling to work as the busses although very frequent don't give change. I have lived in Edinburgh for 6 years now and last April (I think it was) they upped their single bus fair from £1 to £1.10, which isn't a lot, I might add, but if you do not have that extra 10p change and only 20p then tough you loose 10p, same with 50p or more still if you need to catch the bus and you only have a £2 coin then you loose 90p. I mean what is that all about? But it then makes me ask the following questions:

1. What do they do with the extra money they get from not giving change?
2. Do they declare this extra money?

Lothian Busses received UK Best Bus Company of the Year in Jan 2008. I was astonished when I heard this, ok so I do not use other City's public transport that often but I did grow up in Brighton where their bus service I would say is far better than Lothian Busses. They DO give change on Brighton and Hove Busses, even from a £20 note, ok begrudgingly the driver will give you change but never the less they do.

Also I had to wait for over an hour the other day for my bus as I had my little girl with me in her push chair, and get this Lothain Busses can only take on one opened push chair on their busses, again Brighton and Hove Busses are better they can take 5. so how does a bus company that I would say rips of its passengers by not giving change and also makes its passengers wait round for over an hour till a bus comes along with no other push chair on can win UK Bus operator of the Year??.

Along with this only accepting one push chair, if there is a push chair on the bus and some one with a wheel chair gets on that person with the push chair has to get off the bus to allow the wheel chair access... ok I am not having a go at the person in the wheel chair here, but what does that mean for the person with the push chair? do they then have to buy another ticket on the next bus? and what if that next bus already has a push chair on it? I mean come on Lothain Busses surely you have to have considered all these? I am just curious as to why you do not give change and why only one person can get on the bus with a push chair?

You can buy a Day saver ticket on Lothain busses for £2.50 that is a bit cheaper than the B&H Busses £3.20 or so but you are restricted to using that one ticket on Lothian Busses where as the B&H busses I remember using it on Stage Coach and other Bus Operators within the Brighton and Hove region.

I would have soon rather given the award to B&H Busses over Lothain any day considering that you get change with B&H Busses and they can take up to 5 Push Chairs/wheel chairs on one bus

How can they want us to leave the car at home and take the bus when they do not really meet all the needs of all potential passengers?

OK so continuing on from my Mimecast posts, we have started looking at the Marketing Advantage, I think that one of the first comments I got about Mimecast was that it was predominantly a Marketing Tool, well yes it is that but for us it is predominantly an email filtering tool.

Any how we are looking at out sourcing our companies website (shame I know as we have a good team of people in house who maintain it and we have the infrastructure in place), but with the Site going to an external company to host and maintain it then raised the question for our e-bulletin's. Our in house developers have written several web services that connects with our CRM and pulls a list of contact emails and then creates an e-bulletin and then sends it. However with the Site being with a a hosting company , we did not want to have to have to implement something to address the issue of the change over. So we thought we would look at Mimecast and their Marketing Advantage.

So I spoke with the guys at Mimecast and they gave me a demo if how their "broadcasts" work. You can build up a list of templates for your "e-bulleting's" and then import a list of Address from your CRM and then send it out, the beauty of this is that it sends it via a completely separate queue so it does not impact your daily in and out bound traffic, plus if the email for some reason does get flagged as spam it will not black list your main SMTP address.

Along with this feature I then discovered that we can brand our emails, ie put in our Email signatures on Mimecast as opposed to our users managing their own signatures. With Mimecasts integration with AD it can pull out all attributes you specify and create a very descriptive email signature, so I through I would try for the IT Team with in my Company creating a copy of our Business card for our signatures. All you need is some basic HTML knowledge and away you go. I actually cheated and used Dreamweaver to create ours, but anything would probably do.

Once you have got your template built you then need to get it so it fills in the parts from AD. so:

