Posts Tagged ‘vista’

Visual Studio Team Suite 2005 on Vista 64 bit

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

This post may simply be a product of my own ignorance, but hopefully it can help someone else out there in a similar situation.

So recently I was tasked with setting up a Vista Business 64-bit laptop for a developer in our office.  The needed applications are as follows:

SQL 2005 – full reporting and management tools

SQL 2008 – full reporting and management tools

VS Pro 2005

VS Pro 2008

VSTS 2005

VSTS 2005 add-on for database developers

Cisco VPN Client to connect to PIX

Office Suite

Adobe Fireworks CS4

I was told that the VSTS 2005 would not install on 64 bit Vista.  Well that right there made me want to do it.  I wasn’t about to let a new machine with 8GB of RAM go to waste by putting a 32-bit OS on it.  I started by installing the following applications in this order(they can be picky, so please be sure to do in this order):

Vista SP1

Vista SP2

SQL 2005

SQL 2008

VS Pro 2005

VS 2005 Team Explorer – (may not have been necessary, but it didn’t hurt anything and I didn’t try the process without)

VS Pro 2008

VS Pro 2008 SP1

VSTS 2005

VSTS 2005 SP1

VSTS 2005 SP1 Update for Vista – *

VSTS add-on for database developers

* – This is critical.  Without this, the VSS cannot connect to TFS server and Team Suite will not work.

Now, first off, UAC is a pain.  Unless you have modified your local security policy to run all administrators with elevated privelages, and turned off UAC, you will likely have VS 2005(any version) and SQL 2005 fail to install.  The error given can be anything from XP SP2 is not installed to permissions issues.  To avoid this, do two things.  I think you only need to do one or the other, but I did both, just to be safe.

Copy the contents of the install disks to the hard drive before running setup

Right-click and run setup as administrator

You should have no issues now with the initial installers going though.  At this point, I was confused, as the developer had copied over a project and all the related files to his C: drive and was attempting to launch it, but it kept giving an error

Unable to connect to server.

Then it prompts me to remove source control data or temporarily work offline.

Neither of these were viable options.  The strangest part was that I could goto Tools>Connect to TFS and see the projects on the server.

After speaking with someone on the MSDN forums, I realized that the issue was that there was no local path specified for source control to download files to.  If you go to the Source Control node in the Team Exploere window, find the path for the solution and open it, it will prompt you for a location to download the source files to locally and proceed to download them and open your solution.  The problem all along was that we were trying to access the solution that was copied over thinking it would find the TFS server and not actually downloading the source from TFS.

Like I said, possibly my own ignorance, but it was annoying enough that hopefully I save someone else the headache.  Let me know if you have any questions or issues and I will do my best to answer them.  I will try to post my solution for getting the Cisco Pix VPN to work on Vista x64 here in the next week.

Killing Processes on Server 2000 from VBScript

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Alright, so we have a report server that has a massive SQL database and is running Server 2000 SP4. I honestly don’t know too much about it, because we have a DBA who does pretty much 90% of the maintenance/admin work on this server and the reports have nothing to do with the programs I work with. Anyway, the reports that are run export the SQL data to Excel spreadsheets. Once the report is run, the Excel process is left running. This server is already extremely old and bogged down as is, so having over a hundred instances of Excel running on it wasn’t helping. I wrote a script to check for all processes named “excel” and see how long they have been running, then kill the ones that were running for what seem to be too long of time. I had some issues, because Server 2000 does not have all of the capabilies as 2003, obviously. This script requires that you download pskill, part of the PSTools suite from SysInternals(now Microsoft). Now, while the script requires PSKill, it is able to run on server 2000/2003/2008(and 2000/xp/vista/7), so hopefully it is still useful to someone else out there. The script is below and I tried to make sure it was well-commented to help you out. Feel free to leave any suggestions/questions below. Enjoy.


''''This script requires pskill, part of the PSTools suite from SysInternals(now Microsoft). This script is assuming pskill is in your path for cmd line(generally, c:\windows(winnt on 2000/nt)\system32\)

Option Explicit
Dim strComputer, objWMIService, colProcessList, objProcess, PDate, Days, Hrs, Min, Sec, objSWbemLocator, WshShell
strComputer = "."
Set WshShell = CreateObject("wscript.shell")
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colProcessList = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_Process Where Name = 'Excel.exe'") ' Replace Excel with whatever the process is you're looking for.
Do
If colProcessList.Count = 0 Then ' This kills the script if the process we are looking for is not running.(also ties with last commented line for looping)
Exit Do
Else
For Each objProcess in colProcessList
If objProcess.CreationDate "" Then
PDate = Left(objProcess.CreationDate,14) ' pulls the date process started in format: yyyymmddhhmmss
Days = DateDiff("d",DateSerial(Left(PDate,4),Mid(PDate,5,2),Mid(PDate,7,2)),Date) ' find how many days process has been running
Hrs = Hour(Now) - Mid(PDate,9,2) ' find how many hours process was running, if started same day
Min = Minute(Now) - Mid(PDate,11,2) ' same but for minutes
Sec = Second(Now) - Mid(Pdate,13,2) ' same but for seconds
If Hrs > 6 Then ' This is where you specify how long the process has to have been running in order for it to be killed, so you don't kill active jobs. Change it from "Hrs" to "Min" or "Sec" for minutes or seconds. Change 6 to whatever number of units.(currently set to kill processes over 6 hours old)
WshShell.Run "pskill -t " & objProcess.ProcessId, 0, False
Else
If Days > 0 Then ' This is a failsafe to the previous "If". Since it only detects how many hours process was running, if started same day. This guarantees that it kills anything over a day old.
WshShell.Run "pskill -t " & objProcess.ProcessId, 0, False
End If
End If
End If
Next
WScript.Sleep 1000 ' wait before trying again
Set colProcessList = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_Process Where Name = 'Excel.exe'") ' Recheck for processes ' This makes the script keep looking until there aren't any active processes. i.e. a report is being run now, we will wait until it is done to kill the process and the script.
End If
Loop

