Exchange 2003 will not uninstall with error 0x8000ffff

Ok, I have a development server that runs Exchange 2003 as a testbed but I wanted to try Exchange 2007b2 on this box. I thought about reinstalling the box but feeling slightly lazy I decided to remove Exchange 2003 and install Exchange 2007b2. Except I couldn't.....

"Unexpected error 0x8000ffff" so the dialog box said. On examining the log file in the root of C:, the first mention of error 0x8000ffff was in relation to not being able to find the CD. Except it hadn't asked me for the CD.....

On further examination it turned out (I remember now) that I had mounted the Exchange 2003 install CD iso image using Daemon tools and shared them across the network. The error 0x8000ffff was because it couldn't find the share. I shared the iso from the same machine and same sharename and presto! It worked!

How to control OWA spell checker in Exchange 2003

Microsoft KB article 825430 details registry changes for controlling OWA. I came across it when looking for a solution to the error message "The spelling in this item can't be checked. Please try again later."

I think this problem is caused by organisational proxy servers (seen with both ISA and Border Manager) so there's not a lot you can do about someone elses proxy. Microsoft KB article 820378 has more details.

SuSE 10.1 "eth0 renamed to eth1"

After playing with the bcm43xx wireless module I noticed my eth0 had been renamed to eth1, indeed the message also appeared in dmesg output:

dmesg | grep eth1
eth0 renamed to eth1

After a bit of poking I found duplicates of my network card mac address in the following file:

cat /etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0d:56:37:58:8c", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth0"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:90:4b:12:5f:fa", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k wlan0"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0d:56:37:58:8c", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth1"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0d:56:37:58:8c", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth2"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0d:56:37:58:8c", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth3"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:0d:56:37:58:8c", IMPORT="/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth4"

Removing the extra lines (eth1-eth4) and restarting the network caused eth0 to behave again.

How to enable remote desktop.... Remotely!

I recently removed terminal services from my test server as I was through with it and the evaluation license was about to run out. When I tried to connect to my headless server using remote desktop I found that it was disabled by the removal of ts.

Thanks to a blog by cogent free knowledge I was able to enable remote desktop remotely.

Using regedt32, connect to the remote machines registry and change the following key from 1 (disabled) to 0 (enabled):
KEY: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TerminalServer
DATA: fDenyTSConnections

No need to reboot, it works straight away.

Using the bcm43xx driver with SuSE 10.1 and Dell Inspiron 5100

As of Kernel 2.6.17rc a native, reverse engineered, driver is available for bcm43xx range of wireless cards. I have had my bcm4306 rev 02 (Dell Truemobile 1300) card working in my Inspiron 5100 using ndiswrapper for some time but wanted to get the native driver working to play with tools such as kismet.

You'll need the following files:

Kernel.
Novell have not provided a kernel later than 2.6.16 so I had to find a more up to date one. I eventually settled on the 2.6.18rc7 one from the factory distributioncalled kernel-default-2.6.18_rc7_git1-2.i586.rpm. I can't store a copy here because community server does not seem to handle files that big.

Wireless tools.
The wireless tools provided with SuSE 10.1 do not seem to configure the new wireless driver correctly to I again used the rpm from the factory distribution.

bcm43xx-fwcutter-004.
This tool is required to extract firware from the windows driver to make the card work with Linux. You can find the file from the makers siteor use this local copy. I have a precompiled version here too.

A windows driver.
I had been using thedell driver with ndiswrapper with no problems but it would not work with bcm43xx giving me IRQ errors. I eventually found this onewhich worked great for me.

Proceedure.
1. Install the new kernel using a command similar to 'rpm -ivh kernel-default-2.6.18_rc7_git1-2.i586.rpm'. Reboot into the new kernel but be aware that if you were using ndiswrapper it will no longer work because the new kernel will prefer to use bcm43xx instead.

2. Install the new wireless tools. Because Yast2 and a few other pieces of software require the previous version of wireless tools you will get a dependency error on libiw.so.28. I used the following commands to get around this:
'rpm -Uvh –nodeps wireless-tools-29pre10-5.i586.rpm'
'ln -s /usr/lib/libiw.so /usr/lib/libiw.so.28'

3. Install the fwcutter tool from source or by copying the precomiled binary. Installing from source is the standard:
'./configure'
'make'
'make install'

4. Extract the firmware from the wl_apsta.o file using a command similar to:
'bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta.a'
This should place a load of bcm43xx* files into /lib/firmware.

5. Use Yast2 to configure your wireless card and reboot.

You should see output similar to the followig:

ifconfig wlan0
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:90:4B:12:5F:FA
inet addr:192.168.0.51 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::290:4bff:fe12:5ffa/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:30401 errors:0 dropped:220 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:61069 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:3078309 (2.9 Mb) TX bytes:87433000 (83.3 Mb)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0xc000

iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 IEEE 802.11b/g ESSID:"thefoleyhouse" Nickname:"Broadcom 4306"
Mode:Managed Frequency=2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:15:E9:E1:C9:15
Bit Rate=11 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm
RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:XXXX-XXXX-XX Security mode:open
Link Quality=100/100 Signal level=2/3 Noise level=187/100
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

lsmod |grep bcm43xx
bcm43xx 427776 0
firmware_class 14208 2 pcmcia,bcm43xx
ieee80211softmac 36992 1 bcm43xx
ieee80211 34760 2 bcm43xx,ieee80211softmac

Test Blog From Word 2007B2TR

Just thought I'd test "Publish to blog" from Word 2007B2TR. We'll see if it works!
And what about pictures?

Windows Genuine Advantage - Internet Connection Problem [0x80080293]

It's all well and good having Windows Genuine Advantage so that only licensed users can download products and fixes but surely the servers should be highly available or it defeats the purpose? I have a problem with Windows Defender not carrying out scheduled scans and I deceided to reinstall it as a troubleshooting step. Despite having validated my copy of Windows XP many times in the past (repeatedly!) I can not currently download Windows Defender:

Disgusting Keyboard

When my keyboard has got really bad in the past I just bought a new one. Today I decided to clean it:

After I took all the keys off:

After I cleaned it:

All back together again:

Blog Updated to CS2.1

I did a couple of trial runs on this and found the best option was to do a complete in place upgrade.
I first upgraded the database:

• CS1.1>CS2.0
• CD2.0>CS2.1
• ASP1.1>ASP2.0

Then just extracted the new website over the old one. I initially tried creating a new website but had lots of prolems with the old photos!

Windows Live Messenger Setup Problem

I was told that a new version of Windows Live Messenger (v8.0.0812.0) was available so I downloaded it.

Problem is that I had to cancel setup for setup to continue because the "Windows Live Messenger Setup Wizard" tells me it can't run whilst the "Windows Live Messenger Setup Wizard" is running. There was only one copy running, honest!

[*-)]