OK, super geeky post here. Apologies is advance to the ‘normals’ amongst us.

We have a site with a Windows 2008 x64 Remote Desktop (terminal services) server that needs an MS Access ODBC System DSN setup. The normal method via “Start” > “Administrative Tools” > “Data Sources (ODBC)” wouldn’t work. Quite simply in this applet when you click on “System DSN” > “Add” the only driver visible is for SQL Server.

The solution? It turns out you will need to use the 32-bit Data Sources applet, rather than the native x64 one. Logical, hey? Very easily, open up C:WindowsSysWOW64odbcad32.exe instead and you can proceed to add a System DSN as you normally would.

A client needed an old DOS application that they still use a lot to be able to print to some new USB printers they’ve recently purchased. This app is already printing quite happily to their older desktop printers, but they couldn’t get it to work on the new printers. For the record, the solution is to map the LPT1 port to the USB printer. In broad terms, the process is…

1. Share the USB printer

2. From a command line, run “net use lpt1: \computernameprintersharename /persistent:yes”

Job done!

Well here’s another one for the books. We use and recommend Reflexion for hosted email security. In the last two days we’ve migrated both ourselves and one particular client onto the new Reflexion platform (new version, etc). The migration was perfectly simple. The Reflexion guys migrated across all settings, etc, and all we had to do was update MX and Smarthost settings. So moving grassrootsit.com.au across went without hitch, but our client stopped receiving any inbound email. AGAGH.

So after some fantastic and very prompt support from Reflexion (you da man Scott), here’s what happened… This particular client was previously supported by another IT guy who had some creative ways of doing things. Once we moved their domain onto the new platform which, as we now know uses opportunistic TLS for SMTP (ie: if TLS is offered by the client’s server, it will use it), the ‘creatively configured’ TLS on the client’s exchange server didn’t quite behave as expected. TLS transmission failed, and therefore the emails queued up on the Reflexion server.

Immediate solution? Disable TLS on the Exchange box. How? Right-click on the SMTP Virtual Server in ESM then select Properties > Access > Certificate, then follow the wizard to REMOVE the certificate. I restarted the SMTP service for good measure, but not sure if that was necessary or not. Emails immediately started flowing again.

OK, here’s another geeky one more for our own reference than anything else. If you are running a Windows 7 workstation on a Server 2003 network (including SBS 2003), the Previous Versions functionality may appear to be broken. You may see either nothing listed in the Previous Versions window, or everything may appear with the same date stamp. Windows XP workstations continue to function correctly.

There is a very quick fix to be applied to the server. Simply delete the following registry key

HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetServiceslanmanserverParametersDisableDownLevelTimewarp

No reboot is required. The fix is immediate.

UPDATE: We have had a situation recently where deleting this key changed the symptoms, but did not resolve the problem. In this case we re-added the key, and set the value to “1”, which did resolve the issue successfully.

Here’s an interesting one that we’ll be watching closely. Apparently the OS4 software update for iPhones recently released by Apple is causing problems with some Exchange servers. I’m guessing that the more iPhones you have hooking into your Exchange server the more likely this problem is to occur. Apple has released a quick and easy patch for the problem, but the patch must be installed on each iPhone individually. See the link for more details.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3398

This is one that’s cropped up more than once, so for my own reference I’m sticking it up here as a post.

Situation is that an Exchange 2007 distribution group has the ‘Managed By’ field set to a certain user. That user however is unable to manage the group membership as the setting may imply. When attempting to do so they receive the message

Changes to the distribution list membership cannot be saved. You do not have sufficient permission to perform this operation on this object.

This behaviour is by design. For details on granting the appropriate permissions check out this post…

http://www.howexchangeworks.com/2009/09/giving-user-enough-rights-to-manage.html

I have just closed a ticket for a client who was having problems activating Windows 7 on his PC. As a result of these problems, he was getting a warning message popping up claiming that his copy of windows might not be genuine. Obviously, considering we had just sold them multiple activations of Windows 7 under a volume licensing agreement, this was of some concern to them.

The bizarre part is that the license key was legitimate and the workstations were behaving perfectly, except for the fact that they couldn’t check in to Microsoft to activate. The error code they were getting was 0x8007232b, which is apparently related to several problems with activations. In this case however, all that we needed to do was re-enter the activation key and re-submit the activation request. 10 seconds later, the activation was successful! Welcome to the fun world of Microsoft licensing