Received the following error during the SP1 installation:

Some controls aren’t valid. Setup previously failed while performing the action “Install”. You can’t resume setup by performaing the action “BuildToBuildUpgrade”.

It seems as though the server thinks a previous installation operation never completed. An interrupted setup never occurred on this system, but whatever, that’s what it thinks.

My setup is Windows Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010. To resolve this error and continue installation open up your registry and go to

• Open regedit
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\MailboxRole
• The role could potentially whichever role your server thinks installation was interrupted during
• Delete the key named Action

I’ve read posts that mention the existence of a value for the Watermark key is the issue, however my testing showed that deleting the Action key resolves the issue.  It is in fact what the error specifically states is the problem. Not sure if that logic can be applied universally however.

The primary reason I use Firefox as my main browser is that there are many extensions for it that make my life easier as a systems admin…and yes I know there are a thousand other lists on other blogs about “must have Firefox plug-ins”.  This is by no means a complete list and this post is partially to share my experience with the world as well as a reference for me if my laptop ever explodes and I need to re-install them

Check out the staples in my Firefox plug-in collection after the jump.

Download Statusbar (link)
Download Statusbar allows you to view and manage all your downloads from a tiny little status bar at the bottom of Firefox.  These files can be launched directly from it, and it is uniform across all open Firefox windows. Definitely a useful tool for most people doing a lot of downloading.

I personally hate the Downloads popup box that Firefox ships with. I don’t want a new window to popup each time I download something, yet I still want my downloaded file to be easily and readily available without having to open up Windows Explorer and browse to it.

Domain Details (link)
I manage alot of webservers on many different platforms. It can get difficult at times to keep track of what server I’m working on, where an application is hosted and so on. Enter Domain Details.

This plug-in is indispensable in my opinion. Visible from the status bar, this plugin displays Server Type, Headers, IP Address, Location Flag, and links to Whois Reports. Shows links to check server status and cache when page fails to load.

XUL/Migemo (link)
This add-on gives Firefox extremely powerful “find” enhancements. It seems to be made by a Japanese developer that has dictionary assisted functions for the Japanese language, however it’s usefulness goes far beyond that.

My favorite feature is it’s inline search function.  This allows you to be on any web page and just start typing typing the term you are looking for on the page without having to hit CTRL-F or manually opening the Find box. It also allows you to highlight the search term as you type and it will identify the locations on the page it is found, and place little arrows on the side of the Firefox window to jump to the next found location.

It might be a bit difficult to understand exactly what this plug-in will do for you until you actually use it, so take it for a test drive.  If you are like me and scour the messages boards everyday you’ll love this one.

Extended Statusbar (link)
This is another statusbar plug-in that makes the lives of the sys admin and web developers alike. This statusbar enhancesment keeps track of the speed and success of the page loading, much like in Opera.

Adds an Opera-like statusbar that shows:
– percentage of the page loaded
– number of loaded images
– bytes downloaded
– average download speed
– load time

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error ’80004005′
[Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] The specified DSN contains an architecture mismatch between the Driver and Application
/path/to/dsn.asp, line 6

Well that’s interesting.  It’s mostly interesting because of what was actually on line 6 of this file:

Conn.Open “dsn=dsnName;uid=user;pwd=pass;”

Googling kept pointing me to it being a 32bit application running in 64bit mode.  All the resolutions were mostly explaining that the application needs to be recompiled, yadda, yadda.  Obviously this .asp file isn’t a “32bit file”, and well what am I supposed to tell my customers, that they need to only use 64bit .mdb files?

The solution was actually simple and had been something I’d read a few days before at iis.net about 32bit mode worker processes.

To configure 32-bit mode for the server

• Open a command prompt and run the following:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config -section:applicationPools -applicationPoolDefaults.enable32BitAppOnWin64:true

Or you can just toggle this option in the Advanced Settings for the Application Pool for which the site is running. Either way works just fine.

I suppose on a shared web server for which I have no daily knowledge or control over what my customers are doing, it would be a best practice to turn 32bit mode for all sites by default and if an opportunity or need arises to switch back to native 64bit mode, then all the better.

I would have expected there to be no problems with most of them. I started out with a dinky little site that uses a small Microsoft Access Database.  This site uses a standard DSN to access the .mdb. I proceed to go to the Administrative Tools and open the ODBC Data Source Administrator window and add a new DSN for the .mdb and lo and behold I see the following nearly empty window:

<– This of course is no good! Where are all the other data drivers? Apparently all the regular ones we are used to seeing in 32bit Windows no longer exist as 64bit drivers.  The trick is to execute %windir%\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe.

<– This will give you the ability to add the rest of the 32bit Data Sources such as Microsoft Access (.mdb).

