Brian Reid – Microsoft 365 Subject Matter Expert

Brian Reid – Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Certified Master

  • Can’t Update Media Player Library on Windows SmartPhone

    I have found for a while now that I could not view the Windows Media Player library on my phone, and everytime I viewed the library I got a dialog saying “An unexpected error occured”. But now I have fixed it. It must have been a corrupt copy of the libary database on the SDCard…

  • Exchange 2007 Clustering on Windows 2008

    I have just spent an hour or three installing two Windows 2008 Enterprise Edition boxes to create an Exchange 2007 SCC cluster using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 to create the environment. But I did not get that far, as Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering shared storage requires SAS (Serial SCSI) or iSCSI and not…

  • ERROR_REPLICA_SYNC_FAILED_THE TARGET PRINCIPAL NAME IS INCORRECT

    This rather imposing message is found if you try to force replication between to Active Directory Domain Controllers when one of the controllers machine account password is out of sync with the password as stored on the other domain controller. I have seen this a number of times on Virtual PC or Virtual Server Active…

  • Fixing Error 1324.The path xxx contains an invalid character.

    When installing software I have now seen a number of times the following error “Error 1324.The path My Documents contains an invalid character.”. My Documents could be replaced by a number of other special folders, and I have seen this issue on Windows XP and Windows Vista. The problem seems to stem from having UNC…

  • Update Rollup # For Exchange Server 2007

    Blog updated 22nd February 2008 As Microsoft plan to release Update Rollups for Exchange Server 2007 every six to eight weeks (see KB937194), I will use this blog entry to list the current latest update: The latest version of the Exchange 2007 update is Update Rollup 6 for Exchange Server 2007 – this can be…

  • Creating Subject Alternative Name Certificates with Microsoft Certificate Server

    A new feature in digital certificates is the Subject Alternative Name property. This allows you to have a certificate for more than one URI (i.e. www.c7solutions.com and www.c7solutions.co.uk) in the same certificate. It also means that in web servers such as IIS you can bind this certificate to the site and use up only one…

  • Exchange Management Shell

    I need a place to store useful Powershell commands for the administration of Exchange Server 2007, so I thought I would add them here: Upgrading Exchange Organisation Place Replicas of Public Folders on New Exchange Server get-publicfolder -recurse Set-PublicFolder -Replicas:”server\public folder database”,”server\public folder store (server)” Enable ActiveSync Policy for Windows Mobile 2003 Smartphones and Pocket…

  • ISA Server and Net2 Access Control from Paxton

    To allow access to the Net2 Server software through an ISA Server you need to create some custom protocols and then allow those protocols in the rules. This was what stopped me accessing the door control system over a VPN to a client of ours. The new protocols needed are: “Net2 Access Control Inbound”, which…

  • Setting MP3 ID Tags with CDDBControl.dll

    The CDDBControl DLL that can be downloaded from here can be used in VB or Java Script to programatically set and read the ID3 tags on an MP3 file. Lots of documentation exists on Google which shows you how to write the script, but today I discovered that this control will only operate if the…

  • Virtual PC’s Crashing With IntelPPM.sys and Processor.sys

    Today I booted a virtual machine that was provided for me by a client so that I could prep a training course, but I could not log into the virtual machine because it blue-screened with a driver called intelppm.sys failing (and supposedly processr.sys can cause the same problem, but I have not experienced that one…

  • Adding Routes Using CMAK

    I have just put together a Connection Manager VPN client (CMAK) and within it have specified the extra routing information that I needed. When I ran the client I got the following error message and could not find anything on the web with an answer, so here is the answer… Error 1: Connect action to…

  • P1 and P2 Headers in SMTP

    P1 = the value on the MAIL FROM command of the SMTP connection (the message envelope) as defined in RFC 821. P2 = the email address in the message body as defined in RFC 822. These include the FROM, REPLY TO and SENDER fields For example, the following SMTP command sequence describes where P1 and…

  • Invalid Visibility When Sending Email in Microsoft CRM

    Having recently installed Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 I found that when I wanted to send an email to a contact in the system it failed with the error message “Invalid Visibility”. This error occurs because the code that sends the email does not complete successfully, and in my case because of anti-spam restrictions enabled on…

  • VSWebApp and 404

    When I have started too many virtual machines in Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 I find that the administration application (http://server/virtualserver/VSWebApp.exe) stops working. To get it to restart, change the authentication settings on the IIS virtual directory to something other than what you have already (but not anonomyous). For example if it is Basic and Integrated…

  • Mouse Pointer Delays in Virtual Server

    I am running Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and every 10 seconds or so I get a pause in the mouse movement on the screen – very annoying. Examining the performance logs of the server I see that the Virtual Server service “vsssrv” goes to 0% CPU utilisation when this happens – so something is interupting…

  • Unable to Delete Active Directory Object

    Whilst doing some tests on an Active Directory to do with permissions I removed all the permissions apart from SYSTEM. This proved what I wanted to prove, but I then could not delete the object or reset its permissions etc. to tidy up my test environment. A search on the web for the problem returned…

  • Dell Notebook System Software (NSS) Failure to Install

    I recently had to rebuild a Dell Latitude D610 as it was not working properly on purchase. The reinstall instructions for Windows XP SP2 included installing the relevant Dell drivers from the Dell CD (or internet download if they were later versions). The Notebook System Software (NSS) always failed to install – it would crash…

  • Vonage Installation with NTL as Your Broadband Provider

    Connecting the router was easy, just followed the instructions, the only thing that I had to do (as I did not turn off my NTL cable modem) was clone the mac address of the current firewall onto the Linksys VoIP router (this is a setting in the Linksys admin pages). Voice quality over a 2Mb…

  • ntl Netguard Installation with Roaming Profile

    I installed ntl Netguard yesterday, the free antivirus software provided by this broadband provider. The comments on various forums where that it was easy to install but I found this to be incorrect advice. The main issue, and the one I blog about here is the creation of the required product folders when you have…

  • Windows Vista on Virtual PC’s

    As I do not have any spare PC hardware I decided to install a copy of Windows Vista (Beta 1) on virtualization software. I have a choice of both VMWare Workstation 5.0 and Microsoft Virtual PC. And the winner is – Microsoft Virtual PC The reason is simple – I can see what I am…

  • Connecting a Windows SmartPhone to Exchange Server Protected with a Private Certification Authority Digital Certificate

    Having recently obtained my first Windows Mobile powered SmartPhone, I needed to connect to my Exchange Server over the internet using ActiveSync. For those of you unfamiliar with Windows Mobile SmartPhones, they let you connect, using the phones internet connection (typically over a GPRS network), to your Exchange 2003 Servers to download your email at…