Welcome to Brendon Davis

SVCHost failures

Autor brendon | 29.01.2010 | Category Rant

Ever had a server that you really didn’t want to rebuild which could not run svchost.exe without half a dozen services failing?? A Neat little article over at HP shows how to spawn a problematic SVCHost services in its own process tree.  Short Answer:

1. net stop <service_name>
2. sc config <service_name> type=own
3. net start <service_name>

Now this doesn’t fix the problem but at least a single dodgy service doesn’t affect the stability of other critical services.

<Update 29-01-10> I forgot to mention that you can view what services are listining on each process using the command ‘tasklist /svc’ </Update>

Massive Book Sales lost by people using ‘Book Loan’ scheme

Autor brendon | 27.01.2010 | Category Rant, eBook

I love this, with the proliferation of eBooks someone has looked into the state of book distribution, sales and ownership as the RIAA would. They have raised a very important point. Book publishers are losing billions of dollars every year due to the practice of ‘book lending’. Society has become blasé to the questionable practice of loaning books from a library. A single book is purchased from a distributor and then without royalty or fee, read multiple times by people. Consider for a moment, the poor artists writers. They get no additional revenue from multiple readings their work. If this were music, it would be argued as illegal!

Someone decided to do an RIAA style study of online sharing of books. In response, Eric Hellman has done up an awesome article about the implications of physical book loaning. Consider the fact that as few books are released in digital format, a physical book must b purchased to create the digital version. Almost sounds like the same thing a library does… (almost)

My personal opinion is still the same, make the content available for people at an appropriate price and most will do the right thing by you. Publishers should embrace the change because there is NO WAY they can stop it.

Windows Firewall on 2003 DC

Autor brendon | 27.01.2010 | Category Rant

Ever wanted to enable the Windows Firewall on a Server 2003 DC but didn’t know how?? MS KB 555381 could help out. I recommend making the necessary changes to a GPO and then assigning it to the Domain Controller’s OU. Remember that with preferences, you can even deploy the necessary registry changes.

Exchange ActiveSync Heartbeat

Autor brendon | 21.01.2010 | Category TechStuff

Most people don’t realise this but for ‘Push’ email to function, the “Client” must keep an open TCP session to the “Server”. Outlook (by default) does this using RPC over the LAN or VPN, constantly exchanging data, even when there is no new information to send.

Mobile phones are a little different, for one they use HTTPS to sync data. Secondly, data traffic is generally more expensive so when there is no new data, you want the phone to send as few data packets possible. When you create a ‘Publish Outlook Anywhere’ rule with ISA 2006, this automatically configures the firewall to let TCP sessions stay open for up to 30 min without seeing any traffic. Meaning that when there is no new email, the phone will send a single data packet every 30 min.

Unfortunately if your running any other type of firewall (ASA, PIX, NetGear, ISA 2004, etc.) you will need to manually configure this setting. By default, most firewalls will forcefully close a session that is idle for 5 min for security reasons AND on most SOHO firewall’s you can’t change this setting.

Moral of this story, if you use ActiveSync with push enabled on client mobile phones and don’t use ISA 2006 as your Internet firewall, you will likely have sessions from mobile devices disconnected causing Error 3033 on the Exchange Server Event Log. There is a Microsoft KB Article that shows simple change you can make to the ActiveSync web.config file to specify the maximum TCP session limit for your firewall to 5 min. eg,

<add key="MinHeartbeatInterval" value="60"></add>
<add key="MaxHeartbeatInterval" value="300"></add>