Category Archives: Server Support

MAS 90 Patch Issue

I recently decided to be brave and install a hotfix rollup/service pack to our MAS 90 4.3 install.  I believe we were on patch 3 and I would be installing patch 20.  My goal was to clear up some oddball Windows 7 issues that we were having (the exact nature of which I cannot recall unfortunately).

After installing the patch everything looked okay.  It appeared that the client upgrade was somewhat optional since it only upgraded the help files (though I did it anyway just to be sure), and when opening some of the companies in the database I got an unexpected upgrade notice (unexpected since the system was patched and not upgraded):

For all but one of the companys, getting this “Data files have not been converted for this company” message wasn’t an issue.  However for one of the companies in our database we would receive this error, go through ‘Company Maintenance’ to upgrade it, then receive a message that said that there was nothing to upgrade, but then get the “have not been converted” message again when trying to go into the database.

What was odd was that under ‘Company Maintenance’, the ‘Common Information’ module for the company was listed as version “4.09” (which so far as I know, wasn’t even a production release version of MAS 90).  Every other module in every other company was listed as “4.30”.  I am unsure as to how MAS works in the background, but when I looked at the files through a hex editor it did appear that they reporting that they were version “4.09” (however in hindsight it would appear that this value was ‘pushed in’ rather than ‘pulled out’ of the tables).  Ordinarily it would probably be worth restoring the data and trying to figure out what went wrong, but for reasons I’ll not get into the application had already been used for more than two weeks (outside of that company of course).

As luck would have it, I needed to perform some operating system tests a couple weeks earlier and had a test copy of the virtual server that hosts our MAS installation and the data was from before the upgrade.  I tried copying the tables over and a couple other little things, but after nothing worked out I decided to try and upgrade the test copy of the database to see why the upgrade to that company failed, only…it didn’t.  It worked fine.  I then copied over that copy of the company over to the production MAS.

What happened next was rather odd, but MAS is a bit of an odd product.  The version number was still reported as “4.09”, but in poking around I opened the ‘Copy’ utility under ‘Company Maintenance’ with the thought that I would copy another company’s ‘Common Information’ set over to see if the version stayed the same.  I thought better of it again (this wasn’t the first time I mulled it over) and I canceled out and then for whatever reason the version number for ‘Common Information’ was properly reported and the upgrade error went away.

Upgrading to Server 2008

I’m a little late on this, but it has more to do with what’s supported on Server 2008 and having the time to upgrade the servers.  Of note are the two bigger issues when upgrading:

  • One of my servers was formally a Server 2000 box and as such doesn’t have the largest hard drive.  Now existing as a Server 2003 virtual machine I decided to boost the drive size.  This required boosting the drive size in Hyper-V, changing the simple dynamic disk to a basic disk by using this Microsoft tip (sorry I don’t remember which site gave me the tip), and then finishing up with PartedMagic.
  • Next up is removing/uninstalling Powershell.  Since my disks were low on space I was rather diligent about removing the compressed patch uninstall files under the Windows directory so I didn’t have the Powershell uninstall sitting around anywhere. Since I had no other choice, I went through a lengthy process of building an un-SP* Server 2003 virtual machine just so I could get the Powershell uninstall files.  To save others the pain I am sharing the files here.

As well, perhaps due to the age of the OS on the box, the Frontpage extensions had a nasty hook into the OS with the constant upgrade error of “setup has detected that Frontpage server extensions is installed on this computer” blah blah blah.  I paced through the tip here and the one that did it was deleting everything in the registry labeled “web server extensions”.

Does Anyone Else Use Microsoft RMS?

I think not, which leads to a dearth of searchable content when I encounter an issue.

My latest round of technical snafus that I’ve encountered with Microsoft’s digital rights management software for Windows 2003 revolve around the fact that I’d like to upgrade the server to Windows Server 2008.  I’d love even more to port it to the 64 bit Windows Server 2008 R2, but I gave up on ever getting that to work.

