Andrew Hill's Blog

After getting the Windows Phone 7 NoDo update yesterday, I headed to Starbucks to try out the WISPr technology that will automatically connect smart phones to AT&T hotspots when in range.

It appeared to work flawlessly.  When I entered Starbucks, I noticed that my Wi-Fi icon at the top of the screen started showing a signal.  Then, I went into settings to see what was going on and it showed that I was connected to “attwifi” and shown in the screen shot. 

There wasn’t any browser redirection or agreement to accept before getting access to the internet. It’s pretty sweet.

I know Starbucks has changed their WiFi accessibility several times in the past year by removing restrictions on access and making it easier to connect.  So, Starbucks WiFi is already free. But, has Starbucks and AT&T really made it that easy or is WISPr playing a role.  The next test will be to try a protected at&t hotspot.

Microsoft and AT&T finally released Window Phone 7 “NoDo” update for the Samsung Focus to the wild today.  I’ve been nervously awaiting the update because I had used the CheveronWP7.Updater  tool to update my phone prior to Microsoft’s official release and because Microsoft publicly stated that the phone “would not be updateable from Microsoft” and “the only way to fix the phone is to flash it.” 

The good news is that I did receive an update today via the Zune software.  It  was an update called “Samsung update for Windows Phone”.  I have a buddy who hadn’t updated his phone with CheveronWP7.Updater and he received 2 updates one for Feb-2011 and one for Mar-2011.  My guess is that the Samsung update that I received separately was bundled with one of his two updates.

Here’s what I know about the version status between updates on my phone:

My buddy’s phone after receiving all the updates through the Zune software is at the exact same versions as my phone which was partly updated via the CheveronWP7.Updater tool.

It also appears that I have at least one of the AT&T specific features that Microsoft previous disclosed installed on my phone.  The “AT&T Address Book “ feature appears to be there when I go to Settings, Email & Accounts, add an account.

As for the WISPr protocol support, I’ll have to wait to test that out when I’m close to an AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot.  I’m headed to Starbuck’s tonight to test WISPr out.

It seems that my phone’s performance is better now with the update that I received today verses just having the “CheveronWP7.Updater” delivered updates.

So far, my phone appears to be behaving as if I had received all of the updates through the Zune software.

Per Microsoft, AT&T testing for the Windows Phone 7 “NoDo” updates are supposed to be complete in “early April 2011”.  However, today is April 15 and is now officially mid-April and heading toward the end of April.  On the Windows Phone blog, Eric Hautala says, “these tests are important, and they’re just not quite done. I expect to have more to say soon—so please stay tuned. “

After sending @att several tweets about the update status over the last few weeks they finally replied with the response, “We don’t have any news to share yet, but stay tuned!”

Ok guys, staying tuned is pretty much all we have been doing.  It would be nice to know the accurate status of the update and frankly what is the hold up.

This whole update mess and delay has caused users to be impatient with the process and try to get the update anyway.  One such “homebrew” way was released by Chris Walsh, who came up with an easy way using Microsoft tools to update every Windows Phone.  Chris later took the file required for his update process down from his website after Microsoft requested him do so.

Recently, Brandon Watson on the Windows Phone Radio #22 podcast stated, that phones updated with the ChevronWP7.updater tool would be updated to NoDo, “but beyond that they would not be updateable from Microsoft” and “the only way to fix the phone is to flash it.”  Brandon also stated that “We’re [Microsoft] trying to avoid that.”, but goes on to say “If you’re a customer and you use it your on your own.”  So, for those who have updated their phone in this manner, it’s going to be a wait to see how this will impact receiving future updates.

An easy modification to the Forefront Endpoint Protection “Computer List Report” can be made to sort the signatures versions by number.  The default canned report has the list of computers sorted by computer name which is a logical sort order, but not so useful if you want to monitor the report looking for computers who’s antivirus version is out of date.

To make the change you use the SQL Server Reporting Services website along with Report Builder 3.0.

• Launch Report Builder, navigate to the the report server  and open the “Computer List.rdl” report from the following location:  http://<server>/ReportServer/Pages/ReportViewer.aspx?/Forefront Endpoint Protection_FCS/Antimalware/Antimalware Protection Summary Report/Computer List.rdl is a subreport of the Computer List Report.rdl.

Note:  You may want to make a backup of the report before modifying the original.

• Right click on the item that says “=(ComputersTable_Details_Group) and click on Group Properties.
• Click on Sorting and then add SignatureVersion and ComputerName to the sort order as shown below.

• Save the report back to the report server.

It would be nice to have the date of the antivirus definition included on the report like the FCS v1 report.  The date of the antivirus definition would be helpful in determining how out of date a virus definition is.

