Shandy's Blog

Each month I try to post a personal review of what happened at vbCity during the previous month.

Helper Of The Month (HOTM)

Congratulations to Nino Priore, aka Priore for winning the January 2005 HOTM in one of the closest contests we have ever experienced at vbCity. At the beginning of the month at least 6 posters were with a good chance of winning the award. Nino came blazing through towards the last third of the month and proved uncatchable, winning by a big margin in the end.

.NET Fella

Congratulations to Ben Spencer aka Spebby for winning the January 2005 .NET Fella Award. Ben has maintained a prodigious post count over the last few months in the .NET forums and this was finally recognised officially by the vbCity leaders this month.

Newsletters

Two devCity Newsletters were sent out in January, on January 10th and January 25th.

vbCity sends out a community newsletter email once a month, usually around the last week. All registered vbCity members can choose to receive it by going to their profile, selecting preferences and then ticking the Yes, send me monthly Community Update mailing checkbox. You might notice some items from this post appear in the newsletter!

New Features

Probably the biggest news of the month at vbCity was the long awaited release of the new devCity web site. Although this web site boasts many excellent features probably the most awaited feature that for article submission. Previously articles submitted for publishing had to be formatted and published by Serge, which with his ever increasing workload was proving to be problematic. The new site allows any registered author to publish their article online in the format that the article will be displayed in. All that is required by the vbCity management is to request any minor corrections and then press the publish article button :-D. We are always on the look out for new authors so if you would like to join our team of authors start with Author Registration.

Serge added a new forum, Introduce Yourself where vbCity members can post a small piece about who they are so we can get to know one another a little bit better. It seems to have proved quite popular and already has some excellent and interesting posts in it. :)

Leader News

It's great to see rjhare back at vbCity after many months absence. Richie is our resident VBA expert (who has now been made the VBA forum moderator) but more importantly his humour posts are the stuff of legend at vbCity ;-) Worth a mention to is Richie's part in one of the most memorably threads at vbCity in my time of membership, ARE YOU A GEEK?? WELCOME BACK RICHIE :-D

I noticed that Arno, aka breakfast3001 and Dries, aka dries_neyrinck, have both started blogging. Welcome aboard Arno & Dries!

I also noticed Bill, aka wsh2 has made a huge contribution this month. I always think Bill provides some of the best examples of how to layout your code and for this reason alone his posts are worth looking at but in addition to this his answers are, IMHO, some of the best you'll see in the VB.Classic forums.

A number of vbCity leaders got re-elected as Microsoft MVPs this month. Amongst these were tom77757, jspano, Mike McIntyre, Metallisoft, IDontKnow and Deke. In addition xTab got elected as an MVP for the first time. Well done guys!

We also got to see Neil's Photographic Talents :)

Other News

One piece of sad news is that we have requested an end to Political & Religious Threads at vbCity. This has been a fairly contentious area for several months now and Serge has finally decided to act in light of a number of posts that went beyond what was considered acceptable social behaviour and contained personal insults. Hopefully the vbCity members will bear this in mind and understand why it has been done.

At the end of January we had a total around 367,000 posts and 135,600 registered users at vbCity.

Carrying on from my previous post Terminal Services And Remote Access Trouble I have another Terminal Services (S) & Remote Desktop (RD) issue on another server. This time I simply can't connect to the server at all. The RD client gives the following error:

The client could not connect to the remote computer

Remote connections might not be enabled or the computer might be too busy to accept new connections. It is also possible that the network problems are preventing your connection.

Please try connecting again later. If the problem continues to occur, contact your administrator.

I get OK & Help buttons. The help is useless ;-) I have contacted my administrator. I was no help either.

And the following error from the Terminal Services Client:

The client could not connect to the Terminal serve. The server may be too busy. Please try connecting later

I think the same team were responsible for RD & TS help files.

I then thought I knew what the issue was. The registry. Basically if I look at the registry entry for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TermService its obviously corrupted. The exported key was:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TermService]
"ErrorControl"=dword:00000001
"ObjectName"="LocalSystem"
"Type"=dword:00000010
"Description"="Provides a multisession environment that allows client devices to access a virtual Windows 2000 Professional desktop session and Windows-based programs running on the server."
"DisplayName"="Terminal Services"

