One of the “disadvantages” of being a Microsoft Certified Trainer is that you frequently get asked to comment – in one way or another – on current (or past) Microsoft certification paths. The answer is usually something along the lines of “ummm …”. There are a wide range of certifications that Microsoft offers and if you throw in the various older certifications with their respective upgrade paths, thing become quite convoluted. As a result, also for the sake of my own sanity, I have put a few (the most common) certification paths into some more easily understandable diagrams. More...

I just spent the better part of a day trying to figure out and troubleshooting offline certificate Requests for a pair of Windows 2008 Domain Controllers. There is a lot of information (and likely enough) available already, but the info is – let’s say – verbose. This is more of a “note-to-self” post, but perhaps someone else can benefit from this as well. More...

The new MacBook Pro’s have arrived ! They’re Magical ! Revolutionary ! They’re …. ummm … expensive ?!?!

My current notebook is nearing the end of its lifecycle, so I’m in the market for a new one. Nowadays there is of course no escaping the constant nudging friendly advice of colleagues and friends as to why I don’t ditch my Dell and get a MacBook, since they are – again according to friends and colleagues – a better buy than a Dell or any other PC maker. Which leads me to this blog post, a direct comparison between one of the new MacBooks and the Dell system I’ve been eyeing, a Latitude 6510. More...

I came across some odd behavior on TMG deployments with DNS publishing rules. The publishing rule works fine and then - seemingly at random - stops working. The TMG log monitoring shows no DNS traffic going through (or even hitting) the TMG box.

Disabling the rule, applying and then re-enabling the rule gets the traffic flowing again. No log entries whatsoever are generated. A search on the Web showed that a number of people seem to see the same problem on their deployments, so I posted a question in the MS Partner newsgroups in early December.

It turns out this is indeed a bug in TMG and the TMG team was working on a Hotfix for it. Well, that hotfix has finally been released: KB2475183

Prereq’s for this hotfix are Service Pack 1 for TMG and the Update Rollup 1 for TMG SP1.

Today I was working on a little Windows Forms utility that depends on LogParser being installed (COM objects registered). Simple, right? Just add a Windows Installer Launch condition and check if the package is installed. Right-click, add launch condition … umm, wait .. “Component ID” ?? What’s the Component ID of the LogParser package? More...

I had a rather strange problem on my notebook yesterday using a CMAK applet to vpn into our office. I had created the CMAK a while ago, since it’s much easier to use when having to add a bunch of custom routes to the connection. Everything was working fine until all of a sudden the connection would fail with the error “Custom script (to update your routing table) failed (80070002)”. I unfortunately don’t actually know what caused the problem in the first place (trying to troubleshoot the problem I uninstalled and reinstalled the CMAK applet), but I seem to have found a workaround.

As I mentioned, everything was working fine. In fact, I was using the connection in the morning from my house and when I came home in the afternoon the error popped up. Reinstalling the CMAK applet didn’t help and a web search for “CMAK 80070002” returned a bunch of results, but no solutions, so it was time to find out what the error code actually means. Turns out the  “80070002” error (or “0x80070002”) translates to “file not found”. More...

We got a call this morning from some of our BlackBerry users that no mail was being delivered to their devices. Looking at the event logs of the BES machine there were a ton of errors referring to the BlackBerry Agent service not being able to start: Event 10275 “Failed to retrieve the Server DN, Shutting Down” and Event 10277 “BlackBerry Messaging Agent ServerName Agent 1 failed to start. Error code 5305”.

Doing some research showed that a lot of people are having this (or similar) problem, but no one seems to have found an actual solution, just a “workaround” that involves creating a new service account (examples here and here). Before going down that road I figured I’d give it a shot and see if I could find out what the actual problem is and attempt to find a “real” solution. Turns out our problem was related to a mixed Exchange 2007/2010 environment and the way Exchange provides/uses GAL attributes. More...

Hey everyone,

I wrote an advocacy letter as a fine arts teacher, since we are facing budget cuts in EPISD. I'm sharing it with you because I want to do my part to get the word out to keep fine arts programs alive. Most of you are musicians as well, so you know the positive effects learning a musical instrument can have, but many people are unaware of how fine arts can be a life-changing experience for many of our students. More...

Three more days until THE sporting event in the world (sorry guys, I really love my Chargers, but this is the World Cup !! ;-) ).

This post is not about the World Cup per se, though – it’s about spreading the word about José Gallardo Salazar’s brilliant application for Windows Mobile.

José has taken the UI concepts introduced in the Windows Phone 7 previews (i.e. Hubs) and duplicated them in an application running on the current version(s) of Windows Mobile. The end result being a smooth, easy to navigate and visually very appealing app.

Even though it lacks some of the features that other World Cup apps feature it is – in my humble opinion – by far the best Windows Mobile application for WC2010. On top – it’s free !!More...

So, you’ve screwed up your Hyper-V virtual switches and now you’re getting the infamous “Cannot bind .. because it is already bound to another virtual network” error? No problem, you say, all I need to do to fix this is unbind the “Microsoft Virtual Network Switch Protocol” from the NIC, right? So I’ll go to the adapter settings, right-click … wait ... oops – Server Core (!?).

nvspbind.exe to the rescue! Before you proceed though, if you’re on a production box remember what you’re doing. Messing around with network settings of the wrong adaptor might make clients, colleagues and/or bosses a bit grumpy if things go sideways, so make sure you have the important stuff backed up first.

nvspbind.exe was written by a member of the Hyper-V team and will reset the bindings on the adaptor specified to the default settings – which in turn will allow you to access the NIC in the Hyper-V Network manager again.

After downloading, first execute nvspbind.exe -n to get a list of the adaptors and their Guids. Make sure you identify the right adaptor. Like in my case (a Dell 2950) many multi-port NICs have the same name except for some additional moniker of some sort (like “#2”).

In my case the culprit was the first NIC in the list identified as “Local Area Connection 4”

Next, execute nvspbind –u {GuidOfAdaptor}. This will unbind the Virtual Network Switch Protocol from the card and rebind all the default protocols and services.

Should this not work, the same Hyper-V team member has also posted a script that will essentially reset all settings and delete all virtual networking configuration (nvspscrup.js). Execute using the command line scripting host (i.e. “cscript”).

Addendum: just ran across ENIAC’s posting from September of last year. He also has some additional info on how you can use registry settings and netcfg to solve this issue.