Category: SBS 2003

There is an issue with using “previous versions” (shadow copies) in Windows 7 when using it on folders stored on a Small Business Server 2003. The issue is that you cannot get to the previous versions. Read more about the solution at the SBS blog.

The other day I got an email from a blog reader which contained the information of a successful analyze of a memory dump file which is generated when an infamous blue screen of death occur. The reader wanted me to give him the solution or point him in the direction of a solution. This got me into thinking. When is it worth putting time on doing blue screen analyzes?

The content of the crash dump is maybe not that relevant after all. What is more important is how often and when the blue screen of death occurs. If the crash occurred just once or very seldom and randomly I would say that it might not be worth finding out exactly what caused the crash. Keep in mind that a blue screen could indicate a hardware failure, although driver problems are the most common cause for crashes.

However if the crashes occur often or at when doing specific tasks you have all the reasons in the world to get to the bottom of the problem. In these cases I recommend following the guide for troubleshooting blue screen crashes.

An interesting thing to note about blue screens that start occurring after for instance upgrading the OS from Windows XP to Windows Vista or Windows 7 is that the new memory management in the later operating systems might reveal problems in the memory modules that did not show when using Windows XP.

Finally, whenever having problem with blue screens of death I would recommend upgrading the machine BIOS. Often there are compatibility and stability fixes which solves problems with hardware which might be causing you the problems you are experiencing.

When disk space is running out on a system disk, may it be on a server or a client, there are certain things to clean out. One of them being the %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Windows\Installer folder. You cannot under any circumstances delete files from this folder manually as this not only may but most likely will break software that is installed using MSI files, or Windows Installer files.

The %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Windows\Installer folder is a cache for installation files and patches (MSP files) and removing those will cause you to not being able to repair or uninstall applications, and in some cases not removing patches or applying new patches to software. In the event when you actually did delete this cache you can rebuild the files you need manually by extracting the files from original installation media, from patch packages etc but this is a time consuming and not that easy task to accomplish.

But let me get to the point. If you do want to free disk space you can clean out the %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Windows\Installer folder by downloading Windows Installer Cleanup Utility (NOTE: This tool has been retired and is no longer available from Microsoft) and then running the command

msizap.exe G!

When running this, the installer and patch packages are enumerated and unreferenced packages are considered to be safe to delete and are thereby also deleted. Depending on the age of the system and the number of applications installed, this action can free a significant amount of disk space.

Some time ago I migrated a client’s Small Business Server 2003 to a Small Business Server 2008. When migrating their WSS 2.0 SharePoint from the old server to the new one I ran into some problems. I just could not get access to the Operations or Application management in SharePoint Central Administration, with the  below event logged.

Log Name:      Application
Source:        ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0
Date:          2009-02-26 13:23:42
Event ID:      1314
Task Category: Web Event
Level:         Information
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      CONTOSOSRV02.Contoso.local
Description:

Event code: 4007
Event message: URL authorization failed for the request.
Event time: 2009-02-26 16:21:50
Event time (UTC): 2009-02-26 15:21:50
Event ID: 0087e3fc2a3440178e6a801602c514f7
Event sequence: 113
Event occurrence: 6
Event detail code: 0
 
Application information:
    Application domain: /LM/W3SVC/1899589246/ROOT-1-128801351457937683
    Trust level: WSS_Minimal
    Application Virtual Path: /
    Application Path: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\4721\
    Machine name: CONTOSOSRV02
 
Process information:
    Process ID: 7888
    Process name: w3wp.exe
    Account name: CONTOSO\Administrator
 
Request information:
    Request URL: http://contososrv02:4721/_admin/operations.aspx
    Request path: /_admin/operations.aspx
    User host address: ::1
    User: CONTOSO\tempadmin
    Is authenticated: True
    Authentication Type: Negotiate
    Thread account name: CONTOSO\tempadmin

After doing som troubleshooting I got everything working by editing the web.config file of the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\ADMIN directory. I simply added the line below to the file, saved it and then I could access the Operations and Application Management of SharePoint Central Administration.

<allow roles="CONTOSO\WSS_ADMIN_WPG" />

Case closed!

Today I faced a problem where I had to put different sites in IIS on the same SSL port which by default is 443. As you might know you cannot set more than one web site to use port 443 in the GUI of IIS Manager, and you can neither specify different host headers there. However you can put more than one web site on the SSL port by using the command line script as stated below. Run it from C:\inetpub\adminscripts but before you do, find out what the identifier for the site you want to enable SSL for is by clicking on “Web sites” in IIS Manager.

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set /w3svc/1/SecureBindings
":443:intranet.contoso.com"

Make sure that the above command is put and run on one line and you are done. Please note that if you do not have a wildcard certificate installed (*.contoso.com) you will receive certificate warnings for one of the sites, as the certificate name will not match the host name.