June 2008 - Posts
Move over Minesweeper! I received a link to this from my MVP lead and I'm hooked, despite the blatant advertising. The cleverly done retro-chic "plinky plonky" music, chunky graphics and office politics takes me straight back to the early 1980s, Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Micro (model "B" of course!).
You might have guessed from the title of my blog that I'm a child of the 80s at heart, the age when personal computers were new and exciting, anything was possible, and stories had happy endings. So check it out. Oh, and here's a video clip of the song from which I took the name of my blog: Forever in Electric Dreams!
My ClustrMap has just been archived, which means that my site usage will look a bit empty for a little while until you all pay me a visit. ClustrMaps does this annually to stop the image turning into a read smear. I've suggested to the team at ClustrMaps that they use a rolling average instead of wiping everyone's map clean once a year. They assure me it is on the to-do list. Until then, on your left is a clickable image of this year's final total. On the right, for comparison, is the previous year's total, almost exactly an order of magnitude increase! I wonder how long I can keep that up for?
Our blog/forum/file/photo gallery server, based on Telligent Systems' Community Server, has just been upgraded to Community Server 2008. We had a few initial teething problems that seem to have been caused by outdated/missing binaries in the Upgrade package which meant the MetaBlog API threw exceptions. I worked around this by downloading the SDK, recompiling everything then copying the binaries over to the live site in the /bin folder. We now seem to be up and running again. Please let me know if you have any problems accessing the server.
I've just solved a problem today that was driving me crazy. I use Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and have been trying to set it up as an Internet Facing Deployment so I can use it from my hot-desking office. Everything worked as expected from inside my LAN and I could also access CRM using the web client externally - but the Outlook client would have no truck with it. I kept getting authentication errors and the Outlook client just refused to connect.
I posted a question on LinkedIn to see if anyone knew the answer and Julian Sharp came to my rescue. Although he didn't give me the answer directly, he sparked a train of thought that led me to the solution. Jules pointed me to his CRM demo site where I noticed I was seeing a different login screen than on my own server. Jules' server was showing me a forms authentication page while mine was popping up a login dialog box (i.e. using Windows Integrated Authentication). Our IFD configurations sounded the same, so I turned my attention to the ISA web publishing rule.
My ISA publishing rule was originally set to "Requests appear to come from the ISA Server computer" so the CRM server always thought that it was being contacted by a computer on the LAN, it therefore tried to use integrated authentication with Active Directory. Once the option was configured to "Requests appear to come from the original client" then the CRM server was able to correctly deduce that it was talking to a user outside the LAN and present the IFD/forms authentication screen instead.
Having worked that out, I was able to configure the Outlook client and connect with Outlook, too.
Thanks, Jules.
What a radical idea. Microsoft has put all the Sysinternals utilities together in a single web folder, where you can easily download them all in one hit, or simply execute them directly from the web server, no fuss, no pfaff. From the Readme file:
What is this? This is a file share allowing access to all Sysinternals utilities. We have developed this to test an alternate distribution mechanism for our utilities. This will allow you to run these tools from any computer connected to the Internet without having to navigate to a webpage, download and extract the zip file.
http://live.sysinternals.com or \\live.sysinternals.com\tools
Nice one, Microsoft.
For Outlook users who are always exceeding their mailbox quota: I wrote this for you.
When installing SQL Management Studio Express on Windows
Vista x64 (and, perhaps, x86 too) you may well get an error code 29506, the installation will fail and roll-back. This appears to be a security issue with Windows Vista. I've seen this happen a few times on products where the installation does not have a bootstrapper (setup.exe) but just a lone .msi installer package. It seems that while installations get elevated privilege, that's still not equivalent to installing as the administrator. The trouble with an MSI file is that you cannot right click it and "Run as Administrator". To work around this, you can either log in as Administrator and the install should then work, but if (like me) you prefer to keep your administrator account disabled and isolated, here is an alternative that has actually worked for me in a few different situations. We'll cobble together a makeshift bootstrapper (of sorts) that does nothing but chain the msi file, this gives us a convenient target to right-click-and-run-as-administrator.
- Copy the installer package (.msi file) to a convenient location (I generally use the root of my system drive, C:\ but any path will do).
- Create a new text file (on the desktop is fine). Insert the text:
START /WAIT C:\MyInstallerPackage.msi
(obviously you need to substitute your own path and filename for the underlined part above). - Save your text file as Install.bat (or rename it to give it the .bat extension if you already saved it).
- Right-click your new batch file, then select Run As Administrator...
- Approve the UAC prompt and away you go. Your package should now install.