Outlook meeting reminders stop working due to KB2583910

Not exactly sure why this update causes an issue, but KB2583910 seems to be stopping some client reminders from showing up.  I tried all of the usual remedies including deleting the reminders folder, but removing this update solved the issue immediately.  I will be rolling it back from clients via WSUS.

Lync, Sophos, TMG/ISA Incompatibility

On several client workstations I was receiving an error message when starting Lync.  All of these clients were previously running Communicator R2 successfully.  Also, all of these clients are running Sophos anti-virus 9.5.  The message indicated a permission error running communicator.exe.

Using procmon.exe and some time I was able to determine Sophos was blocking Lync for some unknown reason even though it was in the “allowed applications” list.  Note below that I authorized ALL instant messaging applications just to verify it wasn’t Sophos causing the error:

 

 

To make this more complicated, no application control event were being logged on the Sophos console either.  After doing some comparisons on client pcs, I discovered that either the ISA Firewall 2004 service or the TMG 2010 firewall service was installed on all of them.  Disabling didn’t fix the problem, but uninstalling and rebooting did.  Shortly thereafter, I discovered a listed incompatibility between sophos and these firewall client pieces.

http://www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/111203.html

The fix was to uninstall the firewall clients, and then reinstall Sophos manually from the workstation.  Re-deploying via the console did not work.  I used Spiceworks to determine all of the workstations that had the firewall clients installed and then used WMI to remotely uninstall all of them.  Then I emailed a Sophos reinstall link to the affected users.  After the Sophos reinstall, a reboot was required to get Lync to start again. Using WMI to remotely uninstall is very handy!  As a workaround, I created a group on our Sonicwall the allows direct internet access to the users who need it.

/failfast:on /node:@"c:\computers.txt" product where name="Software Name" call uninstall /nointeractive

See this spiceworks post for more information about using WMI to uninstall remotely.

http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/179

Maximizer Web Access and IE9 Compatibility modes

 

Trying to run an upgrade for Maximizer 11.5.  Part of this upgrade includes the ability to use Maximizer Web Access.  The current version does not play well with IE9 showing only a black white box instead of the full interface.  I tried switching the browser to IE8 mode and everything started working again.  How can I force the browser to always do this for everyone?  No problem!

Open up IIS and add a custom HTTP header.  Notice here that the name is “X-USA-Compatible” and I have set the value to “IE=EmulateIE8”.  You can also force earlier versions of IE.  Close your browser, reopen the site and it should magically work again.

Incorrect DFS referrals–IPv6, Win7, iSCSI

 

I have been struggling with an issue concerning Win7 clients, ipv6, and our file servers running DFS.  They would always refer me to the wrong location out of our site.  I have file servers with two NICs on board.  One of these NICs connects the corporate network and the other one connects to a separate vlan for iSCSI.  I have sites setup in AD Sites and Services for all of the subnets, even the iSCSI networks.  What to do?  After some searching I saw a similar post referring to the binding order of your cards.  Lo and Behold moving the corprate lan NIC to the top and the binding order and restarting the DFS service things started working as expected.

ISA Firewall Client 2004 breaks Windows 7

 

There must be an update from Microsoft for Windows 7 that causes an imcompatibility with Win7.  Telltale problems around here:

• FlexLM License servers on local machines filled log files with “internal error” until the disk was full. No other errors were present in the log file.
• Visual Studio 2008 web server appears to hang and do nothing when debugging a project.  Lots of posts about ipv6 problems and firewall issues, but ISA client was the issue.

There are far newer versions of the client and we will try one of those to see if it helps.

Solid Edge 2D won’t install on XP with UAC Error

Situation:  Solid Edge 2D won’t install on a Windows XP in the domain where UAC is turned on.  I know what you are asking yourself, hey Matt Windows XP doesn’t even have UAC right?  Correct, it was introduced with Vista.  In our Domain though it still set the registry value for UAC on windows XP client machines.  You must make a registry change to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Change the DWORD value for EnableLUA temporarily to zero instead of one.  This will allow the installation to happen.

Use Powershell to get logged on user with WMI

I have a need to take a list of computers and determine who is logged in on each one.  We had an OU in active directory that really needed to be sorted and the quickest way for me to do that was to simply see who is logged on to each PC and then manually move them.  Here is my command:

Get-Content C:\batch\computers.txt | ForEach-Object {gwmi -computer $_ -class win32_computerSystem} | fl Name, UserName, Manufacturer, Model | out-file c:\comprep.txt

Let’s break this down piece by piece.  The first part of the command is this:

Get-Content C:\batch\computers.txt

This takes my simple list of computers and puts them into an array which gets piped into:

ForEach-Object {gwmi -computer $_ -class win32_computerSystem}

Now lets take each object one at a time and use WMI to return the computerSystem variable.  The “$_” is the pipeline variable so each computer name in the array is entered there.  The return is more information than I need so I use the next piped command to make it pretty and give me what I want.

fl Name, UserName, Manufacturer, Model

Format List with the name of the pc, logged on user, manufacturer, and model.  Great this is exactly what I want, but it takes a while to run and I want to review it later so let’s dump it into a simple text file.

out-file c:\comprep.txt

That’s all there is to it!  It’s much easier when broken down into simple components.  My output looks like this:

Name         : COMP1
UserName     : domain\user0
Manufacturer : Dell Computer Corporation
Model        : OptiPlex GX270

Name         : Comp2
UserName     : domain\user1
Manufacturer : Dell Computer Corporation
Model        : Precision WorkStation 350

Now I can look through this list and easily sort them to my heart’s content!