Wednesday 10 October 2007

Update on DnsApi 11163 / MrxSmb 50 Errors

These are issues I've spent only the minimum amount of time on lately, yet they demand resolution. The MrxSmb errors followed me when I took the PCI Gigabit card (DLink) out of my old PC and transferred it to my "new" one. After finding there was still a problem I switched to the onboard Intel 100Mbps NIC and everything is fine. Since we experienced this issue with a variety of NICs, some onboard and some external, I can only conclude that the (presumed) bugs in NIC drivers that lead to these problems are relatively common. An analogy from way back when that I recall, is when certain low-end 3D graphics cards, most notably those made by S3, typically had problems on Windows systems of the era when a large number of icons were displayed. What I've found overall from our experiences is that Intel hardware consistently has less problems than other manufacturers. One of our suppliers of PC hardware in the past consistently buys their boards from a prominent Asian manufacturer (one of the largest in the world) but which uses mainly AMD CPUs and third party chipsets. These tend to cause more problems long term. This particular PC was one of those and has proved very niggling to make work at times. Our present hardware supplier, Cyclone, has standardised on Intel boards and although their graphics chipsets may not be anything to write home about they are consistently solid performers. So my next act will be to get a PCIe gigabit Intel card for this machine, although they cost rather more than the Dlink did.

The DNSAPI errors are more perplexing. Last time this happened it was because the two DNS servers had different reverse lookup zone configs. This time as far as I can tell they are both the same. There has been an ongoing issue with stale reverse lookup records that I have not been able to solve to date, which seems to be related to this problem. However I haven't been able to find out anything about it so far from Microsoft.

Monday 8 October 2007

NZ Time Zone Changes in Windows

Maybe if you're like me, you changed the time manually on your three servers a week ago when Daylight Saving started, and thought no more of it until you logged in this morning and discovered all the servers had reset themselves to an hour later than the current time, as well as your desktop...

This happened to us because, even though we use Windows Server Update Services,

  1. We have only approved auto-installation of Critical Updates and Security Updates, and this update is an Update Rollup.
  2. We have not approved auto-installation of updates for our Windows servers, and this update is therefore not yet installed on them.

We also have a Linux server that acts as the time server for many PCs and this has to have its own update done.

In addition you may have Windows clients in your network running Windows 2000 or older. Microsoft is not making updates available in the usual distribution channels for these operating systems because mainstream support is not available for them any more. However unofficial updates can be found for 2000, ME and 98 or you can apply a manual update.

The update for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is KB933360. It appeared on WSUS on 29th August.

Solution: I had to wait all day to get the patch installed on our servers because other updates were waiting to be installed first and they required the servers to be restarted. It took two installation and restart cycles for each server to get them up to date with this patch. Then the time had to be set on each server to the current time. Still, at least now my desktop is showing and keeping the correct time.