DNSAPI 11163 Errors [2], MrxSmb 50 Errors

Back in July I wrote about these errors and how they were happening because the DNS zones were not configured properly on one of our servers. Well, today I was reviewing the event log on a desktop PC and I just happened to notice a resurgence of the errors. After all being quiet for the past two and a half months, this PC just last week started to register the same errors all over again.

For this particular PC it is very aggravating because, in the holidays, I had planned to use it to check out a problem with another PC, which I'll mention below in a minute. Now, well I have to try to figure out this big problem first before I can get onto solving that other very important issue.

Regardless of the work I have done to try to have the network functioning smoothly we still have regular occurrences of reverse DNS lookups failing. An example is trying to do a remote login to a system. When you enter the name of the remote system Windows does a reverse lookup for the IP address. Then you can get the message that the remote system cannot be found, even though you know that is not true. You get the IP address of that machine and type that into MSTSC instead, and it works. You check the reverse lookup zone entry for that machine and it has the wrong IP address in there. So you know why the reverse lookup failed, but you don't know why DNS has not updated it.

The problem I'm having on another PC is a history of MrxSmb error events logged. These errors occur as a result of the PC dropping its network connection or dropping packets and result in a myriad of popup errors telling the user that data from an open file has been lost. As it happens, this PC is the computer technician's own work PC :) . The errors have come up continuously for all the time I can really remember having this PC. I don't recall seeing them on any other type of PC, but I do remember seeing them on another PC of the same type. I have tried the onboard network card as well as two PCI cards, all different brands, with no change in the outcomes. No other event logs (on other PCs) show this error. There has to be something screwy with the hardware in this non-Intel-CPU non-Intel-chipset system. This particular computer has logged over 150 of these errors in the past five weeks. The problem is that they are quite random. The actual number of days on which they occurred is only seven, and the last actual instance when this problem occurred was two weeks ago. So I would have to do at least a month's testing to be sure that it really was a hardware problem like that.

It turns out that my PC has also registered a DNSApi entry, but it was for error 11197 instead and happened three weeks ago. If there is a pattern happening, it is that many of these PCs that have given the error messages are ones that are not turned on every day.

WLW and WLM work with my Wordpress blog

I'm pleased to have discovered that Windows Live Writer can be used to compose messages in my newly established site support blog. I installed WordPress for this purpose and have managed to get it running properly after going through various new learning curves. These involved IIS6, MySQL and PHP as well as Wordpress. Often in the Windows community we find that open source software is not well supported for political reasons. As it turns out, both PHP and MySQL have been available for Windows for years and can be made to work well on it, although I found difficulty getting PHP 4 up and running, so I switched to 5. It's good to be able to get PHP working because there's lots of stuff out there that uses it. Wordpress took a little bit of effort and tweaking but now it's all working, and I will be able to use WLW to maintain it.

The first thing I looked at when an Intranet blog came up was Sharepoint, because WLW supports it, because we get the CALs bundled in free with our software deal, because it can do all these other wonderful things and because it can do a blog as well. But Sharepoint is vastly overblown for what we would use it for. You need specialised training to figure out how to set it up, let alone use it. After I tried installing it and failed, I figured it was just easy to remove it and look for a freeware blogging platform that I could install. Apart from Wordpress, there is an open source version of Moveable Type in development. Because it's not yet available I chose WP instead.

I've also found that Wordpress's RSS feed works with Windows Live Mail. Thus, I can pick up the articles in there. I may also look at setting up the RSS feeds on some staff PCs as well.

FIX for Windows Live Writer unable to connect to Wordpress 2.2 Blog

PROBLEM: When setting up a new account in WLW Beta 3 for a Wordpress 2.2 blog, the following error is returned:

Invalid Server Response - The response to the blogger.getUsersBlog method received from the weblog server was invalid. / Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server

CAUSE: A file loaded in xmlrpc.php is unable to be found because of invalid path information. Line 18 of this file contains the following statement:

include('./wp-config.php');

This will cause PHP to search its path for this file rather than loading it directly from the current directory.

RESOLUTION: Alter the above statement to read

include('wp-config.php');

Note that there are other possible causes for this error; the above is the one that has worked for me.

Installing WordPress on IIS [2]

Now for MySQL. After a lot of looking at documentation I installed MySQL Administrator, a GUI tool which is freely available from the main MySQL website. I had earlier installed the MySQL DBMS which I downloaded from their site last week. Working with PHP is not at all new to me, but both WordPress and MySQL are totally new challenges, especially as PHP and MySQL were not originally developed for the Windows/IIS platform.

