The situation: I’m working in Oracle Calendar as a person’s designate, managing his calendar on his behalf. We’ll call him Sam. I create a meeting for Sam with some other attendees. Later, I remove Sam from the meeting rather than deleting it. Perhaps the other still want to meet but didn’t want to create a [...]
Recently, I was asked to talk with our Help Line staff about strategies for troubleshooting problems with Microsoft Office. I spent some time addressing the activation issues relating specifically Office 2010, which I wrote up in a separate post. The most important point I want to make about general Office troubleshooting is that reinstalling office [...]
Microsoft Office 2010 volume license edition use the Volume License 2.0 mechanisms to manage activation. Office 2010 will activate against our campus Key Management Service (KMS), without user intervention, in a manner similar to Windows Vista and Windows 7. Occasionally, the activation process doesn’t work. Problems are usually related to network communication with the KMS. [...]
I’ve been working on deploying a load-balanced Remote Desktop Gateway service. I deployed the first farm member, then cloned it to create a second member. The second member was throwing Error events, which has the description "There is no domain controller available for domain CAMPUS." Now, I know that the domain controllers are up and [...]
We use BIND for our DNS, and allow certain systems to perform dynamic DNS registration. This arrangement has worked well for years. When I started deploying Server 2008 R2, I noticed that they weren’t registering PTR records. At the same time, I noticed a bunch of errors that seemed to indicate that Dynamic DNS wasn’t [...]
I’m in the process of deploying a couple new Server 2008 R2 domain controllers. I’m using two IBM blades, each having a pair of Broadcom NICs that I configured in fault-tolerance teams. In trying to verify the configuration of one of the DCs, I used the command: dcdiag /test:dns The output surprised me: Starting test: [...]
I’m working with Microsoft to identify a problem I’m seeing with LSASS, possibly related to the VSS snapshot created by our backup software. At this point, I need to be able to capture the memory state on the system, even if I can’t log into the box. There are several ways to trigger a crash [...]
During an upgrade of our VMware ESX infrastructure, I ran into an issue with our domain controllers. As part of the process we needed to upgrade the virtual hardware that is part of the guest vm. After updating the domain controller guest’s VMware Tools software, I shut down the guest and select Upgrade virtual hardware. [...]
Using Process Explorer to view process integrity levels A friend asked me how to open a Control Panel applet As Administrator. In Windows Vista, when you see a little shield icon as part of a button or shortcut, that would indicate that you would get prompted by the User Account Control (UAC) facility to elevate [...]
ESET has fixed the problem that caused widespread system hangs. If you followed my instructions to disable NOD32, you can re-enable it by repeating those steps and changing one word: replace disabled with auto. To recapitulate: 1. Boot into safe mode 2. In either the Run dialog or the Vista Start Menu search box, type [...]
Geoffrey Duke
Sr. System Administrator,
University of Vermont