Microsoft

You may run Commvault Backup Software or any other on a Hyper-V Cluster and your VSS Snapshots of the virtual machines fail from time to time.

At CommVault Virtual iDataAgent using Microsoft VSS and Hyper-V Installation, Backup and Restore problems they describe several reason for this type of failure. There recommend many missing Microsoft hotfixes (you should really install) and a disabled automount, but the top one issue - that happens most often from my expierence is - that you are just running out of disk space in one of the VMs located on the Cluster Shared Volume.

There exists an annoying bug in Windows 7 with GPOs and RODCs that makes your users waiting 20 minutes until the computer starts installing software via Active Directory.

The infrastructure has a central site with 2 DCs 2008 R2 and several branch offices with Read Only Domain Controller located on every office. The problem is that when some changes are done on the Group Policies in the central site (modify old GPOs, create new ones, most often install software like Flash player) after the restart (or gpupdate /force) when the new settings are applied it take about 20 minutes for the client to boot.

Windows boots and show a throbber with "Applying software installation policy..." for about 20 minutes (10 minutes per machine + 10 minutes for user GPO timeout). This happens only after you have changed a GPO and only once. It doesn't matter if this is a software policy or any random setting. The setting get's applied and all other future reboots are fine, until you change anything again inside a GPO.

In best practice Enterprise environments, users have a home directory and the folders like AppData\Roaming and Documents will be redirected with Windows Policy named Folder Redirection to their home drive located on network. In AppData\Roaming folder very many applications are saving their user specific data and this allows a user to log on to any PC in your company with keeping all settings intact. The AppData\Roaming folder become larger over time and 300MB are very common in todays world. For performance reasons you should not copy this on every login/logout to the computer and back to the server. There is many banana software on the market from developers that are not aware of this technology. Notify them, this are bugs - no discussion.

It's best practice to enable the policy Delete Cached copies of roaming profiles that truncates a local user profile from disk to free up disk space after a user logs off a computer. With Windows 7 this stuff can be cached locally for some time, but the performance reasons are still the same.

If you'd like to add more languages or all languages to your Windows 7 deployment image this can be done by hand or with below script. This script requires some path configurations only and integrates all lp.cab files from the Microsoft Language Pack DVD.

Required:

  • Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK)
  • Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise DVD
  • Microsoft Windows 7 Language Pack DVD

Steps:

  1. Copy install.wim from Windows 7 DVD \sources\install.wim to local disk
  2. Configure path to language packs. This is folder named langpacks with subfolders named "ar-sa", "de-de" and so on.
  3. Configure all other paths
  4. Run the batch file to integrate all Language Packs (may take some hours/one day).
  5. Add this WMI file to your Windows Deployment Server (WDS).

Script:

Multilingual user interface (MUI) setups are really common in todays world. Mostly seen with NSIS setups. If your software is multilingual you don't need to maintain tons of setups (aka - one MSI for every language). Nevertheless the below is officially not supported by Microsoft, it's possible and widly used - also by Microsoft. The most popular software I came across in the last days is Apples Safari 5.x browser. I'm sure if you search more, you will find much more setups.

See Available Language Packs for the available LangID's and cultures.

How are the multilingual user interface MSIs created?

If you's like to install software via Active Directory it may fail with Error: %%1274.

Symtoms:

  • You can reboot as often as you'd like and your deployed Software always fails with Error %%1274
  • Eventlog entry:
    • Source: Application Management Group Policy
    • Event ID 101
    • Description: Die Zuweisung der Anwendung ShoreTel Communicator 16.23.5631.0 der Richtlinie ShoreTel Communicator ist fehlgeschlagen. Fehler: %%1274
    • Description: The assignment of application ShoreTel Communicator 16.23.5631.0 from policy ShoreTel Communicator failed. The error was : %%1274

Workaround:

  • Explicitly set the policy Startup policy processing wait time: Activated Amount of time to wait (in seconds): 120s. This is normally not required if FastLogonOptimization is disabled, but Windows 7 seems to have a bug here.

History:

  • 04/09/2011: Exists in Windows 7 RTM and SP1
  • 13/04/2011: Implemented Activated Amount of time to wait workaround.

If you are running a Cacti EZ 0.6 based on CentOS 4.x inside a Hyper V Virtual Machine you will see that the machines system time runs out of sync, but you have configured NTP correctly.

Symtoms:

  • If Cacti EZ runs for about one hour and you may see a time difference of ~90 seconds to your NTP time.
  • "ntpdate -u ntp.example.com" command shows you differences to the current time whenever you execute it.

Solution:

title CentOS (2.6.9-100.EL.plus.c4smp) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-100.EL.plus.c4smp ro root=LABEL=/ clock=pit initrd /initrd-2.6.9-100.EL.plus.c4smp.img