Month: October 2010

Not long ago I posted about the interesting issue of Windows Deployment Server services not starting when having more than 20 logical processors on the machine. Now Microsoft have published the KB article for the problem regarding Windows Deployment Server service but  it also seems to affect ntdsutil as well. Again, running a deployment server or a domain controller on a server which has more than 20 logical processors is not very likely but still it’s kind of an interesting issue.

When running Windows clients in the “cloud”, i.e. virtual Windows clients, there are several things to note and to take into considerations. For instance what will happen every wednesday night at 01:00 when all your X number of Windows clients will start defragmenting their virtual disks? Probably this scenario will significantly impact performance negatively on your virtual cluster disks.

There are many more actions you can take to optimize your clients in a VDI scenario and thanks to Jonathan Bennett this action is very smooth. Run the tool VDI Optimizer and choose what you want to be turned off and out comes a VBscript that you can run for instance at deploy time.

By default when you search using the search box in the start menu in Windows 7, it only returns indexed content. This is by design. However there might be scenarios where you might want to also search libraries which are not indexed and for this scenario there is a hotfix that enables a registry settings that controls this behavior. It is documented in Microsoft KB article 2268596.

Just a quick tip that you do not need to have your entire RDS environment at the Windows Server 2008 R2 level to be able to utilize the nice integration features of RemoteApps in Windows 7. I am referring to the feature of subscribing to a feed of applications and thereby have a dynamic publishing of RemoteApps for the ends users, in the users start menu.

To get this working all you need is a Windows Server 2008 R2 to host the RDS Web Access role, which then can include and publish RemoteApp sources that are based on Windows Server 2008 hosts (no R2 requirements there).

It’s been around for some time and if you did not already know about it Microsoft provide the free tool called Security Compliance Manager. You can use it to very easily manage and export a set of pre-configured (or settings that you configure on your own) settings that improve security. You can then export these settings to for instance a group policy and import it into your domain.

There are templates with pre-configured security lockdowns for Windows XP, Windows Vista and of course also Windows 7. The tool works great for creating a security baseline for your client machines but the only downside is that you cannot import nor in a convenient way compare the settings in the templates with what you currently have.

So to end the pain of handling duplicate drivers in System Center Configuration Manager there has been a hotfix released that resolves the issue with “The selected driver has already been imported at this site”, at least partly, depening on what method your are using to apply drivers. Read more about the affected scenarios at the Mike Niehaus blog and download the hotfix from Microsoft.

There a number of group policies that can interfere when you are deploying Windows 7 machines, one of them being the “Admin approval mode for the built-in local administrator account” which if set to enabled breaks deployment using the Lite Touch scenario using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.

My fellow MVP and now also colleague Johan Arwidmark has a blog post on two methods for handling problems related to group policies when dpeloying machines, either by settings filters on your group policies or postponing the domain join process.

The other week I stumbled across a very interesting fact, a fact that the Windows Deployment Server service refused to start on a clean installed Windows Server 2008 R2. After troubleshooting for a whole day, even reinstalling the OS, reproducing the error even without any patches seemed very strange. The WDS service is a service that normally just works. The following error was logged:

Log Name: Application
Source: WDSServer
Date: 2010-10-04 17:14:23
Event ID: 257
Task Category: WDSServer
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: wds.contoso.com
Description:
An error occurred while trying to start the Windows Deployment Services server.
Error Information: 0xFFFFFBB3

An important fact is that the server to be used for deployments was a retired yet powerful TS/RDS server with two six core processors using hyper threading, making it 24 logical processors.  Not likely to be the hardware specs of a regular deployment server but hey, it can obviously be scenarios where this might be an issue. Thanks goes to a colleague (Jeanette) who figured out that we could try to set the number of logical processors being used to two. Guess what, after a reboot the WDS service started just fine!

To change the number of used processors we used:

bcdedit /set {current} numproc 2

To revert this change you could use:

bcdedit /deletevalue {current} numproc

After some work with Microsoft Product Services and Support it appears to be a bug nevertheless. The limit for the number of logical processors you can have for the WDS service to start is 20. Bear this in mind…

Many of you surely remember the tools “vsp1clean” and “compcln” which was used after service pack 1 and service pack 2 installation to remove older Windows packages which was superseded by the service pack. These tools freed some disk space and as it removed all previous Windows components it made the service pack installation permanent, meaning it was not uninstallable after running the tools.

Anyway enough with history, when you have installed SP1 for Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 you can make it permanent by using the below command.

%windir%\system32\dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /spsuperseded

You can also use Disk Cleanup to accomplish this, choose to clean your system disk and then choose “Clean up system files”, choose your system disk once again and then make sure that you select “Backup files required to uninstall service pack”.

NOTE 1: As SP1 is in beta at the time of this writing, I must warn you that running the above command will make it impossible to uninstall the SP1 beta, in practice meaning you will have to reinstall your machine once SP1 final release is made available.

In Windows you might know that a lot of services do not run as separate processes, instead many of them are actually run within the famous svchost.exe processes. To see this in action just go to a cmd.exe and type “tasklist /svc” and it will list all processes and subprocesses. It might look like:

svchost.exe    AeLookupSvc, Appinfo, AppMgmt, BITS,
               Browser, CertPropSvc, gpsvc, IKEEXT,
               iphlpsvc, LanmanServer, MMCSS, ProfSvc,
               Schedule, SENS, SessionEnv,
               ShellHWDetection, Themes, Winmgmt, wuauserv

If you need to do some troubleshooting or investigate something related to a certain process that is running with other services you can split this service to make in run in its own process. This is done by using the command:

sc.exe config servicename wuauserv type= own

Which in this case makes sure that the Windows Update service (wuauserv) will be run in its own process, for you to troubleshoot. Set it back to its original setting by changing “own” to “share” in the above command. You can find more information about this in KB934650.