Windows Updates and Proxy Servers

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

So, in our environment, we have several segregated networks. Each has their own (squid) proxy server and none have previously had issues with automatic updates. All were supposedly set the same way, with the proxy being pushed through group policy. The gpo was set to only push the proxy to normal users and not members of the IT team, mainly because we just don’t like having it. Anyway, there is one network that could not get the microsoft update web page to load. When we looked at the proxy, it looked as though it was redirecting the page to a null site. The reason it was only affecting the one network was: The other networks have the ability to bypass the proxy if the page didn’t load and it wasn’t listed as blocked, whereas this particular network was forced to have all traffice through the proxy. The key to making it work was one simple command:

proxycfg -p <your proxy>:<proxyport>

That sets your proxy info, now you need to restart update services for it to really make a difference:

net stop wuauserv

net start wuauserv

Anyway, I know this is a simple little post, but hope it helps someone.

UPDATE (9/17):

For Vista/Server 2008 use this command instead of proxycfg:

netsh winhttp set proxy [myproxy]:[myport]

VBScript to find a file (virtually) anywhere in the domain.

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Alright, I haven’t posted in a while, but I also haven’t had any new issues develop that I felt would be helpful or insightful to any of you out there. But today, I did have to write a script to find out if a file had been copied from the directory it was supposed to be in to any other place in the domain. At first, I thought they were crazy, but I turned to my good friend VBScript and got the job done. There are several pieces to this script, each very useful in it’s own right. First, it connects to the domain controller and finds out what domain you are in(handy if you work on several domains and don’t want to fiddle to make it work different places), then it makes a .txt file with every computer account in the domain on a line. The next step is pinging each of the machines listed to see if they are are available. Then, it connects and scans the C drive (via c$) for the file name recursively scans hidden folders and files as well. Then, it finds any shared folders on the system(say a server, where shares are not on C:) and scans them recursively. It reports if the file was found on the system or not and if it was, the exact location on the machine. Anyway, let me know if you have any questions on how to get this working for different scenarios or need to just make certain snippets work.

***Updated 8/7/09 with revisions to make script shorter, more efficient and work better with regular expression/pattern searching***

''Script to find all machines in AD, search C drive of all machines for a pattern in the filename, then search any shared folders for the file and reports
'' whether it was found and whether the machines are reachable by ping.
'' Side Note -- Can not scan shares on Windows 2000 or older, it will simply skip those shares. It will still scan C drive on Windows 2000, not NT

Option Explicit
CONST HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = &H80000002
Const ForReading = 1
Const ForWriting = 2
Const ForAppending = 8
Dim strResultsFile, strServerName, strErrorNumber, strErrorDescription
Dim strAge, strLatestFile, strClientName, strDNSDomain
Dim strBase, strFilter, strAttributes, strQuery
Dim objWMIService, objLocator, objResultsFile, objRootDSE, objCommand, objConnection
Dim objRecordSet
Dim strSearchName
Dim objNetwork : Set objNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")
Dim strFileName : strFileName = "computers.txt"
Dim objFSO : Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Dim WshShell : Set WshShell = CreateObject("wscript.shell")
Dim i
Dim ii
Dim objFile, objCurrentFile, objTempList, objFS, objList, strCurrentFile2, objLogFile1, objLogFile2
Dim strComputer()
Dim strRet

'Here, you can put in the Regulare Expression pattern to use when searching.
Dim objRegEx : Set objRegEx = CreateObject("VBScript.RegExp")
objRegEx.Global = True
objRegEx.IgnoreCase = True
objRegEx.Pattern = ".*pip_dvalles.*"

Dim IsFound
Dim strReply, png, strPing
Dim strList, objShare, strShare
Dim strShares()
Dim strDate, strTime, strHour, strMinute, strSeconds, Now, NowStart, ConnectTime
NowStart = Now
strResultsFile = "computers.txt"
strDate = CStr(Year(Date) * 10000 + Month(Date) * 100 + Day(Date))
strTime = Time
strHour = Hour (strTime)
strMinute = Minute (strTime)
strSeconds = Second (strTime)
Dim strFound, strNotFound
strFound = "C:\Found.txt"
strNotFound = "C:\NotFound.txt"

