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.