Parallels Boot Camp woes 
Thursday, June 12, 2008, 11:49 AM
So I use a Mac. I have used Macs for years. However, I hadn't owned one for about 4 years until Apple switched to Intel processors. Now we can run Windows natively on a Mac. Excellent. It's like 2 computers in one. And there are 2 ways that you can run Windows on a Mac. You can dual boot (Apple calls this feature Boot Camp). Or you can use virtualization software like Parallels or VMWare Fusion to run a virtual machine with Windows simultaneously along side the native Mac OS X.

Then the virtualization people got creative and decided to let you virtualize your Boot Camp installation. This way if you dual boot and use virtualization, you only have to have 1 Windows installation.

Simply put. This has botched my Windows Vista SP1 installation. It had been running beautifully using Boot Camp, and then I decided to try Parallels to access the Vista installation from Mac OS X without having to restart. Bad idea. about 4 working hours later, I still use my Windows programs under Boot Camp. Instead Microsoft sends me to an Internet Explorer only shell and tells me how to get a genuine copy of Windows.

My business is a Microsoft partner. My copy of windows is genuine.

Now I've reactivated Windows Vista SP1 twice, rebooted between Mac OS X, Boot Camp and Vista in Parallels about 12 times. Updated Parallels to the newest version & reinstalled their tools in Vista. And on and on.

As convenient as a feature this virtualizing BootCamp may be, it is not worth the frustration & lost productivity that occurs every time that Microsoft releases a major update.

As soon as I get Vista happy again in Boot Camp, I'm not using Parallels anymore to run the Boot Camp OS. Bad idea. Waste of 1/2 of a business day where I'm supposed to be generating revenue helping clients with their networks and systems. Not nursing my own crippled Vista installation back to the land of trusted functionality....

[ 2 comments ] ( 37 views )   |  permalink  |   ( 3 / 795 )
SBS An error occurred while configuring a component error message when you run the Configure E-mail and Internet Connection Wizard in Windows Small Business Server 2003 fixed by enabling WMI Server 
Thursday, May 1, 2008, 12:55 PM
I thought this one might be helpful to others. I got this error: "An error occurred while configuring a component", running the Configure E-mail and Internet Connection Wizard on an SBS box for a client. Doing some googling, I came to MS KB ID #875421, which was actually for a different problem. But it did reference \Program Files\Microsoft Windows Small Business Server\Support\Icwlog.txt

There I found the following two lines:

Error 0x80070422 returned from call to WMIGetIPAddress().
Error 0x80070422 returned from call to CRFireCommit::Commit().

And obviously the first one points to a problem obtaining the local IP address via WMI. So I looked at the services and sure enough WMI Service was stopped & disabled. I think this was done either by myself or an employee in the past when troubleshooting some lock-ups. In any case, WMI Service is usually a good thing to have running (and by default it is always running). So I set the startup type back to automatic, started it up, reran the SBS CEACIC wizard, and ta-da!

Problem fixed.

[ add comment ]   |  permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 879 )
Fixed SUS 1.0 wouldn't uninstall 
Saturday, March 22, 2008, 08:18 PM
This post is long overdue. Within a month of the previous post, I did fix the problem. I finally ended up being able to fix it, by first downloading from Microsoft the SUS 1.x installer, reinstalling it right on top of itself, and then the uninstall in add/remove programs finally worked. At that point I was able to upgrade the WSUS 2.0 install to 3.0.

I don't know why I didn't try this earlier. I thought I did, but it didn't work. Maybe so, but I am not positive. In any case, it has been working well running WSUS 3.0 now for months.

No thanks to Microsoft for making one of my original posts in their WSUS discussion group disappear. I honestly think that they removed it because they couldn't figure out an answer to it, and I was the only one person out of thousands of users who was having the problem. I've seen this once before too. What gives? I was able to pull my original post up in the Google Groups cache of that Microsoft newsgroup. But in searching the actual microsoft group, it was nowhere to be found. This is the second time that I have seen such behavior. And the other time it was not with one of my own posts, but instead with a MS Office problem that several other people were reporting, in which they were kind of criticizing Microsoft, and for which Microsoft hadn't been able to provide a solution.

I really hope that the disappearance of these threads was just a coincidence, but so far, it doesn't seem that way. In any case, it's pretty sad...

[ 1 comment ] ( 37 views )   |  permalink  |   ( 3 / 695 )
WSUS 3.0 won't install due to the presence of SUS 1.0, which won't uninstall 
Thursday, September 13, 2007, 03:56 PM
I receive the following errors upon trying to uninstall SUS 1.0 (remember this machine currently also has WSUS 2.0 installed, although I don't know whether this makes any difference).

First Error:
============
There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personell or package vendor.

Second Error:
=============
Fatal error during installation


*Then the installer quits

In the application log we find the following errors, which all occur within a few seconds of eachother:

First Error: Event ID 1004 Source MsiInstaller
============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU', component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}' failed. The resource 'D:\SUS\wusync\WUSyncSvc.exe' does not exist.

Second Error: Event ID 1001 Source MsiInstaller
=============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU' failed during request for component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}'

Third Error: Event ID 1004 Source MsiInstaller
============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU', component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}' failed. The resource 'D:\SUS\wusync\WUSyncSvc.exe' does not exist.

Fourth Error: Event ID 1001 Source MsiInstaller
=============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU' failed during request for component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}'

Fifth Error: Event ID 1004 Source MsiInstaller
============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU', component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}' failed. The resource 'D:\SUS\wusync\WUSyncSvc.exe' does not exist.

Sixth Error: Event ID 1001 Source MsiInstaller
============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU' failed during request for component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}'

Seventh Error: Event ID 1004 Source MsiInstaller
==============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU', component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}' failed. The resource 'D:\SUS\wusync\WUSyncSvc.exe' does not exist.

Eighth Error: Event ID 1001 Source MsiInstaller
=============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU' failed during request for component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}'

Nineth Error: Event ID 11721 Source MsiInstaller
=============
Product: Microsoft Software Update Services -- Error 1721. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Action: WUSyncRemove, location: D:\SUS\wusync\WUSyncSvc.exe, command: /unregserver

Tenth Error: Event ID 11725 Source MsiInstaller
=============
Product: Microsoft Software Update Services -- Removal failed.



[ add comment ]   |  permalink  |   ( 3 / 714 )
Xen is better 
Wednesday, April 25, 2007, 09:18 PM
Well, after the 3.2 update, just about all of our problems were fixed. We applied it within the first week of April. But I think it may have introduced a new issue. We have a Windows Small Business Server 2003 Std R2 server that we use for VPN connections. It is a virtual machine on our XenExpress server. Ever since the update, we can no longer connect to other VMs on our XenExpress server over the VPN. We can connect to other systems in the office over the VPN, but not any other VMs on the XenExpress server. The VMs can communicate with eachother fine via IP. It just seems to be the VPN connections that are unable to communicate with the XenExpress VMs. I have looked at the firewalls and I don't think it is a firewall issue.

Again, it seems that it was clearly introduced at the time that we upgraded from 3.1 to 3.2.

We are VERY pleased with the XenExpress server overall, but this little issue would increase our productivity, and allow us to NOT move backward from the solutions and technology we've been using. XenSource is of course a big leap forward in other ways. Did I mention that we like it?? :-)

[ 1 comment ] ( 16 views )   |  permalink  |   ( 3.3 / 12 )

Back Next