Plug: PRTG

Great tool, very handy, works exactly as advertised.  Know what's happening on your network.

http://www.paessler.com/prtg

Debug a running VM when it's crashing without a memory dump

This is mainly just a link dump. I was getting STOP 0xc0000135 errors with no other clues, and I used these resources to properly troubleshoot it.

Live debugging a VM in Hyper-V: http://mikemstech.blogspot.com/2012/01/live-debugging-hyper-v-virtual-machine.html

Troubleshooting 0xc0000135: http://mikemstech.blogspot.com/2012/01/troubleshooting-0xc0000135.html

Make sure you are properly loading symbols in your WinDBG workspace or you won't get enough detailed information to proceed.

SQL Server Browser Service

Doing an upgrade from SQL Express 2005 to SQL Standard 2005 using the SKUUPGRADE=1 option?

Once the process is done and everything appears to be running okay, but isn't, try restarting your SQL Server Browser service. It could save you a day of troubleshooting and planning a server rollback. Or just reboot the box, that would have been helpful.

That is all.

Connecting Drives via SBS RWW 2008 / RWA 2010

This info is _fairly_ easy to find, but I thought I'd post it along anyway to make it a tiny bit easier. If your users need to be able to connect network drives via their Remote Web Workplace or Remote Web Access desktop sessions, check out this document from Microsoft:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=180370

Test Disk = Good

Test Disk, from the guys over at CGSecurity, gets a huge thumbs up from me today. My son had a school project due this week that I helped him with yesterday involving pics from our old digital camera. All the pictures were taken and we get to the part where we need to print them, and the SD card isn't recognized in my laptop. Figuring it was a problem with my laptop, I reboot and try again, still nothing. Placing the card back in the camera results in:

"Hey cool, a new SD card. Want me to format it?"*

*Error message paraphrased.

I'm not about to spend money on this, but I'm definitely hoping to save some time. Lifehacker had done a bit on the "best recovery tools" a while back that I checked out. I tried "Recuva" first, but was disappointed. Turns out, even though Recuva won their little showdown, it's not actually good for any sort of failure situation where the card won't mount or the partition is screwed. It's really just an undelete tool. But next in line was Test Disk. It's cousin is called PhotoRec and that's what I used to recover everything we needed off the SD card, and then some. It also pulled off some old MP3 tracks and some videos that used to live on that card.

So, it worked really well, and I highly recommend it!

Exchange Distribution Groups

When creating Distribution Groups on SBS 2008, there’s (of course) a wizard for it. It steps you through the creation, including adding users, and right near the very end of the wizard there’s an option available, shown here.

Of course, this is usually a no-brainer – we know right away whether the group should be available externally or not. Job done, no hassle.

But…

What if you need to create a distribution group manually for some reason? Or worse yet, on vanilla Exchange 2007 or 2010 servers where we don’t have wizards to baby sit us? If you create a distribution group manually, it MIGHT not accept email from the outside world. Where do you go when you have this problem?

This link has the answer. The checkbox referred to at the article below is the option controlled by the SBS Wizard shown in the above screenshot. http://www.ebsfaq.com/Exchange2007/HubCASMailboxUM/Distributiongroupdoesnotreceiveexternalemail/tabid/2105/Default.aspx

So, watch out for this!

Caffeine, BES, and Everything Else

Link dump day, stuff that's caught my eye:

What caffeine actually does to you - I really liked this article (thanks Jesse). Give it a read. I personally long for the days when caffeine actually worked on me, and I've decided I'd like to get there again. I'm going to slowly cut back over the next few weeks and see what happens.

http://gizmodo.com/5713564/what-caffeine-actually-does-to-your-brain

Clifford Stoll on ... everything - this talk is entertaining on just about every level. He's physically engaging (you'll see what I mean), he's super passionate, looks to be a tiny bit crazy (but in a good way), and brilliantly intelligent. I especially loved his comment on science, engineering, and technology (near the beginning). Do yourself a favor and watch it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html

Lastly, if you are upgrading a BES Express installation, and the installer greets you with something like this (after quite some time as well, as long as 20 minutes):

Database Information

An attempt to upgrade the database was unsuccessful. An error occurred while executing an SQL statement.

If you dig into the installer logs, you'll see something like:

[20000] (01/02 10:51:14.961):{0x2C44} [CBESDBInstaller::executeRetryDDL] Timeout expired 0x80040E31

I did some research on this and found the link below. Basically, before doing any major BES upgrade work, start the process off with a clean boot of your server.

http://www.blackberryforums.com/bes-admin-corner/233903-cant-upgrade-besx-5-0-1-5-0-2-sql-error.html

That's it!