technical solutions and commentary

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A client hosting several web sites in on Windows 2000 Server w/ IIS 5 had some issues with the server processing ASP pages. IIS would display an error for any of the hosted sites when an ASP page was accessed. We tested the HTML pages and they worked without any issues.

The local admin had removed Tomcat and Java components from the server prior to ASP pages not processing. We tried several things to fix this issue including re-registering the aspdll.dll on the server… didn’t work. What finally fixed the problem was registering the oleaut32.dll on the server. From the system32 folder at a command prompt type: regsvr32 oleaut32.dll (this is apparently an OLE automation DLL according to sources located with Google).

After this was complete the ASP pages began processing successfully again. No Reboot Required.
Permissions had to be reapplied on the site to allow the IUSR account to read the files in the web site directories. However I believe this was probably related to some other troubleshooting steps that were attempted before I was involved.

A customer with an internal portal that has a web page to e-mail from. Sending mail to external domains would work, but sending to the internal Exchange mailboxes would not. Was working fine - able to send internal and external messages - until the portal was reconfigured to use the SMTP service on the Exchange 2000 Server (was previously using the SMTP service on the portals IIS server).

The portal web e-mail form used a non-existent account to act as the sending email address (portal@domain.com) from the web page. The admin added an e-mail alias of portal@domain.com to an Exchange account as a secondary SMTP address. After the RUS ran, about 15 minutes later, the portal web page could send mail internally and externally.

Exchange obviously checked the Address Lists to see if the originating address was actually valid and when it could not find the portal@domain.com address it assumed somebody was spoofing an address.

There is an issue with roaming profiles not wanting to load when users log onto a workstation. The standard network error appears about not being able to load your roaming profile. In addition, the system may fail to automatically create the roaming profile folder for newly created user accounts. What causes this problem is that ‘offline folders’ is enabled on the share containing the user profiles. Once the ‘offline folders’ option is disabled on the profile shares the roaming profiles will work properly.

It has been experienced that that not everybody having a roaming profile in the share with ‘offline folders’ enabled will have this problem. So if you are getting profile errors for some end users and not others; even when their profiles are contained in the same share, make sure ‘offline folders’ is disabled on the share.

If disabling the offline files on the profiles share still doesn’t resolve the issue, try disabling BetBIOS over TCP/IP on the workstation with the error. Review the Microsoft KB Article 831651 for known issues with XP pre-SP2 workstations.

Reminder: The user profile share does not have to be enabled for ‘offline folders’ because roaming profiles cache to the local machine by default anyway.

Terminal Services can grant users the ability shadow each other’s sessions with a little more effort than using Citrix’s MetaFrame Presentation Server add-on.

To let your users shadow each other, you’ll first need to change a setting in Administrative Tools.
Click on the RDP-Tcp connection inside the TS Configuration window.

1. From the Permissions tab, click Advanced.
2. Select the Users permission entry and choose View/Edit.
3. In the resulting window, grant the Users group the Remote Control right.
To discover the users logged on to the same server you are using, type query user at a command prompt. You’ll receive each logged in user’s username, session name and ID, status, and their idle time and login time. The session ID of the user is what you want.

To shadow, type shadow <session ID> into the
command prompt. The user will get a dialog box requesting permission to let you
shadow their session. If they accept, you’re in. To stop the session, type
Control-*.

If the user is on another TS server, type query user to list the users on that remote TS server.

To shadow the remote user, type shadow <session ID>/server:<terminal
server name>.

If you’re particularly handy with scripting, you can write code to make this process easier for your users. You can expose many useful TS hooks through Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) using VBScript.

Source: Redmond Magazine article entitled “7 Terminal Services Tips

If you try set quota limits greater than 2,097,151KB through the GUI, on the AD User Object or through the Exchange System Manager, you get the error “The value for ‘Issue warning at (KB)’ is not valid. Specify a value from 0 through 2097151”. To work around this, use “ADSI Edit” from the Windows Support Tools to bypass the GUI limitations to edit the values within Active Directory directly.

In ADSI Edit expand the Domain tree, locate the user you want to increase the limits on and edit the following attributes:

mDBStorageQuota = Issue warning at (KB)
mDBOverQuotaLimit = Prohibit Send at (KB)
mDBOverHardQuotaLimit = Prohibit Send and Receive at (KB)

All of these values are in KB, so for example, ‘4096000′ would be about 4GB.

Note: Before modifying this setting for a person’s a PST or OST file in Outlook version prior to 2003, see Microsoft KB Article 830336 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830336 - “The .pst file has a different format and folder size limit in Outlook 2003”) because of the size limit of a PST.