#troubleshooting

Alright, so the title for this post seems pretty out there, but I can guarantee you that I have come across this on multiple machines. I'm not saying "If you install Windows Media Player 11 on your computer, networking will break," I'm just saying that if you experience the symptoms outlined below and you're stuck, trying uninstalling WM11 and the WM11 codec; you just might get lucky. So, one of the other techs in the office calls me over: He's been beating his head against a wall with a remote user being unable to get internet connectivity on his Windows XP workstation. The tech has been on this thing for hours, tried just about everything he can think of shy of a workstation rebuild, and he's looking for some team support. I have him throw the ticket my way; I figure that another set of eyes can only be helpful. With a bit of digging, we isolate the symptoms: Full connectivity to the local server is available Name resolution is still solid Pings are working to both local and remote addresses Anything higher up the stack than pings only work locally, and bail as soon as you cross a router. This includes file shares, RDP, FTP, HTTP/s, MAPI, and I'm guessing anything else higher than layer 4…

One of our techs recently ran across a problem with a new Windows Vista Business laptop trying to synchronize offline files to a Windows Server 2000 file server. Synchronization would start, but the Sync Center in Vista would show failures for every single file that was attempted to be sync'd. The error message read something to the extent of "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process". We tried the usual: checking permissions on the folders being offline'd (I know that's probably not a word, but you get what I mean); deleting his local cache of Offline Files; disabling and then re-enabling Offline Files. But we just kept on banging our heads against the same error. At first, just about any web search for the error resulted in either something about Windows Home Server or databases or something of the like. Eventually, though, we struck gold: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296264/en-us: Configuring opportunistic locking in Windows…

We'll start off with Inactive accounts first, and then work on the disabled accounts after that. Active Directory in Server 2003 has a nice user/computer attribute called lastLogonTimeStamp that can help us keep track of inactive accounts. If you have ever tried to use that attribute, however, you might have come up with something like this…

Dell, Broadcom, and Microsoft have decided to partner up with the release of a technology called TCP/IP Offloading, or TOE for TCP/IP Offload Engine. It was bundled together in the Scalable Network Pack (SNP), included and enabled by default with Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Server 2003. The gist of this technology is to enable high-load enterprise applications to be easily scalable. For those of you familiar with the OSI model, TOE moves layer 3 and 4 processing out of the OS and CPU into the NIC. The idea is to better utilize advances in network card performance and free up CPU cycles for other purposes, such as application-side processing. This all seems well and good, if they saw fit to properly test the stuff out against their own applications!…