Posts Tagged ‘windows’

May
11
2010

FIX: VPN server on 2008, no data goes through

This post isn’t a regular “fix” in the sense that I point out a problem that is often overlooked or badly documented. It’s just that after spending so many hours chasing this problem, I felt compelled to share it in case it can help, even though it makes little sense.

The setup: I want to add VPN access to my corporate network, consisting of a few servers behind a Linksys/Tomato router. Most servers are Windows 2008 virtualized on VmWare ESX4i servers (but that doesn’t really make any difference.) The VPN server will be placed on a windows 2008 machine that currently serves WSUS (updates) and anti-virus deployment. DNS, DHCP, domain controller, that’s all on other machines.

I followed the guides I could find on the net, but every time I would be able to log my user on to the VPN, but not access anything (not ping any host).

Finally, I resolved this by uninstalling the role from the Server Admin page, rebooting that box, re-installing the role and re-installing the feature.

It worked right away!

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Jan
14
2009

WSUS 3 installation fails at IIS Compression

This one has been an incredible pain as I’ve spent several hours on this and the web seems low on solutions.

Situation: I removed WSUS3 because I needed to recreate the database, which happens at install. The uninstall failed and could not remove WSUS. I deleted the files manually and used the MSI toolkit to remove it entirely. The WSUS3 installer then worked but failed at the very end when it reaches the step “IIS Compression”.

By reviewing the logfiles in temp, I could spot the first major error that triggered the rollback:

Error CustomActions.Dll InstallPsfsip: Failed to load dll (Error 0x8007007E: The specified module could not be found.)

Error CustomActions.Dll RemovePsfsip: Failed to load dll (Error 0x8007007E: The specified module could not be found.)

Many forums suggested to unregister psfsip.dll, reinstall SQL, clear up the registry, remove wsus certserver service, do a somersault, nothing worked for me.

Finally I found this post that explained that the problem is actually with .NET Framework that is damaged. Microsoft support recommended to use the cleanup_tool.exe utility.

So I did. I zapped all .NET Framework versions, then rebooted, then reinstalled .NET 3.5, then installed WSUS3 and it worked fine!

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Nov
11
2008

How to recover deleted files from Windows with Knoppix

Sure, lots of tools are out there that will do just that, but they mostly suffer from two major problems:

  • Many are not free.
  • Installing the software to recover your files will most probably overwrite some of the files that were needing recovery in the first place, rendering the whole operation pointless.

Here’s what I did to recover a friend’s photos from an accidental recycle bin emptying.

1. Download and burn a CD of Knoppix (I used 5.1.1). With this, we’ll be able to boot to a completely seperated operating system and access the files by mounting the hard drive read-only. This way, there is absolutely no chance that our work would corrupt of break the files that we wish to recover.

2. Shutdown the windows computer gracefully if not already. If the machine was suspended or in hibernation, the filesystem will be hard to access via the linux tools. A full shutdown ensures that evreything is properly closed.

3. Boot the Knoppix CD. At the welcome screen, type this command to boot the text only system:

knoppix 2

4. Insert a USB key to copy the recovered files and mount it

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

5. You can then view the files available for recovery:

ntfsundelete /dev/hda1

6. To recover all the pictures that are at least 75% recoverable, I used this command:

ntfsundelete -d /mnt/sda1/ -m *.jpg -p 75 /dev/dha1

7. Unmount the key and reboot

umount /dev/sda1
shutdown -h now

Voilà!

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