The first difficulty is to be able to set up a connection between MySQL Administrator and the DBMS instance. During installation you should have created a username and password which you have to enter. The trickery is in what hostname to use. I figured this would be the Windows host or Windows DNS name but these didn't work. Eventually I tried 'localhost' and that does work, it seems you would have to use this when the Administrator and the DBMS are both running on the same server. Second thing is, there is no direct DB create tool provided in any of the GUIs. So I will still have to write a query to set up my DB for WordPress. But that is pretty easy to do and is covered in WordPress install instructions.

So firstly, set up a user account that WordPress can use to access its database. With the Administrator, this is very simple. Then, create the database. Using the Query Browser, this is a simple SQL statement and WordPress Help gives you the SQL to use. Finally, use Administrator to assign privileges on the new database to the new user account. The only real hiccup is that Administrator doesn't seem to have any way to refresh its schema view to pick up the newly created database, without quitting and running it again.

The next major task is to finish WordPress configuration. This is what will show if this whole grand scheme is really going to fly. This is where we find out whether PHP and MySQL are properly installed and configured, and whether WordPress can work properly with this setup (PHP 5 is supposed to be an unsupported configuration for this release of WP).

Firstly, edit wp_config.php and fill in the values specified. Next, run the install script in the wp-admin subdirectory. It is here I strike my first snag; the message tells me that I appear to be missing MySQL in my PHP installation. Running a phpinfo script to see what is configured, I find that MySQL is not loaded as a PHP module. So I make the change needed in php.ini and restart IIS. This causes mysql to appear in phpinfo output as a loaded module. And now install.php brings me up properly at the first part of the WordPress install page. After completing this page I am presented with a login page. Unfortunately, logging in with the details specified just gives me a blank web page. If I go to the index page instead, it fails to load, giving me a warning and a fatal error about not being able to open 'wp-blog-header.php'. As this file does exist, it looks more like a configuration problem, perhaps path info. It seems that perhaps the problem is that wp-blog-header.php is written by a script and it needs the proper permissions. However, the fix turned out to be very simple:

• Open index.php
• Change ./wp-blog-header.php to wp-blog-header.php in the require statement.

And that brought up the home page in all its glory.

So, we seem to have a working blog. However, it looks like I might have to customise a few more scripts in the same way as shown above, and I will have to work out how to change some of the blog's settings to get the page looking like I would like it to. Then, the next big thing is to see if I can get WLW to work with it. That's all for another day...

RIPREP chapter 3

Over the last few days I have been testing our third Riprep reference image. This one is mainly for our classroom PCs but I have found the HAL is the same one as the computer suite PCs use. So, in theory, the same image could work on both...maybe. The biggest hassle came with a .NET 2.0 reparse point (junction) which Riprep refused to copy. In theory it should be easy enough to have this automatically recreate itself using the cmdlines.txt file which is put into $OEM$\$1\Applications and the InstallFiles path pointed to it in riprep.sif (and OEMPreInstall set to Yes). However I have yet to be able to make this run the linkd command needed to recreate the reparse point automatically. There are a few other things I can try though (GuiRunOnce etc). So I had to run the command manually. Apart from that everything is working well.

When I tried it on our older suite PCs things were somewhat different. After Mini-Setup was finished and the system rebooted, it redetected the sound and graphics adaptors. This resulted in a series of onscreen messages and dialogs to be responded to, including that it wanted to copy older files over newer ones. Obviously this is going to be an issue with a change in hardware. When we used Ghost with Windows 98, we just used one 98 image for everything. As we had a few different types of PCs in use, Windows booting itself for the first time would display the messages that it was installing various drivers for the different hardware it had detected. This is the first time I have seen this happen on an XP machine and I was not prepared for these extra steps because I had assumed that somehow this would all happen automatically. The other problem is that as far as Windows is concerned, the graphics and sound drivers for this hardware are not digitally signed and so even at startup every user will be asked for permission to run the system tray and other various utilities that these devices use. Therefore it seems highly likely I would end up creating a special customisation of this image for this group of PCs to deal with these issues, and thus it's not so easy to have just one image for the lot. Vista handles this a lot better, thankfully.

Installing WordPress on IIS [1]

I have toyed with a few ideas for setting up a support site for intranet based staff use and did do a web page on one of our servers for a while. However the appeal of the blog and the mechanisms of it are such that I think this is by far the most preferred way of publishing the information in an easy to produce way that means it is more likely to work for everyone.

IIS is the web server we have already installed on our servers. It has an important advantage over other products out there and that is Integrated Windows Authentication (previously known as NTLM). What this means is I can restrict access to the site to staff without requiring them to enter a username and password into the browser (assuming they use Internet Explorer), as IE will transmit their Windows logon information back to the web server. Since IIS is running in our domain it can verify this against their domain logon details.

WordPress is a blogging platform that is the basis of the hosted WordPress blogging service. It is an open source and completely free platform. It requires PHP and MySQL, both of which are available in Windows versions. It is also supported by Windows Live Writer, which would be a major advantage when it comes to creating blog posts.

