You may come across the following alert in some of your Domain Controllers Event logs “Client IP Address does not map to an existing Site Boundary in Active Directory”

This event means that a machine has authenticated to a Domain controller which doesn’t have an IP range specified in AD Sites and Services subnets.

To find the IP of the offending machines you need to have a look at the domain controllers netlogon log (%systemroot%\debug\netlogon.log) which will display a list of the IP addresses that do not have a subnet specified.

You then just need to open AD sites and Services and add the subnet.

• Open AD Sites and Services
• Expand Sites , Right click on subnets and choose new subnets
• Enter the Subnet and associate with the appropriate site and click ok

The error should now disappear

Had an issue recently where we couldn’t get the “SQL Server Reporting Services (MSSQLSERVER)” service to start.

In the end it was quite a simple fix, we added the below registry key.

• Open Reg Edit
• Navigate to the following registry key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control”
• Right-click Control, and create a new DWORD with the name “ServicesPipeTimeout”, and then press ENTER.
• Right-click “ServicesPipeTimeout”, and then click Modify.
• Select Decimal, and type 60000 (this will allow the service 1 minute to start)
• Restart Machine

This sorted it for us.

We came across this issue when trying to install 64-bit print drivers on a 32-bit Windows 2008 print server. Below I have highlighted the steps of how to complete this with a 64-bit Windows 7 client machine:

1. Log onto the x64 client

2. Search for Print Management (If it is not present you will need to install Remote Server Administration Tools x64 (http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/F/7/4F71806A-1C56-4EF2-9B4F-9870C4CFD2EE/amd64fre_GRMRSATX_MSU.msu)

3. Run Print Management as administrator

4. Right click “Print Servers” and select “Add/Remove Servers”

5. Type the name of your Print Server and click “Add to List” then OK

6. Under the Printer Server you just added, Select “Printers”

7. You will see a list of servers appear in the console, under the tab “Driver Name” make a note of the driver name you would like to install a x64 version of.

8. Still in the Print Management Console, Select your local x64 client

9. Right click “Drivers” and select “Add Driver”

10. In the wizard, ensure “x64” is the only box ticked then select Next

11. Find your print driver from the list then select Next. (If your print driver is not in the list select the “Windows Update” option to display more”)

12. Finish the wizard

13. Make a note of the “Inf Path” location of the driver you just installed. (To find the “Inf Path” location scroll across while still in the “Drivers” window)

14. Still in the Print Management Console, Select your Print Server

15. Right click “Drivers” and select “Add Driver”

16. In the wizard, ensure “x64” is the only box ticked then select Next

17. Select “Have Disk”

18. Specify the Inf Path location you just made a note of. Select OK and complete the wizard.

19. You will now be able see you driver in x86 and x64 on your Print server. See the below for an example:

20. Try adding the printer as you usually would on other x64 clients and all should be OK

This occurred on a Windows XP system running service pack 2 with Internet Explorer 7 installed.

Problem

One of our customers reported that there were a few users that were getting the “Restore My Active Desktop” button appear. When click on it nothing would happen.

Resolution

In this case the fix was to amend a registry setting called DeskHtmlVersion which can be found in the following path:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Desktop\SafeMode\Components

All you need to do is change the value of the DeskHtmlVersion REG_DWORD to read 0

After you have made the change you will need to log off then back on again and your desktop should be restored.

Problem

We recently had a problem with a user that could not play voicemail recording attachments in an email that were in a WAV format. The error we were receiving was:

After upgrading the media player to the latest version and even trying some other 3rd party software such as VLC Media Player we would still receive a similar message that the codecs were not available.

Resolution

After clicking on the Web Help button in the upgraded Windows Media Player 11 we found that it identified the codec 42 needed installing. We searched for a long time on the web trying to find the codec and finally found the download at the following location:

http://www.powerpack.to/home/downloads/dvr_3850.rar

(You will require software to open the RAR file such as WinRAR or 7Zip)

1. Extract the folder and browse to the “Pack” folder

2. Right click on the vivog723.inf and select install

You should then be able to play the wav files without any problems after that.

