Josh Wieder

For managing fragmentation of NTFS (Windows Server 2003/2008, XP, Vista, and Windows 7) : For general disk defragmentation, the following utilities offer a substantial improvement in overall performance and efficacy over native operating system tools: Auslogics Disk Defrag  or Raxco PerfectDisk For use on disks unsupported by the above tools, frequently executed and/or locked files or even a straightforward command line utility that can easily be used as part of a shell script: Contig from the Sysinternals Suite Contig has been of particular value when managing backup servers - servers storing huge files with substantial writes on a regular basis. Being able to specify the backup files allows for properly scheduling defragmentation by backup job, and in the process eliminating the need for downtime on these systems as part of this manner of disk maintenance. Can also be used for per-file fragmentation analysis and reporting. For managing fragmentation of ext4 file systems ...

The Problem The configuration of the system when this error was encountered is as follows: A. Windows Server 2008 R2 Redundant Domain Controllers - we will call these DC1.joshwieder.com and DC2.joshwieder.com B. Windows Server 2003 Web Server with Windows Remote Management enabled / part of the Active directory deployment - we will call this WEB.joshwieder.com C. For the sake of our example, let's say I have configured an OU named "Web Servers" on those domain controllers Whenever the Windows 2003 Web server reboots, or WinRM.exe service on the Windows 2003 Web server restarts, the following error was logged into the Event Viewer: Event ID: 10154 Source: Microsoft-Windows-WinRM Version: 6.1 Symbolic Name: LOG_WSMAN_SPN_CREATION Message: The WinRM service failed to create the following SPN: %1. Additional Data The error received was 8344: Insufficient access rights to perform the operation. User Action The SPN can be created by an administrator ...

I recently worked on a Windows 2003 server that required manual reboots in order to login, whether via console or Remote Desktop. After rebooting, Event ID 1517 was logged repeatedly in Event Viewer (protip: this error could also appear as Event ID 1524 in Windows Server 2003, or as Event 1000 in Windows Server 2000). Microsoft explains this error in better detail than I can in KB article 944984 - essentially, user profile registry hives are kept in limbo after log off, and never completely terminated. Unfortunately, the hotfix described in the KB article didn't help. I don't administrate this server, I was just called in to fix the issue without breaking anything else. At this point, I know the administrator had an application in need of some coding assistance. I didn't have time to review every application's authentication behavior, though, and I am a novice developer at best. As an alternative to reviewing miles of code, I installed the User Profile Hive Cleanup S...

So its been about 5 months since the IETF released the RFC 6455 proposal for websockets: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455 The websocket API is a protocol that allows for the bidirectional transfer of http/https data. This breaks down to a single initial handshake and then autonomous communication from both the server and client concurrently. With it comes a significant performance improvement (as only one handshake is needed, and client-side implementation gets much simpler) and a number of practical applications - I always think chat clients, but the applications are endless for web driven applications that require real time data transfer (HTML5 games that don't suck!) Its no secret that websockets will not work with a standard IIS7 implementation. Http.sys is a greedy bugger, and gobbles up all connections listening on port 80. Even with WCF, there is no formally recognized workaround besides "wait for 8" and the native websocket/SOAP functionality that it...

Microsoft Access Data Components are usually fairly stable. They tend to be updated with significant OS related updates (I'm looking at you, Service Packs).  That being said, issues do happen. Today I encountered an issue following a P to V migration using Hyper-V for a Windows 2000 server with an ADO connection to a MSSQL database. Somehow MDAC versions become mismatched during this process. Your actual error may vary. Your application may throw an error 429 " Active-X component can't create object", you might get a  IPP_E_MDAC_VERSION error. In the case today, a line in the website's general.asa was mentioned as an invalid object. Download and execute the Microsoft Component Checker to verify a mismatch against your required Component versions - Use this for 2003   and this for 2000 . For Windows Server 2003 and 2008 systems, I would typically advise an in-place upgrade as outlined here . You can try a manual install on these OS' but frankly it is no...