As I continue to attempt getting all old IIS6 sites running properly in IIS 7.5 (Windows Server 2003 R2 64bit), the next issue didn’t occur much past my last post.  After creating my new Data Source (DSN), I opened up the migrated site and received the following error:

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?

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So I’m in the process of moving all the sites leftover on my old 32bit Windows Server 2003 web servers running IIS6. I’m moving everything to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit.  I am pretty sure I’m going to end up choosing the Web Edition of Windows Server 2008.  So far it seems to do everything I need at a huge discount to Standard Edition.

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:

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The problem was painfully obvious: Since installing Outlook 2007 my Active Directory account name continues to get locked out.

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

I got around to installing the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview yesterday. All in all I’m very impressed with what I’m seeing.  I’ve beta tested Office 2003 and Office 2007, as well as run all their Technical Previews and I think I can already say this one runs much smoother than any I’ve tested in the past.   It runs fast, smooth, and as desired with only a few problems so far.

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.

Last week I had the unfortunate and immediate need to migrate IIS 6.0 from one Windows Server 2003 to another. I thought this process was going to be very painful, when in fact it was quite simple and straightforward. It’s hard to believe that after all these years I’ve never had to do this. There really is a first time for everything!

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.

The goal at my customer’s site last night was simple:

1. Ghost the Dell PowerEdge 2950 Windows Server 2003 C: and D: drives
2. Pull out the 3 old 36GB drive RAID 5 Array  and replace with 5 shiny new 146GB drives in a RAID 5 Array
3. Put the ghost image back on the new RAID 5 array
4. Go home and have a good night’s rest

My night can be summed up in two simple words:  MISERABLE FAILURE

Almost two hours into the project I finally realized that the PERC3/Di drivers are actually inserted into the PERC2/3 bundle of PERC drivers rather than the PERC 3/4 bundle of drivers.  There are PERC Di’s,, Si’s, DC’s, SC’s, and QC’s.  The Di and Si versions apparently are the bastard child of the PERC drivers.

Once I was able to boot into Bart PE Ghost kept crashing with Error 32000.  Symantec basically says this could mean anything, or nothing.  Thanks Symantec.

I was finally able to take an image of the machine, however it was useless.  It turns out the previous IT guy decided it would be a great idea to turn the RAID 5 Array into a dynamic partition.  Ghost, and from what I’ve read cannot clone RAID 5 volumes – only spanned, striped or mirrored volumes.

What upsets me more than the fact that this just a stupid decision by the last IT guy, and more the fact that several hours were wasted by me trying to get it to work is the fact that the last guy must have made a concerted, conscious effor to make this change in Windows. This was not a case of simply choosing the wrong choice – Door A or B. A colleague of mine reminded me this morning as I was venting that Microsoft suggest making all volumes Dynamic (or at least they did a while back).

I take full blame for not preparing for the w0rk I was embarking upon last night.  It just goes to show that you really can’t trust the work of others. Nothing is safe.

After all these years.  All the upgrades, complaints, replacments and new versions – we still need to interact with our Windows Update process. It started out years ago with the special program interaction that was required with IE installations for WU.  Then it was the Malicious Software Removal Tool and Service Packs.  Now we have this silly Microsoft Live Installer.

It would seem to me that the easiest way to get more users to install updates would be to actually make it easier for them to do! Could Microsoft not really want users to install updates?  Do they enjoy being lambasted in the blogosphere about how insecure their systems allegedly are?

Maybe the folks over at Microsoft have been misunderstood all along. Maybe they make these boneheaded decisions on purpose.  Maybe they are just masochists and they thrive on pain and torture.  They’d rather fight the big fight rather than do the little things that might make our lives easier.

I suppose on some level we all like the pain.  That’s why we still put up with it.