Symantec Endpoint and disappearing file shares

So it seems that Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 is trying to make my life difficult again when I really would prefer that it stays simple. One of my clients called me in a panic saying that her, and everyone elses, "My Computer" screen was empty. Convinced that this could not be the case and that the description she was giving was "erroneous" I told her not to worry and that I would be there soon.

Upon arrival I had a quick look at in Windows Explorer and My Computer and sure enough everything was gone, not just network drives but C: and D: as well. Strange, very strange. Looked at a couple of other workstations and sure enough everyone was the same. Quickly logged into the server thinking the worst (SBS 2008) and everything was exactly as it should be. All the files there, all the shares there and everything accessible. Not to worry, a quick restart should fix the problem and sure enough it did.....for about a week and then it all happened again. After a bit of trouble shooting (ok, a lot) I got round to checking out the AV and after a bit of googling I found a lot of other people having the exact or very similar problem.

No problem I thought, Ill just uninstall Endpoint...but Endpoint had different ideas. I tried to uninstall it but it refused to go and I ended up with a hung server. No choice but to hard power it down. Came back up again and it was half uninstalled. Ok try and uninstall again......hmmmm server hung again so have to hard power it down....again. Start back up.....server has crapped itself and tells me it will be shutting down in 1 minute. About now I am starting to get nervous. Server comes back up and I can log in but all sorts of services are failing and error messages are showing up in the logs. I bounce it again to give it a clean shutdown and restart and it seems to work ok. Decide to try reinstalling Endpoint to see if that will let me uninstall it. Seems to install ok......restart server.....buggeration, its stuffed again.

I continue until I strike some lucky combination of uninstalled and installed state where the server seems happy to come up and everything is working. I tentatively disable the on access scan and still everything works. Hurray, I can go home about 5 hours late.

I am now trying to get my hands on the Symantec Uninstall tool that they apparently have to get rid of the "software" once and for all. I mean, how good can a piece of software be that it needs to have a special tool written just to uninstall it properly.

So, I hear Kaspersky is pretty good, maybe Ill give that I go.

RSAT Tools for Windows 7 RC and Beta

I ended up reinstalling Windows 7 RC on a different computer just because it was time for a change however when I came to install the Remote Server and Administration tools (RSAT) I couldnt find my original download. No worries I thought, Ill just download them again from Microsoft however when I downloaded them I just got an error message that says "The update is not applicable to your computer". That had me scratching my head for a while as they definitely used to work. Turns out that the latest version of the tools that Microsoft released do not seem to be compatible with either the Beta or the RC and after searching around the net for a while, nobody seems to have them.

Luckily for me I was clearing up some old files today and I found the original install package for the RSAT tools.

If you need a copy of the tools then drop me an email at geoffcashmoney at gmail dot com and I will send you the rapidshare link.

Edit: I have been overwhelmed with people looking for this file so am just going to post the RSAT tools link up and can always up them again if they disappear....seems that someone linked to me from a Microsoft forum somewhere and lots of people are looking for these.

In answer to some common questions.....no it doesnt have a virus (but would I tell you if it did and I was trying to give it to you...sheesh) and the file name is the same as described in the link i.e. Windows6.1-KB958830-x86.msu

Cheers guys and gals.

http://rapidshare.com/files/274537551/Windows6.1-KB958830-x86.msu

UPDATE: - guys, I no longer have this so please stop asking. I don't know why anyone would still need them anyway as Windows 7 has been out for ages...why would you still be trying to use a beta release candidate?

HP ML110 G3 drive sizes

I have a HP ML110 G3 server at home that came with the original 80 GB disks. I was pretty much out of space on these drives and wanted to upgrade them however the specs on the HP website were somewhat vague as to what drives I could put in. In the end I just decided to fork out and try some drives so popped down to the local pc store and picked up 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB 3.5" internal SATA 16MB Cach 7200 RPM. Im happy to report that these work fine in my server (running SBS 2008).

All I had to do was backup the server to an external hard disk using the builtin Windows backup. Take the old disks out and put the new ones in, rebuild the raid array (SATA) so my mirror was up and going and then recover the windows image via the SBS DVD. Once recovered I thought there was a problem as I could log into the server but couldnt browse any drives or open the event log, services....pretty much anything. Decided that it must be doing something with the new drives so left it alone for an hour and sure enough when I came back there was a message saying a restart was needed for the new hardware so bounced the box and everything came back up hunky dory.

All up took about 3 hours for the whole thing...have to say I was very impressed with the Windows restore which really was quite painless and easy.

Scheduled tasks could not start

I was having a problem running some scheduled tasks that I was using with SyncBack starting when scheduled. They would all run fine manually but when left to start at a scheduled time they were refusing to start. The error message I received was simple "could not start".

Turns out that there were 2 issues here. First was that I needed to put a path in the "start in" section of the properties of a scheduled task. Never had to do that before but it was definitely causing the first part of the problem.

Second issue was that I needed to alter my group policy settings so that the "log on as a batch job" permission was granted to the backup account that I was using to run the backup job (found under computer configuration\windows settings\security settings\local policies\user rights assignments\log on as a batch job. I added this in the default domain policy so that I could use the account anywhere in the domain but it wouldnt really matter where you made the change as long as the policy was applied to the OU the computer was in.

Simple really but took a fair bit of figuring out.

Roll on the weekend...