<HTML>
    <BODY>
    <BR>
    <BR>
    <MC type=body>
    <BR>
    <BR>
<table width="325" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" 
style="font-family: Verdana;">
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid #CCCCCC; background-color: white;  
font-famil: verdana; color: #000066; text-decoration: none; 
font-size: 9px;">
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="6" width="100%">
<tr>
<td colspan="2" align="left" valign="top"; style="padding-left: 5; 
font-size:10px; font-family:Verdana;">
  <span style="font-size: 9px; color: #000066;"><mc type='variable' 
source='from' attribute="streetaddress"> <mc type='variable' 
source='from' attribute="l">  <mc type='variable' source='from' 
attribute="postalcode">
 <br />
  Tel <mc type='variable' source='from' attribute="telephonenumber"> 
Fax <mc type='variable' source='from' 
attribute="facsimiletelephonenumber">
  <br />
  <mc type='variable' source='from' attribute="homephone"><br />
  <mc type='variable' source='from' attribute="mobile"><br />
  </span>
  <span style="font-size: 9px; color: #000066; text-decoration:none; 
link color:#000066; visited color:#000066;">Email 
  <mc type='variable' source='from' attribute='mail' link='mailto'/> 
  </span><br /> 
  <a href="http://www.company.com" style="font: verdana; 
font-size: 9px; font-weight: bold; color: #000066; 
text-decoration:none; link color:#000066; visited color:#000066;">
www.company.com</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="60%" valign="top" style="padding-left: 5; font-size:10px; 
font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><p>
<span style="font: verdana; font-size: 10px; color: #8A184C; 
text-transform:uppercase;"><mc type='variable' source='from' 
attribute='name'><br>
  </span><span style="font: verdana; font-size: 9px; 
color: #000066;"><mc type='variable' source='from' 
attribute='description'></span></p>
  </td>
<td width="40%" align="right" valign="bottom" style="padding-left: 5;
 font-size:10px; font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
  <span class="style1"><mc type=clickimage code=logo></span></td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<BR>
<BR>

</body>
</HTML>

So this is what you are presented with:

Mimecast can pull all the above details from within AD so if you are going to implement this then you will need to make sure that your AD is fully up to date.

Also for the DDI what I did was actually put DDI 0123 456 7123 into the field for the Home telephone number as the Telephone Number field was taken up by the main switchboard number.

I set this as Active Stationary for the IT Staff with in the company I work and also put the other bits of the disclaimer under the businesses card, so it works in the same way as it always has done, it will search for a specific phrase in the Disclaimer and then attach/move to the bottom of every email set out of the company (it moves the disclaimer that is already in the email if it is a reply to a reply or something).

Problem: A problem on your computer is preventing updates from being downloaded or installed.

WOW don't you just love those great Microsoft Error messages!?? They are so descriptive of the problem you are experiencing.

This is the first time I have actually seen this error, I have seen several other messages, usually in relation to my PC having its Update settings set through Group Policy or something similar, but usually a re-boot fixes the problem or remove the computer from the domain. But this error a re-boot or remove the computer account from the domain did not fix the problem.

I initially put this down to Windows XP SP3 as that was why I was playing around with this, I had a fresh install of XP with SP2 and then applied SP3 to it. for some reason it then did not want to run the install of updates on it.

Well After looking round the net I found something that suggested to register several DLL's Here is what was suggested on an MS Forum:

Follow these easy steps:
1. Click Start > Run and type regsvr32 wuapi.dll
2. When you receive the message that the DLL has been registered, click OK
and perform the same steps for each of the following commands under Start >
Run:
regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups2.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll

So I thought rather than type regsvr32 and each DLL why not put them in a batch file and run that? so I created a new batch file, called it WinUpd.bat put in each line to register the DLL and then saved and ran the file! worked like a charm. Windows Update actually worked.

In order to physically get on to the consoles of my Servers I have a 15" 1U Rack Mounted Dell Monitor with Keyboard and Mouse, plugged into an HP IP KVM. So when I put in the Dell Open Manage Server Assistant 5.2 CD into my Dell Server you would think that it is all go from there? Well no, in fact its a case of Monitor says "no". For some reason once it has loaded the Linux Kernel and then goes into the graphical user interface the Dell Monitor displays Out Of Sync. Not very handy really. when I an on the console of one of my HP Servers and want to install it and use the smart start it seems to be quite happy and displays all the graphical user interface. So I thought I'd take the HP IP KVM out of the equation, but no it still did not want to display the graphical setup screens.

My next test was another monitor, plugged directly into the server, it worked so I thought how about if that monitor is plugged into the HP IP KVM? and.... yes it worked. So the problem boiled down to something with in the Server Assist CD and resolution settings and frequencies.

Today I downloaded the latest Version 5.3 and Dell seemed to have rectified the issue I can now stand at the console on the server and Install it, however I could just do what I did before and sit at my desk and use the HP Console Viewer software to manage the HP IP KVM.

The actual config of the server using 5.3 is still very similar to 5.2, it looks slightly different but other than that I guess the updates are in the back of the Install for things like Drivers etc....

The one thing that Dell have not yet done and what HP have been doing on their Smart Start since 7.4 I think is included an option to obtain the Windows Source Files from a network share. I found that added option with HP really useful as I could point it to our server with a folder shared out for Windows Server, rather than finding a Windows CD or having to burn another CD.

I recently put a post up regarding the Mobility side of things with Mimecast and setting up outlook express/windows live mail to access your work email on the Mimecast Towers.

