Random Rants & Raves

All right, I'm not much into movie reviews and this is one that has been reviewed a thousand times over by people far better and far worse than me - however, it would simply be not fair to not comment on this brilliant movie. The Dark Knight is probably one of the best movies I've seen - and not just in recent times. But my comments on the movie come in a different context - of that of a boy who has read through many of the caped crusader's exploits. Although having been a fan of the Batman character since I was a kid, I always knew that this one series was different from the other super hero comics I used to read - Phantom, Mandrake, Superman, Tarzan, et al.

The Batman has always been a darker comic series than any of the other ones. He was one that had enough gray shades that made him more human rather than super human. For a young boy reading these comics, Batman was the ultimate in super-cool - he had the gadgets, the car, the planes and didn't waste his time romantically (too much). Most of his female counterparts were also in the same league - Catwoman, Batgirl etc. And many of the stories actually were more of detective stories than action oriented ones with dark and sinister events.

I was lucky to have watched only a few of the Batman & Robin TV series when it aired. The serial converted the duo into a set of - pardon the pun - jokers!  A caricature of the true Batman, the paunchy crime fighter with his "kapows" and "Holy <whatever>" disgusted me enough to never venture near that series for more than a few odd episodes. When the new Batman movie franchise was launched I was quite happy that finally we might have a more serious Batman version.

To a point, the first Batman (the Tim Burton one) was quite dark - at least as compared to the TV series. Jack Nicholson's Joker was eerily evil with a bunch of one-liners that made his characterization interesting. But the later parts of the franchise disappointed big time - BatGirl, Robin, the villains were all more around for their star power in Hollywood rather than the depth they could bring to their characters other than taking them back to being caricatures.

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If you are installing HMC 4.5 and have reached the point of provisioning where you need to add the server name to the Exchange 2007 default OAB CAS pool, you need to provision the AddOABCAS.xml file.

However as the documentation says, you might receive an error even if you have followed the prior steps correctly:

Note: 
If you run into an error message indicating that EXCASOAB01 is not configured with a distribution point, use the Exchange Management Console to change the internal URL of the OAB distribution to a non-existing URL (for example, http://excas01.fabrikam.com/OAB), and make a copy of the original URL. Then, repeat the above procedure to add EXCASOAB01 into the default OAB CAS pool. After the addition is complete, change the internal URL of the OAB distribution back to the original.

There is a simple way of doing this from the Exchange Management Shell (aka PowerShell). Simply type the lines below to save the current URL and change it:

$oldUrl = Get-OABVirtualDirectory
echo $oldUrl.InternalUrl
Get-OabVirtualDirectory | Set-OabVirtualDirectory -InternalUrl <NEW URL HERE>

Go back to the Command Shell and run the provtest command to provision the AddOABCAS.xml file again. This time it should work. Now simply set the old URL back again in the Management Shell like this

Get-OabVirtualDirectory | Set-OabVirtualDirectory 
     -InternalUrl $oldUrl.InternalUrl

Hope this helps

The Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting 4.5 is a set of services and tools that allow hosting providers to configure, deploy, provision, manage, monitor and update their servers to provide Web, Data and Collaboration hosting using the Microsoft platforms of IIS, SQL Server and Windows SharePoint Services. Wbh consists of a number of different infrastructure components including Automated Deployment Services, Active Directory, MS System Center, Windows Server Update Services and the Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS).

The MPS is the platform that allows the hosting provider to provision services - such as the Web hosting, Data hosting and SharePoint hosting for their customers using a simplified control panel front end. However, setting up the infrastructure of MPS is quite complex and requires 8-9 server just for the management infrastructure alone. I've been working with a large number of hosters in India for enabling them on the WbH platform and this turned out to be a major stumbling block for them - both in terms of number of servers to setup and the complexity of the procedure. Microsoft India then went ahead and asked me to create a proof-of-concept for deploying MPS on a single server for demo and low end usage scenarios. I decided to do this inside a Virtual PC and install everything within it.