Word 2003 and Symantec Antivirus

Ive just been troubleshooting the strangest problem with Word 2003. The user was able to save files over the network to her homedrive but the process was very slow. However using Excel, powerpoint e.t.c save times were fine. Word also seemed to be crashing a lot however nothing I did seemed to fix the problem. Turned out that Symantec Antivirus 11.0.2 was causing the problem. I uninstalled it, restarted and then installed version 11.0.4 and the problem went away. You would have thought that by version 11 Symantec would have sorted these kinds of problems out. McAfee anyone?

Hypver V and APC Powerchute Business Edition 8.0.1

So Ive just discovered that Powerchute Business Edition v 8.0.1 has changed from 8.0 to not supporting Hyper V roles. That is, if you have any Server 2008 OS with Hyper V installed then this will not work. WHY APC??? Now I have to dig around and try and find an old version from somewhere.

Bah, humbug.

Periodically run outlook rules

I have a Windows Mobile 6.1 smart phone which I really like using. The thing that really bugged me though was when I would receive an email, my rules would run on the Exchange server and send my mail off into different folders. The only way that I would know that I had a new email on my phone would be if I drilled down into my different folders to check. The new email notification only appears if the email is in the inbox.

Now the main problem I had was that I would have to leave all my rules in Outlook disabled for a few days and then after that would go through and tick all the rules to run to clean up my inbox. There is no way in Outlook to enable or disable all the rules in a simple way. I have so may rules sorting my email that unticking and ticking each rule to "Run Now" just wasnt realistic. Sooooo I have written a Macro for Outlook that enables and disables rules with the push of a button. The code is at the bottom of this.

To get it working you start Outlook then go into Tools / Macro / Visual Basic Editor. Then on the toolbar just below the File Menu there should be a little drop down arrow. Click on the arrow and choose module. This will open up a new window on the right. Simply paste the code into that and then save and exit.

Now, having closed the Visual Basic window and being back in the main outlook window click on Customize, then the toolbars tab and then New and give your toolbar a name you like.

Once you have done that click back on the commands tab and choose macro. On the right you should see 2 commands. Project1.EnableRules and Project1.DisableRules. Drag each of rules onto the new toolbar that you just made (it will be floating around on your screen somewhere) and hey presto you are done.

Only thing left to do is to change your macro security so that they can run. In outlook click on Tools / Macro / Security and check warnings for all Macros. You will get a pop up each time you try and run this but just click enable macros and it will go away until the next time you close and open outlook. I wouldnt advise turning macro security all the way off.

Now whenever you want to turn all your rules on or off you just click on the respective button....easy as pie.

Here is the code you need...enjoy.

Sub DisableRules()

Dim Rules As Outlook.Rules
Dim OutlookRule As Outlook.Rule
Dim counter As Integer
On Error Resume Next

Set Rules = Application.Session.DefaultStore.GetRules

For Each OutlookRule In Rules
OutlookRule.Enabled = False
counter = counter + 1
Next

Rules.Save

Set Rules = Nothing
Set OutlookRule = Nothing

End Sub

Sub EnableRules()

Dim Rules As Outlook.Rules
Dim OutlookRule As Outlook.Rule
Dim counter As Integer
On Error Resume Next

Set Rules = Application.Session.DefaultStore.GetRules

For Each OutlookRule In Rules
OutlookRule.Enabled = True
OutlookRule.Execute ShowProgress:=True
counter = counter + 1
Next

Rules.Save

Set Rules = Nothing
Set OutlookRule = Nothing

End Sub

My Cisco SDM wont work

I had a problem where I was trying to use the Cisco SDM to work on a router. I had just upgraded my machine to Windows 7 RC, launched the SDM and then got the requisite username and password settings. My internet browser of choice, firefox, started up and looked like it was starting the SDM, got the splash screen e.t.c and then....naddah, nothing...just sat there and did nothing. After a bit of umming and arhhhing I decided that it must be something to do with Windows 7 so dug out and old laptop with XP installed and tried to get that going but...same result. Strange, turns out that I had installed the latest versions of JAVA 6.13 I think it was and that was what was stopping me from successfully starting the SDM. Uninstalling the current version and re-installing 6.6 fixed the problem straight away and then I was back in business. Thanks JAVA, I had 2 hours to waste anyway.

Windows SBS 2008 and Hyper V

So a situation arose at work where it became necessary to install the Hyper V role inside Windows SBS 2008 Std Edition. Everything I read was basically saying not to do this, Microsoft doesnt support it, no one supports it, dont pray to God when it doesn't work because even he doesn't support it.

Well I did it and sure enough I broke something...well a few things actually. Firstly DHCP stopped working as everyone said it would. Then the network started doing really strange things and basically I thought that my new nice clean server was going to end up bricked.

However to cut a long story short it is possible to do it and I have got it working. I now have a Windows XP machine humming along quite merrily in a Hyper V session inside SBS08 and it has been for the last couple of months. The critical mistake that I made was not to install a second network card and use it exclusively for the virtual machine. Because I didnt do this the first time round all of the virtual network settings tried to bind to the main NIC and ended screwing everything up. With its own dedicated NIC everything has been working just fine....and yes I know....its not supported.

Bloggin huh?

In an effort to do my part in filling up the internet I have decided that I would create a....wait for it.....blog. Yup, I have realised that the internet is lacking without my input and so have endeavoured to bestow upon subnets of all classes and races...my insights into life.

Enjoy.