Print Spooler Failures

Posted on April 13, 2010 by Sean O'Farrell

We have been having trouble with print spooler failures with a Terminal Server Farm recently and I recently discovered a cool feature of the 2008R2 Printer Manager.

You can select a driver and set it to isolate which means the driver will have it’s own isolated virtual print spooler , This means it wont share the common print spooler and in the event of a buggy driver it wont pull the whole print spooler down , only the printer using that particular driver.

Remote Desktop Easy Print and a HP Universal Print Driver can act in similar ways and therefore can clash, witch would make sense to isolate each driver.

Its a really cool feature that not many people know about and can really help troubleshoot print spooler problems.

If your having trouble with a driver which is isolated , it will then have its own process and you can use Process Explorer from sysinternals to analyse that process.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Exchange 2010 Quick Setup Guide

Posted on April 2, 2010 by Sean O'Farrell

Exchange 2010 Quick Setup Guide R1

1. If installing on Hyper-V R2 , Have the following config
C:\40gb Fixed Disk, D:\100gb Fixed Disk Database, E:\20gb,2008R2 Enterprise , 4 processors , As much ram as possible, Patch OS prior to install.

2. Run this command from command prompt

ServerManagerCmd -i RSAT-ADDS Web-Server Web-Metabase Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console Web-ISAPI-Ext NET-HTTP-Activation Web-Basic-Auth Web-Digest-Auth Web-Windows-Auth Web-Dyn-Compression RPC-over-HTTP-proxy Web-Net-Ext -Restart

3. Install Feature “Desktop Expierience” if you wish to install the unified messaging role.

4. Install Exchange 2010, It will sysprep active directory for you.

5. During install it will ask you for external name for owa . I chose mail.domainname eg. mail.cdsoft.ie

6. When setup is complete re-boot server and then install Exchange 2010 Rollup2 Update kb9796711 and reboot.

7. Move Database and log files to relevant drives.

8. Add in accepted external domain, add to default email policy. (I normally like to define firstname.secondname

9. Create an internet send connector via Organisation/Hubtransport/new send connector wizard.

10. Edit the default receive connector permission group to allow anonymous users

11. Edit Organisation/Hub Transport/Global Settings/Transport Settings and change max send & receive size to 30720

12. Run this command in exchange system shell

13. Set-OWAVirtualDirectory -Identity “owa (default web site)” -LogonFormat username -DefaultDomain INTERNALDOMAINNAME (eg.cdsoft.local)

14. Buy a trusted cert for exchange

15. Add users via new mailbox wizard and create new user this way and select AD OU that the user belongs to.

16. Disable Windows Firewall and Allow Main Firewall to allow external ports 25 & 443 access to server.

17. Implement correct backup procedure.
Sean

After installing Hyper-V Integration Services on the next reboot the VM displays BSOD 0x0000007B

Posted on March 29, 2010 by Sean O'Farrell

A big thanks to kev greene in cdsoft for this article which has proved to be priceless.

Recently, I had some customers with VMs they just P2V’ed, or even had them running already on Virtual Server or Hyper-V. Now, they installed the latest Integration Components that came with the R2 Release.

After the required reboot, the VM shows a Bluescreen 0x0000007B INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

During Debugging I found that the Storage Driver of the ICs require the Windows Driver Framework (WDF), which was not loaded in this case. So the Storage Driver fails to load.
Looking into the Registry of the VM, shows that the WDF Driver was already installed previously, but had the wrong Group relationship, so it is initialized too late.

So here’s how to fix this issue:

1. Boot the VM into LastKnownGood. Press F8 during boot.
2. Open the Registry and drill down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Wdf01000
3. There is a Group Value that should have the Value WdfLoadGroup. In my cases it was wrongly set to base. Change this to WdfLoadGroup
4. Then remove the Integration Components from Control Panel/Software.
5. Reboot the VM (now without ICs)
6. Install the ICs once again

Google Docs Storage

Posted on February 27, 2010 by Sean O'Farrell

My laptop’s hard drive is starting to make a clicking sound. I have been meaning to replace it for some time but just have not got around to it. So prior to it dying I am uploading all the pics of my little boy Jayden to Google Docs storage. Each user gets a standard 1GB storage but I purchased an additional 20GB storage for $5.00 a year!!!

I always use yousendit.com for sending files i need for work like hot fixes and patches. Mostly any email package or service will put restrictions on sending .exe files , but the free version only allows sending a maximum of 100MB. With my google docs storage I can easily share a folder and send the link to somebody and they have the required file, files.

Its really simple to use and I feel safer having my files in the cloud. I will however have to make my password stronger!!