The WbH solution requires Windows 2003 or Windows 2008. However, the MPS service can only run on Windows 2003. To install the MPS part of the WbH infrastructure you will need to download the following two components from the WbH Download Page.

1. Service Provisioning.zip
2. Samples.zip

Installing everything into a single machine/VPC requires some creative manipulation of the Deployment Walkthrough for MPS. I will be linking to a detailed walkthrough that shows how this can be achieved a little later. However, as the title of the post says, there is a showstopper error that comes a good way into the deployment process and solving it took a fair amount of time.

When you use the Deployment Tool to go ahead and deploy the MPS Core Platform and Hosting Platform they work fine. However, when you try to install the Business Web Service on the machine, you run into a major issue. you get an exception that says:

MSI log returned non-zero error code 1603

As soon as you get this error, the system rolls the deployment of this step back and you lose the Web application and the web services that were extracted. You can check the log file for MPSWebServices.msi in the c:\ConfigShare\log folder to see the cause of this error. Open the log file in Notepad and do a search for "value 3". Look at the line above this that says:

Error setting new DACL for: C:\WINDOWS\Temp

Now this error seems innocuous enough and you might think that giving Everyone, Full Control on c:\Windows\Temp will solve the issue. Unfortunately it doesn't. Nor does deleting the folder and recreating it, changing setting in Domain Security Policy or a myriad of other things that I tried. In fact, a bunch of searches on Live and Google did not get me any answers at all on this - other than some forum posts (here, here, & here) that detailed the same error but with no resolution. In fact, the last answer on the 3rd post linked says that it is simply not possible to provision MPS on an AD server.

Further investigation in the log showed me that there is a InstallHelper.vbs script that runs a bunch of commands that perform this deployment. Searching around everywhere did not get me this file. I did get a InstallHelper.msi that unfortunately only had a DLL file within it. Extracting the MPSWebServices.msi file got me the files of the Web services itself but the installation was not complete.

It was late at night when I finally found the fix to this issue. More...

I've been using Windows Vista Ultimate x64 for quite a while now on my notebook and try to use 64-bit software in most cases as well whenever it's available. For instance, I have the 64-bit versions of all my Dell drivers, .NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008, Virtual PC 2007, Paint.Net, PerfectDisk, Live Mesh, IE7Pro, Daemon Tools, Zune 2.0 and others installed. One of the applications that I use constantly is Internet Explorer 64-bit.

I've found that IE7x64 is much more stable than the 32-version and is also much more responsive. However, there is one issue with it. Plug-ins like Flash and SilverLight (to mention a few) are not compatible with it. To make matters worse, most web sites check only for the browser type and whether the plug-in is install or not. If it's not, they try to install the plug-in. Which means that not only does my machine waste bandwidth by unnecessarily downloading the required CAB file (which cannot install), I also get prompted to install Flash (for instance) every time I try to browse using IE7x64 on such sites.

A solution to this problem is running IE7x64 in the "No Add-ons" mode. This mode disables even trying to load the plug-in, saving time, bandwidth and the irritating popups. You can enable this mode by modifying the shortcut to launch IE7x64 and adding the the -extoff parameter to the end like this:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -extoff

This brings up the window with a message stating that the browser is running without add-ons enabled. If you do not want this message to be displayed every time you launch the browser, you can change the shortcut to add a URL at the end of the previous like to look like this:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -extoff about:blank

Of course, you can replace the "about:blank: with a URL of your choice as well.

When you now browse a site having a plug-in, you will see a non-intrusive yellow information bar on top that reminds you that you are not seeing everything that is there on the page, but believe me, the page loads extremely fast due to this. Javascript and Ajax continue to work fine - it's only 3rd party add-ons that are affected and makes for a much better browsing experience.

Of course, if you do need to use these plug-ins, you will need to keep a 32-bit browser handy as well - at least till the time that the plug-in developers release 64-bit editions of their products.