So after seeing this work on the PC I thought I'd give it a go on one of our smartphones. so I configured it to use my work email address and AD Password and set the smtp and pop3 servers to one of the service towers we use. Hit the send and receive and it worked like a charm. This actually could have proved very usefull the other week as we had a power cut, some unfortunate person cut through a mains cable on the building site across the road from our office and cut power to all buildings in the area and our UPS's only give us about 30 minutes of power to the servers so we had to shut them all down, which meant although the smartphones could connect to our front end Exchange Server which is located in Harrogate it then could not talk to the Back End Exchange Server which was in Edinburgh. So with this neat feature of Mimecast our mobility users could have still stayed up to date with their email.

The next thing that we are looking at with Mimecast is the Marketing Advantage and the possibility of branding our out going emails.

I have been using an Orange SPV C500 Smartphone for a couple of years now, I like the functions of the phone and it isn't too big or bulky and it syncs up with my computer fine. The phone I got was one of the spares that we had at work and I unlocked it so I could use my O2 SIM in it. However 3 or 4 years on now my phone was beginning to look a bit scratch and knocked about so about time to replace it. However the Other C500 I had was not unlocked.

I found the site I used before to unlock my phone, however it required you to be able to to connect to the Internet on the phone with orange prior to unlocking as there are some registry changes you need to make on the phone so you can run an unassigned installer.

So my predicament is I have a Smartphone that is locked to orange but do not have an active Orange SIM.

I found this blog which meant I did not need to get on to the Internet with Orange prior to unlocking the phone: http://spod.cx/blog/unlocking_orange_spv_c500.shtml

So here is what you need to do unlock your SPV C500:

Perquisites

• An Orange SPV C500
• USB Sync Cable
• A Windows XP PC (I could not get it to work on Vista :( )
• Active Sync installed and working
• An Orange SIM (just so you can turn the phone on).

How to unlock the phone

• Connect the phone to your PC using the sync cable
• Download regeditSTG.zip and copy to the phone. You need to copy the file as a zip as the EXE will not work on its own, the phone can read the zip archive.
• Using the File Manager browse to the Folder you placed the Zip file. Open the zip file and run regedit.exe.
• To "application unlock" the phone change the following registry values:
• in HKLM/Security/Policies/Policies
• Change 00001001 from its current value to 1
• Change 00001005 from its current value to 40
• Turn the phone off and back on.
• Download spv-services.zip to your PC and unzip.
• Copy the cert.cab file to your phone, find it again using file manager and run it. This will install an app signing certificate that the next step relies on.
• Run the SPVServices.exe on your PC, it will communicate with your phone using Active Sync. You need an Internet connection on your PC as the file will connect to a remote server to do the unlocking calculations.
• Finally put in your non orange SIM and turn the phone on.

I have been looking a bit more in to some of the other things that Mimecast can do, one of which is the Mimecast Mobile Continuity.

I have Exchange Mobility setup just now and I have just installed SP2 on my Exchange Servers and it all seems to be syncing up as and when emails arrive (ok there is a slight delay but 15 seconds is acceptable.... or isn't it???). Any how one thing I noticed in the Service information was that you could in fact access your email through a mobile device on the Mimecast Towers:

January 2008: Mimecast Release - 2008.1

1. Mimecast Mobile Continuity

This release has introduced a new “mobile continuity” feature across the Mimecast platform.  The new feature maintains a rolling 5 day “mobile continuity mailbox” for all users across the Mimecast service (including internal emails absorbed through journaling for customers who have purchased the Mimecast Multi product).  This mailbox is maintained separately so deleting messages from the “mobile continuity mailbox” will not affect other downstream servers (e.g. Exchange, Novell) nor will it affect messages within your Mimecast account.
Access to the service is controlled by Mimecast local access settings.  These local permissions can be configured under “Profiles > Domains > Internal Domains > domain.com > user email address” and by checking the “Allow Logon” and “Allow POP access” boxes.

So I thought to myself if you allow POP access does that mean that you can use a client such as Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail? So I thought why not test it.

I set up Windows Live mail with a new POP3 Account and set all the details to my Works email address and then in the pop3 server I put in my Mimecast Service Address. for the authentication I had to put my full Email Address and domain password.

I set the same server for my Outgoing server and checked the option My Outgoing Server Requires Authentication, and left if as using the same credentials as my Incoming server. However when I hit send it could not send.... that might have something to do with me not checking enable submission on the Profile for my Mimecast account, so I enabled that and it all work great :).

I think that I will have to test this using a Smartphone and see what happens.