Also, on the wish list is to have the dates and times on the report reflect the local time zone instead of UTC time. (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/FCSNext/thread/fbabae75-de51-481f-b636-aba378650a7d)  Unless the times are in local time they are pretty much useless.

I started deploying System Center Configuration Manager to all of my servers today.  I stumbled across an issue on my Windows Server 2008 x64 machines that I didn’t see on the others.  The SCCM client installed successfully, but where is the Configuration Manager icon that is normally in the Control Panel? 

It turns out there is a control panel icon called “View 32-bit Control Panel Items” and inside there are the missing SCCM icons (see below.)

I use Data Protection Manager 2010 (DPM) to backup the Exchange “application” database along with a host based backup of the Exchange server running in Hyper-V.  When doing so, DPM complains about backups rightfully so because the Exchange database is being backed up in two different methods.

The error message in DPM says “DPM had detected a discontinuity in the log chain for Exchange Database Mailbox Database…. (ID 30216 Details: Unspecified error (0×80004005))”

Microsoft has released a hotfix for this issue: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975354/en-us

However, it appears that the hotfix is not needed on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, which is my case.

The KB article does say that a registry entry is needed to allow the host based Hyper-V backup of the server to backup the server properly without messing up the application level database backup.

The KB article says…

“Note You may still experience issue 3 after you install this hotfix. You can apply the following registry entry in a virtual machine to fix issue 3 for that virtual machine:

Location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Virtualization\VssRequestor
Name: BackupType
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0 or 1

If this registry entry is created and its value is set to 1, application backup will not be affected by the virtual machine backup operation on the server that is running Hyper-V. If this registry entry does not exist, or if its value is 0, issue 3 occurs.”

With this registry setting set to 1 on a “bare metal” server restore, first restore the Hyper-V host based backup and then the Exchange application based backup on top of it to recover the server and application database to the fullest.

This is also an issue when backing up SQL Servers in the same manner.

The DPM error related to SQL says “Change Tracking has been marked inconsistent due to on the following reasons 1. Unexpected shutdown of the protected server 2. Unforeseen issue in DPM Bitmap failover during cluster failover. (ID 30500)”

I’m installing Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 (FEP) on a System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 R3 server that has SQL Server 2008 R2 installed in a way in which the SQL services are started with a domain account.

I ran into the following error during the FEP prerequisites verifications:,

Setup cannot verify the service principal name (SPN) for this account. Ensure that there is a single valid SPN entry for this account in the Active Directory Domain Services.

To fix the problem, I followed the steps from Romano Jerez blog post: http://blog-en.netvnext.com/2010/12/sql-errors-installing-fep-2010.html

Thanks Romano!

I installed Windows Server Update Services 3.0 SP2 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 server that already had SQL Server 2008 R2 installed.  When installing WSUS, I used the full version of SQL that was already installed for the WSUS database.  WSUS is working fine, but I have an error in Server Manager where it is monitoring the system services for WSUS.

I haven’t found a way to fix the underlying problem, but there is a way to get rid of the error from displaying in Server Manager.

Go to Server Manager, Roles, Windows Server Update Services, click Preferences in the System Services section, uncheck MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE to stop monitoring this service.  There is no need to monitor this service since WSUS isn’t using the Windows Internal Database.

Last week I accepted a couple application updates (Stock Map and Handyscan) to install like many before it. However, these application updates for some unknown reason made the apps unusable. After the update was applied, I tried to launch the app and received an error message that said “<app> license is invalid. Please purchase the product.” with a button to uninstall the app.

I doubt the problem was caused by anything the app developer did after talking to the developer for the Stock Map app, which by the way is an excellent visual stock tracking application.  You should try it out.

After talking to @WinPhoneSupport, it turns out the fix is to uninstall the app, clear the IE browsing history, turn off the phone, pull the battery, restart the phone and then reinstall the app.

If you run into a similar problem, I hope this helps.

I have had a need for a summary report with information on what was happening with my Exchange ActiveSync environment. For example: How many devices are connecting? What devices types are connecting? Who is connecting?

Of course you can setup security to only allow certain people or even certain devices to connect to Exchange, but what I wanted to know is what was really happening.

I found information on Microsoft TechNet that will do just this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb430775.aspx

To run the reports you will need to open up an Exchange Management Shell and run the following command:

Export-ActiveSyncLog -Filename: “C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1\u_ex110315.log” -StartDate:”03/14/11″ -EndDate:”03/15/11″ -UseGMT:$true -OutputPath:”c:\exreports\easreports”

You’ll need to modify the location of the IIS log files and the date range that you’re interested. You’ll also need to make sure the output path is a valid directory.

The resulting reports are CSV files that can be opened in Excel.  It would be nice if this could be automated to generate the reports, zip them up and email them.  Just having the reports available is better than nothing.