Jake Kappus.comCertified Geek, Dad, MMA fan, and ocassional Pro Wrestler

This one has been annoying me for a while now.  For whatever reason, Adobe Reader 9 PDF files will not load correctly in any version of Windows 7.  At least on 64bit for sure, but I just checked and my 32bit Win 7 machine is having the same issue.   Usually a blank “OK” dialog box would pop up and the page rendering would stop.

I tooled around in the preferences and found “Fast Web View” was turned on.  I turned if off and viola, no more problems.

My new favorite feature in Office 2010!  I discovered this today while working on some customer documentation.  Makes screenshots much easier and faster.

I just noticed that TechEd 2010 is scheduled for June 7-11 in New Orleans LA.  I work for a smaller firm so it’s going to take some work to get my company to send me.  Hmmm…Melissa has family around The Big Easy…maybe I can score a trip down there and a nice side trip for our anniversary on the 12th. 

A few months ago I was contacted on a Sunday evening by a customer who had automatically installed patches through Windows Update to his OCS server. It was the April/May rollup and the patch required that Monitoring server was installed or it would not restart the Front End Services. IIRC, Microsoft soon fixed that patch.

Well it happened again today… This came through my RSS from the OCS team at Microsoft.

Currently an issue is being observed after applying KB974571 (MS09-056: Vulnerabilities in CryptoAPI could allow spoofing) to LCS/OCS servers, that is causing them to believe that they are running an evaluation version of LCS/OCS and that it has expired.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974571/

If you apply the patch, the LCS/OCS services fail to start and you see these errors in the event log:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Live Communications Server
Event Category: (1000)
Event ID: 12290
Date: 10/13/2009
Time: 8:28:57 PM
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
The evaluation period for Microsoft Office Live Communication Server 2005 has expired. Obtain the released version of this product and upgrade to the non-evaluation version by running setup.exe
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Live Communications Server
Event Category: (1000)
Event ID: 16417
Date: 10/13/2009
Time: 8:28:57 PM
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
Unable to initialize the protocol stack. The service has to stop.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Live Communications Server
Event Category: (1000)
Event ID: 12299
Date: 10/13/2009
Time: 8:28:57 PM
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
The service is shutting down due to an internal error.
Error Code: 0xC3ED0804.
Resolution:
Check the previous event log entries and resolve them. Restart the server. If the problem persists contact product support.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Uninstalling the patch is the only way to currently fix this issue.
The issue is currently being escalated, but until a fix can be found, delaying the install of KB974571 is recommended.

I try to make it a practice not to install rollups or patches for Exchange, SQL, or OCS automatically via Microsoft Update for this very reason. Though Exchange rollups are pretty solid, I still don’t trust the Microsoft QA process yet. They did release Vista with a serious amount of bugs…

Today a customer needed to move VM’s from a standalone VSphere 4.0 server to another standalone ESX 3.5 server. Needless to say, there isn’t much documentation nor chatter about this on VMWare’s website or community.

Not sure if this VM was created originally in ESX or VSphere, I first suggested that we just cold migrate the VM to the ESX box and try to add it to the inventory. I was hoping it was still using the version 4 hardware profiles instead of version 7 that VSphere utilizes.

No luck…

Turns out we had to use the VMWare Standalone Converter to convert the VM back to 3.5. This worked and we were able to mount and start the VM successfully. Too bad this ESX implementation was not using the best practice of a dedicated gig NIC on either server for the service console as it took over 4 hours to move the 150GB VM and convert it.

Combine this with spending a weekend backing up the VM’s and doing a manual array expansion on the stand alone ESX server, it just cements (in my mind at least) the importance of proper design and implementation of any application using established best practices and recommended hardware specifications. It may cost more now, but it will definitely cost more in the future because I’m not cheap on the weekends.

It was just announced by our friends at Microsoft, that Exchange 2010 has reached RTM and will be launched at TechEd Berlin in early November.

Must…find…the bits…..

If you follow Microsoft Unified Communications, you may have heard here that Microsoft has announced a new XMPP gateway for direct interface with XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) capable systems like Jabber and Google Talk. XMPP is an open protocol that could open up interfaces with many open source IM systems.

What’s even bigger, with Cisco buying Jabber, this now means that Cisco’s Unified Presence Client (CUPC), which is going to be based on Jabber eventually could be able to interface with OCS. This will make co-existence and other federation scenarios much more appealing.

This goes in tandem with Microsoft now including the PIC licensing for MSN and AOL in with the LCS/OCS 2007 Standard Server licensing with software assurance. Yahoo still requires a PIC subscription at a 50% discount.