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Got a few new tapes today for a Tandberg VXA-2 drive today and they had RED labels with caution symbols on them saying “UPGRADE VXA DRIVE FIRMWARE TODAY”. I can take a hint and decided to do it. Their website search was not very helpful on finding how to upgrade the firmware, but it is a very easy process. The first thing you need to do is to download and install the VXA Tool on the machine with the tape drive attached. http://www.exabyte.com/support/online/downloads/downloads.cfm?did=622

Once you have that downloaded open up the VXA Tool program and from the main screen select ‘update drive firmware’.  You can select to have it upgrade the firmware automatically (the default and recommended) or you can have it update the firmware from a file manually.

If you want to download the firmware manually you can go to: http://www.tandbergdata.com/us/en/support/drivers-and-downloads/ and select ‘firmware’ from the download menu and VXA2 from the ‘product’ menu

I had a problem today that I eventually traced down to the axlbridge.exe from Quickbooks Enterprise 10 (R5). What would happen is that when the user would log in to Quickbooks to open any company file the computer and quickbooks would come to a grinding halt. If you had the patience to close quickbooks through exiting the application the computer would start running fine, but if you killed the process the computer would still run slowly. This helped me indentify the application that was starting with quickbooks causing the issue. I can kill the application and Quickbooks runs fine.

Reinstalling the application, updating the application, or replacing that file did not help. Delete the file and Quickbooks replaces it. I eventually was able to fix the problem by denying permissions for all users of the computer to file. I am not sure what effects that this is going to have, but she is able to use quickbooks for everything that she needs.

After we started testing with Windows 7 we found that it had an issue connecting to an Exchange 2003 server when using Outlook over RPC. We could still connect using Outlook over RPC to the server on our Windows XP machines. While troubleshooting the connection I noticed that on the Windows XP when opening Outlook using the /rpcdiag switch that it had the name of the server with its netbios name (i.e. server1), but on Windows 7 it showed the server with its fully qualified domain name (i.e. server1.office.local)

This triggered an idea and I checked the server registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Rpc\RpcProxy) where you have to configure the ports and found that it was configured to use the netbios name and not the longer fully qualified domain name. A few seconds after I made this registry change the Windows 7 machine connected to Outlook and started syncing email! I tested my Windows XP machines, restarted the server, and everything was still connected.

Registry entry before change: server1:6001-6002;mail.domain.com:6001-6002;server1:6004;mail.domain.com:6004

Registry entry after: server1.office.local:6001-6002;mail.domain.com:6001-6002;server1.office.local:6004;mail.domain.com:6004

Installing a new Windows 7 computer for a client and found for some reason that even though the HP Color Laserjet 3500 worked in Vista HP did not have a supported driver for Windows 7. We found that you can load the Windows Vista drivers, but if you try to edit any of the properties on the printer (paper tray, color options, etc) it gives an error. Otherwise it prints beautifully

I know that I have been tempted to press that button and squeeze a little more disk space out of my computer instead or archiving off music or pictures, but our experience with file compression on a Windows machine has not been good. It makes recovering deleted files much more difficult, but the real problem that we see with most computers that have done this has been poor performance.

Going back and unchecking the box to compress files on your hard drive stops windows from doing this with new files, but it doesn’t seem to go back and clear out the compression that it has already done on your existing files.

Fortunately there is a command that you can run on your computer to undo this. Depending on how many files you have and the speed of your computer this can take a few hours.

compact /u/s/a/i/q

This command uncompresses, subfolders, hidden and system files, continues proccessing if it runs into an error, and only reports the most essential information.

Received the following error today on a new server that I promoted to a domain controller that would trigger every time the server was started.

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    NtFrs
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    13571
Date:        8/4/2009
Time:        3:14:10 PM
User:        N/A
Computer:    servername
Description:
The File Replication Service has detected that one or more volumes on this computer have the same Volume Serial Number. File Replication  Service does not support this configuration. Files may not replicate  until this conflict is resolved.

Volume Serial Number : 1234-5678
List of volumes that have this Volume Serial Number: c:, c:

The output of “dir” command displays the Volume Serial Number before listing the contents of the folder.

The server was a RAID 5 configuration with a single volume setup for the disks and no external disks attached. The one thing that I noticed is that the servers C: drive was not configured with a volume label.

To fix the error all I had to do was open up Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management and select properties on the disk and give the C: drive a label. Restarting the server no longer gives the error.

Installing Windows Server 2003 Small Business Edition into an existing SBS environment today. After joining the machine to the domain and promoting it to a domain controller I was ready to continue with the SBS install. When I went to start the install it does a health check and gave me an error that “Windows small business server does not support internet connection sharing” and instructions on how to disable it. Unfortunately those intructions did not was as I did not have the sharing tab in my network connections that it was referring to.

Fixing the problem was pretty easy so that I could resume my setup. I stopped the “Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)” service, set it to manual, and I was able to get my install going.