Windows Update Error 800B0109

This Windows update error 800B0109 means that the WSUS signing certificate is not trusted. Windows 7 64 bit will not install the update if the certificate is not trusted. If this happens to a regular home user who gets updates via Microsoft you should check really hard to make sure you do not have some malware that has hijacked you WSUS process.

However is my case I used System Center Updates Publisher to push out Adobe updates and I created my own self signed certificate which is not trusted by the clients. I either need to add that certificate to the trusted store on each computer or create a new cert using my CA that is already trusted by the clients.

Because the root goal of this exercise was to eliminate visiting each client for Adobe updates, I will try the CA route and see how it goes.

Yet Another Exchange Activesync Issue

A user received a new Android tablet and they wanted to sync their email with the Exchange 2010 server. After configuring everything phone side the phone never displayed the security setting warning and displayed a loading sign that never ended.

On the server side, the exchange server was spewing event id 1008 into the event log.

Other users had no problem, but this was the first time this user had attempted to sync with exchange.

To make a long story short and after some googling I found,  Cannot sync iPhone with Exchange ActiveSync.
This article talks about a permissions problem on the server. The solution was to verify that the user has the "Include inheritable permissions from this object's parent" checked on the Active Directory user's permissions.

1. Open "Active Directory Users and Computers" (dsa.msc).
2. Go to "View" and make sure "Advanced Features" is checked, if it isn't - check it.
3. Find the problematic user and open its "Properties" (right click --> Properties).
4. Go to the "Security" tab and click on the "Advanced" button.
5. Verify that the "Include inheritable permissions from this object's parent" checkbox is checked. If it is, you may try to reset the user's permissions by clicking on the "Restore defaults" button.

After fixing the permissions and then newly adding the email account on the tablet, everything worked but the initial sync did seem to take a little while. It is interesting that this is the same root cause of a similar problem I had before.The interesting thing is that I checked this on all of the users last time and I also checked all of the users again this time. Probably I missed this one user the last time around though....

Cannot install to GPT partition

I was attempting to install Windows 7 to a laptop using a flash drive.
The first problem I ran into was that the laptop would not detect my usb flash drive and I could not set the DVD as the boot drive. In the bios I found a setting called csm or something like that. I enabled that setting and on the next boot, the bios detected the usb drive and the DVD drive.

In the Windows 7 installer I attempted to choose the partition for the install but I was greeted with the error, "windows cannot be installed on this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style."

Cutting to the chase, I had to delete all of the partitions before the installer would allow me to install Windows 7.

Removing Duplicates in MySQL

I inherited a database that had some performance problems.

To improve performance on one of the tables we added a few indexes based on common searches for that table. The problem was that there were a number of duplicates that prevented creation of the indexes.

To fix this problem I ran the following query all at once in phpmyadmin as temporary tables only last the duration of the connection.

CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE bad_temp AS SELECT DISTINCT * FROM bad_table;
 
DELETE FROM bad_table;

INSERT INTO bad_table(email,nid,timestamp) SELECT email,nid,timestamp FROM bad_temp;

DROP TABLE bad_temp;

This took care of the problem and I was able to add the index.

ALTER TABLE `good_table` 
ADD PRIMARY KEY (`email`, `nid`, `timestamp`)

A nod to Database Journal that gave me the idea.

Temporary URL for Hosted Drupal

I recently moved one of my sites from GoDaddy to Host Gator. My initial impressions of Host Gator are favorable compared to GoDaddy. One issue that vexed me almost immediately is attempting to set up and configure Drupal 7 on the new host while my DNS still pointed to the old hosting site.

I wanted the old site to be available until the new site was operational and I was ready to cut over. Tech Support was able to provide a temporary URL but it returned a 404 for everything except the home page. They were unable to figure out a solution and ultimately told me it was not possible with Drupal. Not a good sign for Host Gator support.

Ultimately I found that editing the sites/default/settings.php and changing the $base_url to http://your-server-ip-address/~username

Then edit the .htaccess file in the public_html directory.
 Find the RewriteBase and change it to /~username.

These changes enabled all the functionality that I needed to configure the site and get it up and running.
When I am ready to make the switch, I just need to revert the changes.

Syslog to MySql on openSUSE

I have been experimenting with openSUSE lately as I am not impressed with the direction Mandriva Linux is going. Mandriva has been my main distribution since early versions of Mandrake back around 1998.

I followed the steps in my earlier post but I had to fiddle with a few more things to get it running on openSUSE.

In /etc/rsyslog.conf I added:

$ModLoad imudp         # load udp server
$UDPServerRun 514      # start udp server

the UDP server was not running by default so I added it and poked a hole in the firewall so that I could log the router messages to the database.

Network Discovery Windows 7

At some point in the recent past I noticed that I could not browse the local network.
I had recently upgraded to SBS 2011 after the upgrade I was able to browse the network but not now.
I could still access all of the resources on the network, so it was not a permission problem.
Network Discovery was turned on in the Advanced Sharing Settings of all of the Windows 7 computers.

After googling and bingleing many people wrote that they turned on the Computer Browser service.
However in Windows 7 and Server 2008, the browser service is deprecated and no longer used.
Dom's Techie Blog pointed to the services that need to be running for Network Discovery to work.
All of mine were set to the correct settings and running except that Function Discovery Resource Publication was set to manual and not running. Everything I could find stated that it should be set to manual.

On a hunch I started the Function Discovery Resource Publication service on a few computers and I was able to browse to them on the network almost instantly. I am not sure why I am not able to browse with the services set to default but I created a new Global Policy to set the service to Automatic and applied it to all of the computers in the domain.

I can now browse all of the computers but I still do not have a valid cause for what happened. I am going to try to research this one some more and see what happens.