Set objLogFile1 = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strNotFound, ForAppending, True)
Set objLogFile2 = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strFound, ForAppending, True)

'Check for the presence of the Computer.txt file in the same folder as the script
If Not objFSO.FileExists(strFileName) Then

Set objResultsFile = objFsO.OpenTextFile (strResultsFile, ForWriting, True)
' Start getting a list of all servers from AD
' Determine DNS domain name from RootDSE object.
Set objRootDSE = GetObject("LDAP://RootDSE")
strDNSDomain = objRootDSE.Get("DefaultNamingContext")
'Start the ADO connection
Set objCommand = CreateObject("ADODB.Command")
Set objConnection = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
objConnection.Provider = "ADsDSOObject"
objConnection.Open "Active Directory Provider"
objCommand.ActiveConnection = objConnection

'Set the ADO connection query strings
strBase = ""
strFilter = "(objectCategory=computer)"
strAttributes = "distinguishedName,objectCategory,name"

'Create the Query
strQuery = strBase & ";" & strFilter & ";" & strAttributes & ";subtree"
objCommand.CommandText = strQuery
objCommand.Properties("Page Size") = 100
objCommand.Properties("Timeout") = 30
objCommand.Properties("Cache Results") = False
Set objRecordSet = objCommand.Execute

objRecordSet.MoveFirst

'Find all computers in the domain
While Not objRecordset.EOF
ON ERROR RESUME NEXT
strServerName = objRecordset.Fields("name")
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strServerName & "\root\cimv2")
strErrorNumber = Err.Number
strErrorDescription = Err.Description

objResultsFile.WriteLine strServerName

'NEXT!
objRecordSet.MoveNext

Wend
objResultsFile.Close
WScript.Echo "All computer accounts in " & strDNSDOMAIN & " have been found." & vbCrLf & "Click OK to scan for file: " & objSearchFile
Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strFileName, ForReading)
Else
Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strFileName, ForReading)
End if

'start parsing through computer.txt
Do Until objFile.AtEndOfStream
isFound = FALSE
Redim Preserve strComputer(i)
strComputer(i) = objFile.ReadLine

'Ping Computers to make sure that they are reachable.
Set png = WshShell.exec("ping -n 1 " & strComputer(i))
Do Until png.Status = 1 : WScript.Sleep 10 : Loop
strPing = png.StdOut.ReadAll

'NOTE: The string being looked for in the Instr is case sensitive.
'Do not change the case of any character which appears on the
'same line as a Case InStr. AS this will result in a failure.
Select Case True
Case InStr(strPing, "Request timed out") > 1
strReply = "Request timed out"
Case InStr(strPing, "could not find host") > 1
strReply = "Host not reachable"
Case InStr(strPing, "Reply from") > 1
strReply = "Ping Successful"
End Select

' Connects to the operating system's file system
ON ERROR RESUME NEXT
Set objFS = GetObject("WinNT://" & strComputer(i) & "/LanmanServer,FileService")
objList = ""

' Loops through each share and checks for file
For Each objShare In objFS
strShare = LCase(objShare.name)
Set objTempList = WshShell.Exec("cmd /c dir /a/s/b \\" & strComputer(i) & "\" & strShare)
Do Until objTempList.StdOut.AtEndOfStream
objCurrentFile = objTempList.StdOut.ReadLine
If objRegEx.Test(objFSO.GetBaseName(objCurrentFile)) Then
strCurrentFile2 = objfSO.GetBaseName(objCurrentFile)
objLogFile2.WriteLine Now & " - The file " & objSearchFile & " was found on " & strComputer(i) & " at " & objCurrentFile
isFound = True
Else
If isFound = False Then
isFound = False
Else
isFound = True
End If
End If
Loop
objList = LCase(objShare.name) & vbCrLf & objList
Next

'Check for file on remote PC
Set objTempList = WshShell.Exec("cmd /c dir /a/s/b \\" & strComputer(i) & "c$")
Do Until objTempList.StdOut.AtEndOfStream
objCurrentFile = objTempList.StdOut.ReadLine
If objRegEx.Test(objFSO.GetBaseName(objCurrentFile)) Then
strCurrentFile2 = objfSO.GetBaseName(objCurrentFile)
objLogFile2.WriteLine Now & " - The file " & objSearchFile & " was found on " & strComputer(i) & " at " & objCurrentFile
isFound = True
Else
If isFound = False Then
isFound = False
Else
isFound = True
End If
End If
Loop

'Write to Not Found Log, if not found.
If isFound = False Then
objLogFile1.WriteLine Now & "No File matching the pattern (" & objRegEx.Pattern & ") was found on " & strComputer(i)
End If
Loop
objLogFile1.Close
objLogFile2.Close
WScript.Echo "Done scanning, LogFiles are located at:" & vbCrLf & strFound & vbCrLf & strNotFound & vbCrLf & "Click OK to finish"

Hope this helps someone out there.