However I did get a virtual lab install of the server to upgrade to regular old 32 bit Server 2008, except that RMS on 2008 runs off of SQL (express) 2005.  Unfortunately my existing install of RMS was running on the old MSDE 2000.  After making sure that the SQL upgrade worked, I upgraded MSDE on the server to Express and everything seemed to run okay, except that occasionally the DRMS_Logging service wouldn’t start.  I’d start it back, and at some point in time it would stop (sometimes stopping right away after I tried to start it).  Finally, I couldn’t get it to start at all (to be fair to myself I figuring it was a timing issue with IIS since cycling IIS seemed to get the RMS service to start, though obviously this turned out to be a coincidence).

When I first looked at the server I noticed that I was getting ‘file full’ SQL errors, which I figured came about because SQL Express was hitting it’s space limit.  When I looked at the MOM/Onepoint database I noticed that it had grown quite large.  I looked up how to purge data and the posts all seemed to go back to the ‘sqlagent’ running a process that ran a stored procedure that handled the ‘grooming’.  After messing around with the SQL Express installer a bit looking for the agent install I’d found that although the SQL agent at least appeared to be included with MSDE 2000, it’s not with 2005.  I then went through the database and determined that the procedure ‘dbo.MOMXGrooming’ was the winner.  After executing that and shrinking the DB and files it cleared up the SQL space issue.  Yet still, the DRMS_Logging service wouldn’t start.

I looked at the logging database for RMS and it was rather large as well, but with no built in grooming procedure I just dropped the table and recreated it (backing up first of course).  The service still wouldn’t start, no errors, no nothing.  I figured that even though it wasn’t working it was worth looking at the web management piece to see if it would let me configure it.  When I tried to pull it up, the site kicked out an error saying that it could not run because the event viewer was full – the application event log had filled up with SQL space errors.  After purging the log, the service started and people could get into their documents yet again.

Obscure IIS 7 Issue

On my WSUS implementations on my Windows 2008 servers I’ve an issue on two occasions where clients become unable to download the wuident.cab file.  Attempting to manually download the file results in a “403-Forbidden: Access is denied” error.  The first time I was getting the error I had an update to the Windows Update Service that I had been putting off, and after installing it the error cleared up.  The second time it came up only one of my update servers had the issue and I was befuddled as (just like the first time) the server was working fine and then began getting the issue seemingly out of the blue (more than likely due to an update of some sort?  The DPM install on the same server?).  One caveat though was that it all worked fine locally.

After hunting through the GUI and checking permissions I finally tracked down this web link.  For some reason the ‘<location path=”Default Web Site/SimpleAuthWebService”>’ section of the applicationhost.config file was getting set to all the ‘NoRemote’ settings.  After setting the handler section to “<handlers accessPolicy=”Read, Script” />” the WSUS began functioning properly again.

I’m not a total gluten for the GUI, but it would be nice to know where it’s purview ended and the text based editing began (maybe an embedded link in the GUI?).  It could also be that I’m not quite familiar enough with it as well since I’m constantly having to switch between the 6 and 7 interfaces.

SharePoint upgrade with a side of Metabase

After upgrading from SharePoint 2 to 3 our content came up, but no changes could be made and when trying to sign on (via the “Sign In” link) I was getting an error of “Server Application Unavailable” and an event 1062 on the server with the text:

It is not possible to run two different versions of ASP.NET in the same IIS process. Please use the IIS Administration Tool to reconfigure your server to run the application in a separate process.

What was aggravating on this count was that everything looked to be ASP ‘2’ (2.0.50727), but while digging I discovered that the ‘images’ and ‘inc’ virtual directories under ‘_layouts’ were set to ‘1.1’ (v1.1.4322).  The ‘inc’ path didn’t even exist and after creating it, it stuck to the ASP.net setting of 2.  The ‘images’ virtual directory was a different story as it kept reverting back to 1.1.  I finally recalled from a certification test that if nothing else the metabase.xml file for IIS contains all the settings for the web server and it can be edited by hand.  After looking into the file I discovered that the ‘images’ virtual directory had two entries, one with 2 and one with 1.1.  I deleted the 1.1 and the settings stuck to 2 when IIS was cycled; but unfortunately the error persisted.

It turned out that, even though it couldn’t be changed in the GUI, the ‘_layouts’ directory was set to 1.1.  I manually changed it in the metabase.xml file by copying the settings over from the ‘inc’ section and after cycling IIS the sign-in function worked and the error was gone!

Now to fix all the permissions on our custom web parts that got copied by the upgrade process and were set to the default folder permissions.