You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'windows' category.
Hi guys, long time no see … I’m back with some news for owners of HP Compaq dc7900 sff machines (obviously) who may experience BSOD under certain conditions (generally during logon phase, or at logon screen).
After experiencing this crash on a dozen of machines and analyzing the minidumps, I figured out that the crash was caused by a nasty service installed on the comps which is called CpqDtct (The CpqDtct.sys file is HP Compaq Client Management Driver). Various attempts to remove the service/file were unsuccessful, and I couldn’t afford to lose any minute (since the issue happened in production environment, during deployment).
Here are the steps taken to disable the nasty little service :
- From a remote computer, access the faulty machine registry through regedit.exe
- Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\CpqDtct
- Delete all values and subkeys (but not the CpqDtct key itself)
- modify permissions on CpqDtct key to DENY ALL (Permissions / Advanced / Untick Inherit Permissions / Click on Remove / OK / OK)
- Repeat operation with all other ControlSetXXX keys
Enjoy!
We’ve had one of our AD Domain Controllers reporting that it didn’t have the SACL right. This was logged constantly on event ID 2080. We tried nearly everything but without success. This morning I came up with a solution to fix it, while trying to desperately find the ntSecurityDescriptor property in ADSI Edit and other places. Well, it’s more simple than that!
On whatever DC, fire up Active Directory Users & Computers, click on the View menu and select Advanced Features. Then browse to Domain Controllers OU, right click on the DC which misses the SACL right and select Properties. Click on the Security tab and select Advanced. Be patient… then on the Permissions tab, click on Add … Select the Exchange Servers security group and click on OK. You will see a dialog with two tabs: Object and Properties. Select Properties. Then scroll down until you find Read nTSecurityDescriptor. Check Allow, click on OK as much as needed to close the window. Then check your event log after a while. Your DC should now report that it has the SACL right. 
Despite dealing with the (bad) tonsillitis, today (especially towards the end) proved to be productive. On tonight’s menu : dead domain controller demotion, plus checking Service Principal Names duplicate entries. That made me discover a lovely little utility included in windows : LDP.exe
Removing the SPN entry drove our Sharepoint blind, couldn’t see the database server anymore! That’s certainly linked to Kerberos. I’ve added again the SPN entry in ADSIEdit.msc and all is fine again.
More tomorrow!
This morning one of our users reported that his adwords editor suddenly keeps freezing. After trying to uninstall and reinstall without success, I tried to do it a bit harsher… and it worked! I uninstalled adwords editor, went to the user’s “Application Data” and “Local Settings\Application Data” folders and deleted there both “Google Adwords” folders. Then I reinstalled and it now works like a charm.
On a Windows x64 Enterprise Edition machine you may happen to have problems with the Active Directory users & computers MMC snap-in. Try the following to fix the issue :
%windir%\syswow64\mmc.exe %systemroot%\system32\dsa.msc -32
this will launch the 32bit version of the snap-in, without errors (hopefully).
If you’re trying to run newsid.exe on windows vista you will most probably get an error saying that newsid.exe can’t find the computer SID. The problem can be fixed easily :
right-click on newsid.exe and select “run as administrator”
If you can’t run it as an admin, launch a cmd.exe and use the runas command to get privileged access :
runas /user:domain\username newsid.exe
This issue occurs on Windows 2003 systems because the update file is too large. To fix this issue, install the microsoft hotfix KB925336 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925336)
You can expect to encounter this issue when applying Visual Studio 2005 service pack.