Comparing this entry to ones in other, working serves showed the key to appear incomplete.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TermService]
"Start"=dword:00000002
"ErrorControl"=dword:00000001
"ImagePath"=hex(2):25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,6f,00,\
74,00,25,00,5c,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,74,\
00,65,00,72,00,6d,00,73,00,72,00,76,00,2e,00,65,00,78,00,65,00,00,00
"ObjectName"="LocalSystem"
"Type"=dword:00000010
"Description"="Provides a multisession environment that allows client devices to access a virtual Windows 2000 Professional desktop session and Windows-based programs running on the server."
"DisplayName"="Terminal Services"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TermService\Parameters]
"UseLicenseServer"=dword:00000000
"fInternetConnector"=dword:00000000
"Certificate"=hex:01,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,06,00,5c,00,52,53,41,31,\
48,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,3f,00,00,00,01,00,01,00,99,d3,52,ed,f0,c7,61,2e,a8,\
cd,eb,dd,f6,a3,d2,12,e9,fd,fd,e8,5e,bb,a8,eb,bf,01,bc,04,ae,b2,e5,9c,92,7a,\
7c,02,11,22,f7,db,e5,e1,34,91,03,fb,ec,f9,73,19,76,a4,86,3c,cf,7b,5f,f0,fb,\
86,6d,22,f5,bb,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,08,00,48,00,e0,00,de,ec,96,56,61,26,\
07,0f,4a,22,30,c6,8c,c3,ed,6d,d5,23,64,ec,34,b6,d9,b5,f1,d6,4b,bb,78,4b,c3,\
e5,74,c8,6a,5a,9d,0a,8d,66,e9,6c,ca,d8,f5,39,cd,8b,73,3d,f8,16,52,c4,18,21,\
52,05,b2,c1,0e,1d,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TermService\Performance]
"Close"="CloseTSObject"
"Collect Timeout"=dword:000003e8
"Collect"="CollectTSObjectData"
"Open Timeout"=dword:000003e8
"Open"="OpenTSObject"
"Library"="perfts.dll"
"Last Counter"=dword:00005af8
"Last Help"=dword:00005af9
"First Counter"=dword:00005a78
"First Help"=dword:00005a79
"Object List"="23160 23282"
"WbemAdapFileTime"=hex:00,20,2b,88,67,40,bf,01
"WbemAdapFileSize"=dword:00003110
"WbemAdapStatus"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TermService\Enum]
"0"="Root\\LEGACY_TERMSERVICE\\0000"
"Count"=dword:00000001
"NextInstance"=dword:00000001

Seeing the huge difference in the registry entries I decided the best policy would be to try and re-create he correct key entries so I uninstalled and re-installed TS via Add/Remove Windows Components. No effect. I also tried to manually enter the keys taken from another server. However, when I tried to manually add the Parameters sub key using RegEdit I got the error message Cannot rename New Key #1: The specified key name already exists. Type another name and try again.. Needless to say the key does not exist as a sub key of TermService. I then un-installed TS and tried to delete the entire TermService key. Whenever I do that using RegEdit I get the pretty useless error message Cannot delete TermService: Error while deleting key.. Using CoolReg I get the more useful error message of Access Denied. I changed permissions, booted to safe mode, booted to command prompt safe mode to try and delete the key all to no avail. I've even tried importing a registry key from a working server in. Again no joy. One interesting point is that all the subkeys bar the Parameters sub key imported.

At this point I thought I'd check if for some reason the actual service wasn't started and found to my dismay the problem was more profound than that. The service wasn't even listed in Services. I have given in for now. I know when I'm beaten ;-) Re-installing the OS isn't really an option. If anyone has any ideas how to get the Terminal Services service registered again let me know!

Yesterday I was working on a number of issues that required the rebooting of servers so a late evening was called for to avoid unnecessary inconveience to the users, damn them ;-) I won't go into the details of all the problems that needed resolving but will stick to one of them that basically has me stumped. Well OK a few of them have me stumped but one at a time ;-)

We used to run pcAnywhere as the method of connecting to PCs and servers remotely and to be fair it works reasonably well. However, recently (the last 18 months or so) we have migrated to Terminal Services and Remote Desktop. These technologies have proved less reliable than pcAnywhere, although I have to say when they are working I much prefer them, especially remote desktop.

Now the problem is that two of the servers (all our servers are W2000 SP4) will not allow connections via the Terminal Services (TS) or Remote Desktop (RD) Clients. To clarify that, one server allows you to connect once to it after rebooting, the other refuses any connections at all. In this post I'll stick to the one that at least works the once.

File Server 1, Allows Single TS/RD Client Connection After Reboot And Then Refuses All Future Connections

Now I have had this issue before on a number of our servers (including the one I currently have the problem on) and via the microsoft.public.windows.terminal_services newsgroup I managed to sort this out; many thanks to Vera Noest! When I examined the Event Log I discovered the following entry occurred whenever a TS/RD client was refused a connection:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: TermService
Event Category: None
Event ID: 55
Date: x
Time: x
User: N/A
Computer: x
Description:
Attempt to send a message to a disconnected communication port.
Data:
x ..

Using EventID.Net I tracked this issue down to Security Update for Microsoft Windows (840987), which had just been installed on all our file servers. Not all our file servers had the problem but around half a dozen did. By uninstalling critical update 840987 I moved onto not being able to get a TS/RD client connection to the server at all. However the event log error message changed to:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: TermService
Event Category: None
Event ID: 50
Date: x
Time: x
User: N/A
Computer: x
Description:
The RDP protocol component "DATA ENCRYPTION" detected an error in the protocol stream and has disconnected the client.
Data:
x ..

Re-visiting EventID.Net pointed me to "The RDP Protocol Component "DATA ENCRYPTION" Detected an Error..." error message and after following the instructions and rebooting the server TS/RD client connections worked a treat.

However, I missed one vital fact. I had previously set the Automatic Updates on our servers to Automatically download the updates, and install them on the schedule I specify. This meant that at 03:00 the next morning all the servers re-installed Security Update for Microsoft Windows (840987) :( So I uninstalled it again on the servers, altered the Automatic Updates on our servers back to Download the updates automatically and notify me when they are ready to be installed and thought I was sorted. Well it was except to this single server which is back to where I was at the beginning. It acts just as though the Security Update for Microsoft Windows (840987)was still installed. Believe me. It isn't. At least the entry is still missing from the list of updates in Add/Remove Programs and when I go to run Windows Update it wants to install it again.

So I'm stumped. I can't keep rebooting this server because it is our main file server. I may try and install and then remove Security Update for Microsoft Windows (840987) again and see if that helps. Other than that I am open to suggestions ...