My torn data pages - Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Today I had the challenge of joining a Vista x64 computer to an SBS 2003 domain. Okay, not a straightforward thing and there is some patching needed before Vista can be joined to an SBS 2003 domain. However that was not the issue today, as it wasn't the first Vista machine to be joined to this domain. The SBS 2003 Server already received the 926505 patch (which was needed to get the first Vista x64 into the domain). However this time upon trying to join a Vista x64 machine, this error came up.

Your computer could not be joined to the domain because the following error has occurred:

The remote procedure call failed and did not execute.

And nothing in the eventlogs of either the Vista machine or the SBS-box! Also, after receiving this error, the computer account for the Vista machine is disabled in AD.

A bit of Googling showed the failing RPC might very well be a firewall issue, not specific to SBS and applicable to both Microsoft ISA and CheckPoint (see 899148). Not that this was the issue right now as ISA was running SP2 and SP1 is said to resolve the issue. But it was the hint I needed, knowing that the ISA Server 2004 was put on the SBS box after the first Vista machine was joined to the domain... To sum it up, the issue is 917903 and is solved in rollup update 930414.

CAUTION!!! After applying the 930414 patch, likely your Exchange Routing Engine, Simple Mail Transport Protocol and World Wide Web Service are stopped and publications (HTTP, HTTPS and SMTP) could be failing too.

But I did join the Vista machine to the SBS domain!

UPDATE(2007-03-15), applying the 930414 patch solved the problem where Outlook loses connection to the Exchange server, then keeps asking for a password, without restoring connection. 

1. Run Internet Explorer as administrator (go via Start, All Programs, click right mouse key on Internet Explorer, see the shield...).
2. In IE, click Tools, Internet Options, Content, Certificates.
3. Click Import to start the wizard. Click next and browse to the SBS Cert (\\yourSBSbox\C$\ClientApps\SBScert\SBSCert.cer). Click Next.
4. Choose "Place all certificates in the following store", then click Browse and check to "Show physical stores".
5. Browse to place the certificate in "Trusted Root Certification Authorities\Local Computer". OK, Next, Finish to complete the wizard.

Sometimes there are those things that annoy you, like the amount of memory seen by my computer. I have a HP Compaq nx6325 equipped with 4 GB of RAM, but Vista only reports 2943 MB. Not that I expected to see 4096 MB, I'm a bit smarter than that. This machine has an ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 which has no memory of its own and uses HyperTransport HyperMemory to share the system memory between CPU and GPU. But why should the GPU chew up over 25% of the systems memory?!?! (And why would I want to limit the amount of memory used for the GPU? I'm running Vista and SQL Server Developer x64 Editions, and would like to have maximum memory for the database services.)

Well, today I read a paper from Microsoft explaining what is going on with memory. Not that I have a solution now, but at least I can ask smarter questions now.

I couldn't send trackbacks through dasBlog, which was a pity (either I don't know how to, or it's future functionality). Anyway, I solved it by signing up for HaloScan. A little warning though on sending trackbacks works, but when I did so to the NewLevel blog, only the first URL was processed

Technorati tags: HaloScan, Typepad, das Blog, trackback

Initially I planned using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to host my blog and I have been looking into it before, even wrote three posts about WSS 3.0 when I worked for NewLevel (1, 2, 3). But as you may notice, this blog is based on dasBlog, not WSS 3.0...

So what happened? First of all, WSS was eating away too many resources from my little server. Second, I knew WSS doesn't accept trackbacks by default, so you either should write your own webparts or find them on the net (Steen Molberg has some blogparts for WSS 2.0). Anyway I needed a good solution for the Windows Platform, no cost (in terms of financial transaction) and with a smaller footprint than WSS 3.0; it's called dasBlog.

Configuring dasBlog was real easy, as was customizing (I'm leaving the two issues I had for a later post). If you know a little about HTML and CSS, you're equipped to do some customization. Like this blog's theme, which is based on the Nautica 2.2. I did the customization, including the graphics (fractal header and torn-off page) in ~ 6 hours time.

Another nice thing about dasBlog... it's recognized by WindowsLiveWriter (my third little problem with WSS 3.0). Unfortunately some features, like sending trackbacks and adding categories don't seem to work.

Recently I started my own company; ReSQueL, after several years with Tulip Computers and NewLevel. At NewLevel I wrote for the company’s blog and feel it’s an asset my company should have too.

For a couple of reasons, l kept pushing the creation of the website ahead. The major reason was Internet access and the server, but those two were solved about two weeks back. My ISP provided a modest, but dedicated connection with Terms of Usage allowing me to host services like http(s) and smtp.

After some preparation, it’s time to kick-off the new site and the weblog. What can you expect on this blog?

• Useful stuff about SQL Server
• Content for (self-)study and certification for SQL Server
• Things related to ReSQueL
• Other stuff I think is useful

Happy reading