We ran into this issue a while back after performing the migration to TMG 2010, the PPTP VPN stopped working and Event ID 4402 was recorded in the logs:

Also Event ID 20255:

Solution:

Open the Network Policy Server console (Start > Administrative Tools > Network Policy Server).

Right-Click servername and select “Register server in Active Directory”

We began receiving alerts from our SCOM 2007 R2 server that daily summary reports were failing to create on a TMG box shortly after installing TMG SP1.

Solution:

Run the “fixsqlserverlogin.vbs” script from the “Installing Forefront TMG SP1” TechNet article:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff717843.aspx#fixsqlserverlogin_vbs

  One to watch out for when upgrading to Exchange 2010 SP1 is not to include a rollup in the updates folder of the extracted SP1 media, as it will cause the upgrade to fail any you will notice the following errors in the ExchangeSetup.log

Updates Folder

Error in the Exchangesetuplogs

[ERROR] Installing product D:\Support\EXCHANGE 2010 SP1 + R2\exchangeserver.msi failed. Fatal error during installation. Error code is 1603.
[ERROR] Fatal error during installation
Ending processing install-msipackage
The Exchange Server setup operation didn’t complete.  More details can be found in ExchangeSetup.log located in the <SystemDrive>:\ExchangeSetupLogs folder.
End of Setup
**************

After Running the upgrade for the third time you will then see the below in the log.

[REQUIRED] The previous installation path could not be found in the registry. Only disaster recovery mode is available.
[REQUIRED] The previously installed version could not be determined from the registry. Only disaster recovery mode is available.

So just be careful not to put any exchange rollups in the update folder during your SP1 upgrade !

Recently we have came across an issue where users home folders were getting deleted, every time we changed the users home folder location in there AD user object

Each user who had there home folder deleted all changed their home folder to a DFSR path, all had offline folders enable and all had a GPO applied with the setting “ Enable Move the Contents of Documents to the new location” enabled.

After much research we managed to find out the scenarios in which the users files would or wouldn’t get deleted.

Scenario 1

Folder Gets Deleted Every time we change the path.

1, Enable Move the Contents of Documents to the new location

2, Set UNC path under the home drive for the User in AD

3, Log on as the user onto Vista Client

4, Make sure H drive is enabled for Offline files

5, Add some files to the H drive and then perform a Sync through offline files

6, Change Users home drive to DFS namespace

7, Log off Vista machine and Log back on

8, Perform a Sync

9,Reboot Client

10, Home Folder gets deleted

Scenario 2

Folder doesn’t get deleted

1, Deselect Move the Contents of Documents to the new location

2, Set UNC path under the Profile for the User in AD

3, Log on as the user onto Vista Client

4, Make sure H drive is enabled for Offline files

5, Add some files to the H drive and then perform a Sync through offline files

6, Change User home drive to DFS namespace

7, Log off Vista machine and Log back on

8, Perform a Sync

9, Reboot Client

10, Home Folder does not get deleted

Scenario 3

Folder doesn’t get deleted

1, Do not use offline files

2, Move the contents folder can be enable or disabled doesn’t make a difference

In the end we went for scenario 2 as we needed users to have the offline files functionality.

A new mailbox repair functionality has been added with Exchange 2010 SP1, we’ve used it recently where we had a corruption on a users mailbox in regards to Folder Views.  On a 1GB mailbox it took around 20 seconds to run the cmdlet and it logs an EventID on the mailbox server when the cmdlet is completed.

The cmdlet is New-MailboxRepairRequest and the following types of corruption can be fixed this

• Search folder corruptions
• Aggregate counts on folders
• Views on folders that aren’t returning the correct content
• Provisioned folders that are incorrectly pointing into parent folders that aren’t provisioned

Another Useful thing about the cmdlet is that you can run it in detect only mode , which will then display any corruption in the mailbox servers event viewer and then if you do spot the corruption you can run it for real.

Microsoft KB referencing the cmdlet http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff625221.aspx