It seems as though this problem is caused by my local computer account name (which I am logged in as), is the same as the one in my Active Directory.  Outlook must be trying to unsuccessfully authenticate to AD using “username” instead of “domain\username”.  This seems odd to me, however since I changed my local Vista username to something different the problem hasn’t shown itself.

Thanks to Matt  / webdevmatt.com for the suggestion

64bit
This is long overdue. I live out of Outlook and it gets put to the test on a daily basis. Any bit of extra power I can get out of Outlook is a huge plus in my book.  Granted there aren’t many functions that will make use of 64bit processing, but again every bit counts.

Splash
The first thing you’ll notice upon launching Outlook 2010 is the new splash screen. I know it seems insignificant, and this change lacks any sort of functionality, however it’s nice to see all aspects of the product being improved.  One very small thing the splash screen does do is show the progress of the startup process, which might prove to be helpful in the future.

Outlook takes a while to load up the first time.  It seems to have sped up with each subsequent launch.  I suspect that is due to caching and indexing finally completing.

Ribbon
Microsoft did what I thought they should have done with Outlook 2007 – give the same style ribbon that the rest of the Office products received with Office 2007.  This is long overdue in my opinion.

Quick Steps
One of the cooler things with this release is the inclusion of “Quick Steps”.  Thnk of them as customizable repeat actions. You can create a quick step to take care of things you do all the time, such as forward an email to a specific person or manager, reply or reply all to a message with a Meeting Request, move a message to a specific folder and much more.  You can even create a quick step, that will with on click, Reply (all) to a message, change the subject and insert predefined text in the body. I know this was all possible with rules and templates with previous Outlook versions, but never this simple and quick.

My one hope for Quick Steps is that Microsoft opens up the Quick Steps to allow users to create Quick Steps with much more detailed actions that they don’t offer by default. Currently they only give a short list of very basic functions.  You can’t tease me with an awesome idea like this and not expect me to want more

Search
Search within Outlook 2010 looks to be much more useful to the common user. Microsoft has including some predefined search criteria options which made often made it a pain to do more complex searches within Outlook 2007. It seems so simple, but we never had it like this before. I think Microsoft is really starting to listen.

Active Directory Authentication
The only, and potentially fatal problem I’ve had so far is since I’ve installed Outlook 2010 my Active Directory account seems to be getting locked out.  Its happened twice within the last day.  I’ll open Outlook and it will keep asking me for my username and password.  Then, I’ll log onto my Domain Controller and see that my account has been locked out – and yes I am typing the right password.  I’m not sure what is Outlook is trying to do, but it’s doing it unsuccessfully. My Domain Security Policy is vanilla, so Outlook is failing at authenticating something the magic number of times. I hope this is a bug that Micrsoft has assigned some resources to.

Conclusion
Other than the major problem with my Active Directory account getting locked out Microsoft is right on track with this one.  The interface is clean and fast and there few improvements I’ve seen thus far scream the fact that Microsoft is putting in a lot of effort.

I don’t usually have much of a need for the other Office apps, but when I do I usually work in them all day for a special project. I hope to get some alone time with Visio 2007 next week.

Luckily I run everything within VMware ESX Environment, so no data needed to be copied from one machine to another. I simply provisioned a new Windows Server 2003 guest and added the old server’s VMDK disk to the new machine.

• The first thing you need to do is backup your old IIS configuration. In IIS Manager, right click in IIS Manager > All Tasks > Backup/Restore Configuration.

• Probably the most imporant part of the whole process is to make sure you “Encrypt the backup using password”. This makes th e IIS config “portable”. If you don’t encrypt it, you won’t be able to import it on a different system as there are sessions keys stored withing the IIS metabase.

• By default the configuration backup goes to C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\MetaBack. So you will need to grab both files it has created and move them on over to the new server. Place them in the same location on the new server because IIS doesn’t give you a choice to browse for a backup – it looks in that directory each time.

• Now you’ll restore that configuration from within IIS Manager, right click in IIS Manager > All Tasks > Backup/Restore Configuration. Choose the one you want to restore and restore. It will ask for the encryptin password.
• Now we need to restart IIS. This will actually re-create the IUSR account in the Local User Manager, which kind of impressed me. The password will be wrong for this account so you need to set it to something manually by the normal Reset Password function.
• Now you need to need to tell the metabase about that new password. Microsoft has a nice article outlining how this is done.
  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297989
• Restart IIS and for the most part you should be good to go.

I opted to simply reset the password for the IUSR account that the metabase created automatically for me. The name was wrong (hence IUSR_computer), however this meant I wouldnt need to change all of the special IUSR permissions set for special files such as MDB and other special case files. You can easily tell the metabase to use a new user account as the IUSR account using the metabase explorer, but I’m not going to go into that right now.