Tips, Tricks, and Tales from the Techs

A few days ago I received an after hours call from a client who could not access Remote Web Workplace on his company’s Windows SBS 2003 server.  At first I thought it might be a problem on his end such as a corrupt Active X control, SSL cert problem, or a problem with IE7 security.

When I tried it from my home I had this same thing happen.  I could load the main page, but after clicking on the “Remote Web Workplace” link and logging in I got an error, “The page cannot be found“.

Like any good tech, I panicked and booked the next flight to South America, and withdrew large sums of money from my bank account.  Well, maybe I should try to take a stab at the problem before I leave the country.

One of the first things I did (and you should too) is check the Windows Event Log.  Start > Run > and type “eventvwr.msc”

Under the Application log I found this nice little message:

The key to finding the problem was the actual error, “Input string was not in correct format“.  After doing some research (and I found VERY little information) i came across ONE person having the same error and symptoms as the client’s server.  According to some good people at Microsoft the problem could be caused by RWW using a .NET Framework version other than 1.1 (The SBS website is only compatible with 1.1, although there might be a way of getting different versions to work).

To verify this, I logged into the IIS Mananger (Start > All Programs > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager).  To get to the Framework settings we need to expand out the server > “Websites” > “Default Website” and right click > “Properties” on the problem page, in our case “Remote“.  On the properties window there will be a tab called “ASP.NET“  Under that:

AH HAAAAAAAA!!!!

So I changed the ASP.NET version to 1.1 and restarted the IIS Admin service (Start > Run > “iisreset -noforce”) and everything was back to normal.

What could have caused this?  A windows update is a good guess.

Everything worked out well, but unfortuantly the ticket to South America was non-refundable…

Update: There are also other error messages/issues that you can encounter on the SBS site that are related to ASP.NET.  If you right click on the Default Website in ISS Admin and change the ASP.NET properties there you can correct other issues on different pages as well.

Kevin Uncategorized

Odds are you are reading this article because you have encountered this error message while trying to connect to a remote computer using Windows Vista’s Remote Desktop client.  If you’ve researched this problem you’ve probably seen the fix for it.  The official knowledge base article from Microsoft tells you how to fix this problem.  However, if you are running Windows Vista, this probably did not resolve the issue for you.  You’re probably perplexed, confused, and a little scared.  Don’t worry, it’ll be ok.

If you’ve been using Windows Vista for a bit you’ve noticed that when you try to run many programs, your screen goes dark and the Windows UAC asks you if you if you want to run the program.  What is happening is Windows is automatically asking if you want to run the program as an administrator, because as a regular user can’t run some programs.  Remote Desktop is no exception.

When you start Remote Desktop in Vista it does not run as an administrator and the UAC box won’t pop up asking you to (I’ve seen laptops were it did work before, but now now, possibly a Windows update or something else that has changed).  So there’s 3 ways around this problem.

1) Right click the icon and click “Run as Administrator”
2) In the search menu on the Start menu type “mstsc” (no quotes) and then instead of hitting Enter press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to run mstsc.exe (Remote Desktop) as an administrator.
3) The less-hassel way it to open regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing, and right-click and change the permissions so all users have full control of that key.

No reboot is required.  The next time you try to connect to a computer using RDP you should have no problems.  That means you can spend less time playing Vista Ultimate’s Holdem Poker and more time working!

Kevin Uncategorized

Over a period of a week or two you realize your computer is freezing constantly.  You check for obvious signs of hardware failure, like bloated motherboard capacitors, and check the cabling.  You take a look at the Windows event viewer (type “eventvwr” in the run command) and under the system you notice a lot of hard drive errors.

After running a utility like HD Tune you realize your hard drive is on the fritz.  If it’s something like a bad block, it can be “repaired” by reformatting you machine as Windows will write around this block and be marked as bad on a clean install.  However a lot of times this is caused by something like the head of the hard drive causing damage to the platter, which usually means it’ll happen again.

So the best course of action is to replace that hard drive.  Today we’ll be looking at what you should do for a typical hard drive failure on a desktop PC.”

1) Order a new hard drive.

Simple enough.  It doesn’t have to be the exact same one, just make sure the bus in the same (IDE, SATA) and get the same size or larger drive to avoid any problems down the road.

