SBS 2008 Task Errors

On my Small Business Server (SBS) 2008 server I use the Forefront Security for Exchange system. It uses a suite of licensed antivirus algorithms to scan incoming email. The idea is that using multiple engines increases the probability of finding a virus.

SBS 2008 has a nice monitoring report system built int. You can define what you want in the report and what time to run it. The server will then run the report and email the results to any designated email addresses. Recently my system has shown a few errors stating that some of the engines used by Forefront have been discontinued.

Microsoft retired some of the engines and introduced some new ones. So I disabled the retired ones and enabled the new engines. Then I enabled the updates for the new engines and disabled the updates for the retired engines. Then I started getting errors like the following.

So I started poking around in the Task Scheduler configuration and I saw something strange. The configuration for each of the Forefront updates was set to run as Windows 2003, 2000 instead of Server 2008.

 

I clicked on Properties for each task and changed it to the 2008 options like this.

 

So far the errors have gone away. I will let it run for another week or so and see what happens.

DVD Library in Vista Media Center

I have been looking around for a integrated way to store movies on the server and allow all of the computers in the house to access those movies. I think I found a good solution in this Microsoft Knowledge Base Article.

It details how to enable the built in DVD Library support in Vista Media Center. All of the movies are stored in individual folders located in a shared folder on the server in the VIDEO_TS format.

Then on each of the client Vista machines, open regedit and navigate to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings subkey.
Locate the ShowGallery key and modify the value from Play to Gallery.

Then launch Media Center and you should see DVD Library under TV & Movies.



This worked fine on my rig but when I tried it for my wife the registry setting did not change the GUI and the DVD Library did not show up.
I fixed this by giving her account temporary local admin, made the registry change, made sure it worked , and then removed her from the local admin group.

Once the DVD Library shows up in the gui click on it and then right click and select add a shared folder from another computer and then select the share with the movies.

The movies should start appearing in the Library. There are still a few issues for me to sort out. One is that the information such as the cover art and meta data is not cached and it needs to be looked up every time. As the number of movies increases this can take a bit of time. You can place an image called folder.jpg in each movies folder and that will take precedence over the download. Another issue is the dvdid.xml, and I have been doing a bit of reading and cam across this site that appears rather interesting.

Vista DRM Issue

Never one to pass up a good deal, I was able to get a new Q9650 Quad Core processor at a good price. I replaced the E8400 Dual Core in my main Rig, updated the bios and fired her up. I am running Vista Ultimate x64 in this machine and it started right up and I just had to open Task Manager and see all four cores looking good.

After the obligatory re-activation, I ran the Vista performance benchmark for the experience Index and I am now 5.9 across the board with 8 Gig RAM, 8800GTS video, and a WD Raptor 150 Gig Drive.

Then I opened up Media Center and I encountered the first of my issues. Error windows popped up about the receiver service not working and Digital Cable device registration application stopped working errors started opening up.

As it turns out Vista DRM is tied to the CPU so you need to delete the DRM cache. Open up an explorer window and go to the tools menu on the toolbar. If you do not see the toolbar, hit the alt key and it should appear. Go to folder options and choose the "view" tab.

Select the show hidden folders and unselect the Hide Protected Operating System Files. Then go to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\DRM. Make sure it is the correct DRM folder, there is another DRM folder one level up and it is empty. If I am feeling cynical I think it is a decoy to confuse people. Inside the correct DRM folder there should be some files like this.





Now delete all of the file inside of the DRM folder but not the DRM folder itself. Then log off and reboot for good measure. You may want to reset the folder view options back to their default options. Now the annoying errors should be gone Media Center should be working fine again.

SD Card Partitioning

A week or so ago my wife mentioned that she was having a problem with her digital camera. Given the importance of the requester I stopped what I was doing and listened to her describe the problem.

It seemed that the camera was having problems writing to the SD Card and after turning the camera off and on it wanted to reformat the card. This is not a new camera or card so this is something that should not be happening at this point.

I popped the card into my pc and Windows showed that it as a One Gig partition. This was strange because it is a Two Gig card. Opening up Disk Manager showed that indeed there was a One Gig partition and the rest was unused space. I attempted to resize the partition and even create a second partition in that unused space but Disk Manager wasn't going to let me do it.

So I tried inserting the card into my Linux laptop to see what I could do. Mandriva detected the card and auto mounted it as "NEW VOLUME". That was a good sign so dropped to the shell and issued a "fdisk -l" to see what was there but only the hard drive ( sda ) showed up. Then I poked around in /dev/ to see what I can find and didn't notice anything. I issued a "ls" on /mnt and there was nothing there.

After a moment of inspiration I checked /media and there was NEW VOLUME and then after a bit of googling I issued a"cat /etc/mtab" and was rewarded with:

/dev/mmcblk0p1 /media/NEW\040VOLUME vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,uid=501,utf-8

Now I was able to unmount using "unmount /dev/mmcblk01p1"

Then I used "fdisk /dev/mmcblk01p1" and selected "d" to delete the partition

Then "w" to write the table to the card.

Then I selected "n" for new partition.

Then "p" for primary.

Then "1" to make it the first partition.

Then "enter" to accept the default first cylinder.

Then "enter" again to accept the default last cylinder.

Then "w" to write the table.

Now the card is partitioned into one partition again and after formatting and putting it back in the camera and taking a few pictures my wife is happily taking pictures again.