Microsoft Shows Me A New Trick
So I was on a support call with Microsoft the other day because Outlook Anywhere was not working on a 2008 Small Business Server. While I was watching the technician work away I saw a purple box pop up in a command prompt. I stopped him and asked what exactly he did and he told me that by pressing F7 it will list previous commands that you typed. Now I have always used the up and down arrows to run commands again and I'm not sure if this is any faster/slower however its nice to be able and see a list of commands rather than scrolling through one by one.
A call to Microsoft support generally means that something is really wrong so in that respect it is usually unpleasant. However, what I have always enjoyed is watching someone who really knows a specific product or server role resolve the issue because I always learn something. This is one of the more trivial things I have learned, but something new none the less.
Ext2Fsd BAD_POOL_HEADER BSOD on Windows 7
I have been using Ext2Fsd for a long time, everything was fine while using Vista. I decided to upgrade to Windows 7 after the release candidate was made available. For the most part everything was fine, until I started browsing my ext3 /home partition where I keep all my data. Sometimes I would get lucky and be able to open the file I wanted, however in most cases I was met with a BSOD saying something about a BAD_POOL_HEADER.
I am not a programmer, in fact I am probably one of the worst candidates for a programmer, I don't like it either. Thankfully for me though a gentleman named Bo Brantén developed a version that eliminates this issue. He describes the issue on the Ext2Fsd project page as a response to the posting of version 0.48. Apparently the issue was caused when the driver referenced memory after it was freed.
The updated version can be downloaded from the link below. Replace your ext2fsd.sys in C:\Windows\System32\drivers with the updated version and reboot.
Invalid CD/DVD-ROM Selection Error When Attempting To Attach Virtual Media ISO on DRAC
This issue is isolated to Internet Explorer 8, I have tried this on multiple systems running version 8 and all have the same problem. When you try and attach the media it throws an error saying "Invalid CD/DVD-ROM Selection" and the CD/DVD-ROM drive path behind the error is changed to C:\fakepath\whatever.is. This issue does not occur in Internet Explorer 7 and I would assume would be fine in version 6.
I called Dell technical support and the error can be resolved by adding the IP address as a trusted site in Internet Explorer 8. Once that is done you should be able to connect your ISO. The person I talked to at Dell had never seen this error so it could possibly be fixed with a future firmware upgrade. Nevertheless it is another example of the problems encountered when forcing users to use Internet Explorer due to ActiveX rather than creating web based software that relies on open standards.
.NET Framework 2.0 Failure
Recently I have seen the following error message in the application event log on two different Windows 2000 servers at two different companies.
The Open Procedure for service "ASP.NET" in DLL "C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_perf.dll" failed. Performance data for this service will not be available. Status code returned is data DWORD 0.
In both cases the fix was to download and install .NET Framework 2.0 SP2 (reboot required) and the flood of event log errors was gone.