2) Transfer your data to a new location.

While your waiting for the UPS guy to ring your doorbell, transfer all the data you have off the hard drive to a new one.  The best way is to boot your computer from a UBCD4Win CD and run the Unstoppable Copier from it.  Copy the ENTIRE drive to either an external hard drive, another hard drive on your computer, or a network location (such as a shared folder on another computer or a server if you have access to one).  Grab some lunch it might take a while.  Subway is good.

3) Install and format your your new hard drive.

I don’t really need to say too much about installing a new hard drive do I?  Just swap the old one out and put the new one in.  Boot into UBCD4Win again to format the drive.  Right click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”.  In the Computer Managment window click on Disk Management.

The new hard drive should look like Disk 1 (however yours should be Disk 0 if it’s the only drive), it should be unallocated and void of anything.  Right click on it and click “Format”.  Run through the wizard and format as a logical drive with a primary partition.  Name your hard drive (”Local Disk” is the norm) and check it to do a “Quick Format”.  After the wizard is complete, UBCD will say you need to reboot.  I’ve always avoided this by running through the format wizard again.  Right click the drive and mark the drive as active.  After that you should be able to right click on the drive that is showing at the top of the window and assign in the drive letter “C”.  Go to My Computer and voila!  Your hard drive is ready to be written to.

4) Transfer your data to the new hard drive

Run Unstoppable Copier again and copy your data from where you saved it to the new hard drive.  Grab some lunch again.

5) Rebuild your boot.ini

After everything is done, reboot your computer and see if it loads.  If it doesn’t you might have to rebuild your boot.ini file.  This is especially true on Dell machines that have that little 50mb partition before the OS partition.   Boot up UBCD4Win and at the main blue screen before you boot into your BartPE OS (the shell you are in when using UBCD) scroll down and launch the Windows Recovery Console.  It’ll take a few minutes to boot, just follow the prompts on the screen when Windows setup asks what you want t do.  When you are in select your windows installation and enter the local administrator password (if you can’t remember it or don’t know it you can use the password tools in your UBCD to create a new one).   At the command prompt type “bootcfg /rebuild”.  Enter these options:

Add installation to boot list?: Yes
Enter Load Identifier:  Microsoft Windows (XP Home, Pro, Vista, Home, Business, Ultimate, whatever the name of your OS is)
Enter Operating System Load Options: (leave blank)

Type exit to reboot the machine.
There you have it.  Windows should now boot properly and everything should look the way it did before.  Windows might ask to reboot itself after it install you new hard drive drivers, so do so.  If you are still having problems you might want to use the “fixboot” and “fixmbr” commands at the Recovery Console in case something messed up during your data transfers.  The disaster you thought you had on your hands, wasn’t that bad was it?

Kevin Hardware, Tips and Tricks

If you’re a web developer you’re bound to come across this. You just designed a great looking web page that excels your expectations.  It’s looks greats, is easy to navigate, and you know it’s going to knock your client off his feet.  You go to preview it in Firefox and it looks perfect, just as it did in the web editor your designed it in.  You publish your site to the web, sit back and relax.  You’re just waiting for the praises from the person who trusted you to put them on the web.

In about three minutes you get a all for the client and you become the one who gets knocked off his feet.  They complain the text is overlapping different parts of the page it shouldn’t, some of the links don’t work, and there’s a blue transparent film around some of the images.

You quickly fire off Firefox and go to the website, but all looks normal.  You are perplexed until it hits you.  They are using Internet Explorer.

Besides being a haven for rogue toolbars that won’t uninstall, spyware, and one of the slowest browsers out there, Internet Explorer also doesn’t support web standards like other browsers do.  It doesn’t have the support for CSS, tables, images (like PNGs), and other elements that Firefox has.

So don’t use Firefox to test your websites, not because it’s a bad browser, but because it’s an awesome browser, created by people who really care about the needs and methods of web developers.  It’s not that Microsfoft is evil (we at STC really like Microsoft), it’s just that they really don’t focus on IE like they should.  Internet Explorer also has the largest market share (even though they are steadily losing it) and most people who view your site will be rendering your page in it.

So next time you need to see if there are any subtle hidden “flaws” in your website, don’t use Firefox.  Firefox is too nice and cares about your feelings.

Kevin Tips and Tricks, Web Development