First task is to get PHP and MySQL up and running. The main issue is that WordPress is only certified for PHP4, but the latest version of PHP is 5.2 and support for 4 will end soon. In any case, PHP4 appears to be next to impossible to make work with IIS. Surely it's not rocket science but after a lot of fruitless effort trying to make 4.x work with IIS I gave up and tried 5.2.x which has so far worked flawlessly. The real test will be if WordPress can work with it without major issues, because of deprecations in 5.x. Next step: get MySQL up...

WDS part 2

This thread on Technet Forums details the steps needed to get WDS happening.

This is how far I have got down the WDS track. The boot.wim from the Vista DVD that we have self identifies as "Microsoft Windows Longhorn Setup (x86)" which I have left it as. While the image is being added I will turn on my reference PC and let it run the Mini-Setup wizard post RIPREP, the step that I did with it yesterday. After that's finished I will set it up to SysPrep instead for WDS instead of RIS.

WDS has added the image and a capture image has been created from it. That said, I can't actually view the capture image anywhere in WDS. The next step is the SysPrep of my reference PC. Sysprep.exe and setupcl.exe have to be obtained from the Deploy.cab files that come with XP. These are placed into C:\sysprep on the reference PC along with Sysprep.inf which is the same as for RIS. Sysprep is then run with the /reseal and /reboot options.

Once the PC reboots, it needs to be set up for PXE boot. The systems we are using have the Intel D101GGC board which is the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset, the onboard NIC being a Realtek 8139. Although this type of NIC is well known, it is configured quite differently in the BIOS, perhaps this is a function of the ATI chipset as well. Whereas on the Intel chipset, or Compaqs that we also have, all you have to do is make the network card one of the boot devices (any one) and then press F12 during the POST, the D101GGC requires you to enable the boot ROM, and then at bootup you have to press Shift-F10 when the Realtek boot message comes up, in order to configure the boot manager. Tell it to use the Bios order for boot devices (Int19). The difference is with the Intels/Compaqs you just press F12 at POST to PXE and if you don't then it boots the HDD as usual. On the ATI/Realtek system you are having to configure either the BIOS or the boot manager settings and then it always boots to PXE until the option is turned off. There may be a way of configuring it differently but I haven't worked that out yet.

At this juncture I'm leaving WDS alone for a bit, as it's clear I need a lot more time to set it all up and test it out, whereas for this particular PC I need to get it back up and running quickly.

Getting started with WDS

Windows Deployment Services is Microsoft's replacement for RIS (Remote Install Services). WDS development has been driven by the advent of Windows Vista; however, it is also capable of deploying Windows XP to client PCs. WDS is available as an update to Windows Server 2003 (in Service Pack 2) and will also be deployed with Windows Server 2008.

This week I was creating a new image for Windows XP using RIS, but because of an issue that RIS threw up, I decided I would also start to look at WDS. There are several documents that pertain to WDS that are revelant:

• Windows Deployment Services Update Step-by-Step Guide for Windows Server 2003

• The help file for WDS on the server which you can get when WDS is installed.

At this time it might be just as easy to get RIS to make the image as usual and then convert it to WDS using the tools provided. The difficulty of the learning curve right now is in figuring out exactly how to create the image from the reference computer. From documentation I already have I know how to Sysprep (based on its similarities to Riprep). So far as I can tell the next step is to PXE boot the client, then you have to have a Capture image already set up. As far as I can tell you need a WinPE capture image created first, which does the capture back to WDS of what is called an Install Image. Right now, though, I don't have any capture images (or boot images) on my WDS server. So I'd have to get the right one there first.

The other option is to use the tools supplied to create an existing RIS image. WDS Management as deployed on the server provides this in the GUI or the WDSUTIL command line tool can be used to do it.

So the next step is to figure out where to get a capture image from. In the meantime I still have my RIS image that I created from my reference machine, and therefore the option of creating the WDS image directly from the RIS image.

Cable management on desktop cases and plain desks

In an ideal world every computer would be in a tower case and our computer suite desks would have proper tower bays with some form of integrated ducting. Unfortunately these objectives cannot always be met and so we have to adapt in order to achieve something that is functional, practical and above all, tidy.

The use of plain desks dictates a requirement of low profile desktop cases, ordinarily to be avoided due to bulk, limited expandability and poor ventilation. Some cases are not strong enough to carry CRT screens so LCD is mandated if at all possible. The latter would also allow the use of 600 mm depth desks if you can get a tower bay underneath. 800 mm of width per user would then be sufficient and allow plenty of room on top with the reduced profile of the LCD.

Cable management requires adaption in plain desks. Running cables internally is the best all-round solution but may not be practical without large-scale holesawing. If it is not possible to drill through desk tops you may need to run cables along the back of desks instead. Keyboard, mouse and VGA cables should be neatly bunched up at the back of desktop cases. Power and network cables need to be trunked across the desks and plugboxes could be mounted internally at one end. IEC mains leads can be purchased with tapon plugs, increased lengths up to 5 metres or 2-into-1 Y cords as required. Ducting may be able to be fitted along the backs of desks to carry the trunked cables.

These photos illustrate different objectives and how to solve common problems.

This picture shows a plugbox mounted inside a desk. Mains leads exit through a 60 mm holesaw hole at top left and run along the back of the desk to individual PCs.

Here we see how to hang a network switch on the end of a desk. Using the rack ears we can usually turn these through 90 degrees and screw them to the side of the desk.

Courtesy of the local polytech here is another way of mounting a plugbox. The main problem with this is that plugpacks will tend to fall out under their own weight. Mains and network cabling in this example is run inside the two white ducts. Various types of ducting is available to suit.

Here is a nice tidy way to bunch cables at the back of a desktop case. The bracket shown is supplied with these particular Foxconn cases for a security cable and not being required in our situation we used them to attach a large cable tie to loop and secure the excess length in VGA, keyboard and mouse leads. The bracket is attached to the case with a screw and this can easily be undone to detach the cable bunch from the case without undoing the cable tie.

And finally here are three PCs on a desk using a combination of the above techniques. Network and mains leads run in a channel along the outer back of the desks and are held into the channel using large cable ties. The mains leads run around the far end of the desk through a 60 mm hole to the plugbox. The excess lead length which has not yet been tied back can be seen here hanging down under the desk.

Changes to RM Integris in NZ

Most users of RM Integris Student Management System in NZ should be aware by now that RM Australia-Pacific has taken over support of the product from Renaissance Education Division, as per the terms of an agreement dated 1st April this year. RMAP believe that this will help to improve the overall service delivery and performance of Integris for all of the NZ customers.

I have been advised we are likely to see a further round of User Group meetings later this year and a roadmap for the development / release of future versions and enhancements to Integris is being developed.

The big news for the past couple of years has been the development cycle of Integris G2 and although it is likely to be 2009 or even later before it will become readily available to NZ schools, it is keenly anticipated in these parts. I understand an improved Billing system is also in the works.

New Windows Live Releases

What's different about this post? It has in it, a picture, and the text in it is also fully justified. These are two key improvements that have been added to the latest beta release of Windows Live Writer when working with Google's Blogger service. WLW Beta 3 also includes functionality for some blogging services to insert videos, publish XHTML markup, use additional languages, and various bugs have been fixed.

Windows Live Mail has also been updated to build 1365 with new features and functionality. I haven't as yet taken the opportunity to investigate these in detail; the changes to WLW are more significant at this stage. However as I am now using WLM at work I would expect to see impacts of the improvements that have been made in this product.

Microsoft has also created a single point install for these tools, which is a convenience for home users. Businesses and network administrators would, however, like to see full-file downloads, even MSI files in time, that they could streamline their administration with. I trust these will be available in the final releases of these products. Although there are other WL products available, these are the only two I am likely to use regularly, either at home or work.

Blogger users will find there is an additional step before you can upload pictures using WLW. You must go to the Google Picasaweb site and agree to their terms and conditions. WLW helpfully offers to open this website for you. Once you accept those conditions, you will see albums already created for any Blogger blogs that you have uploaded pictures to. You can then make full use of WLW's picture upload capability in Blogger posts.

Windows Live Mail successfully installs on Domain PCs

When I first tried out Windows Live Mail Desktop beta, I never could get it to install on any of our PCs at work. WLM beta install attempts were similarly unsuccessful. I speculate that the domain GPO for Windows Update conflicts with WLMd's attempts to set up Microsoft Update.

However, on machines that have not had WLMd installed before and are on a domain the install is successful and it has been completed now on two PCs. I am now able to use it at work and evaluate its usefulness here. One important reason why I would want to use it is because Outlook is such a prima donna when it comes to working with IMAP mail. Even with Outlook 2007 it constantly complains that it can't connect to the server and goes offline. Microsoft needs to bash the OE/WLM and Outlook teams' heads together. OL2007 has improved IMAP support but it's still a notch behind WLM in this respect. It seems Outlook is still too much geared towards corporate Exchange server and that functionality for other types of servers is an afterthought.

Anyway now that I have WLM working in our workplace I will be evaluating it very seriously for our use and if MS can fix some of the well known issues such as RSS feeds it should be a very good alternative for some of our users.

(Post errors fixed and text justified using the new beta build of Windows Live Writer. 6 Sept 07, 2:17 pm)