Solutions for IT technical problems admins and developers may face with.
If the default action for disk drives in “My Computer” window is “Search” instead of “Open” and you cannot change this behavior using “File Types” tab in “Folder Options” then you must set the default value for HKCR\Drive\Shell registry key to none and restart the explorer.exe process.
Mentioned problem sometimes arises after some malware installation – the disinfection not always repairs that problem automatically.
After deploying MS Exchange 2003 server in your organization and configuring OWA to let users change their domain passwords you can face a strange issue. When users try to change their passwords, after clicking “OK” button they see an error message saying “Object Required” and their password are not being changed. This enigmatic error message means, that the MS Exchange cannot find a properly registered COM object in the registry. To solve the problem you must manually register the “iispwchg.dll” library on the MS Exchange server. The full command to do this is:
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\inetsrv\iisadmpwd\iispwchg.dll
The reason why MS Exchange does not register mentioned library by itself during the installation is unknown for me. However I noticed, that MS Exchange installers are written is such a way, so the administrators can demonstrate their knowledge and skills <ironic> before the MS Exchange product can start fully working.
If you want to install the OmniPass software version which was designed for Windows Vista in Windows 7 think twice before making this mistake. Doing so can result in a very long delays during the logon of the user’s profile who installed the software. This can even cause some of your user profiles to be unable to login constantly showing the “Welcome” message on the screen.
So do not install the OmniPass software (the version which was designed for Vista) in Windows 7 if you want to have your system to be usable.
Some time ago I faced a very strange issue with Bind 9 DNS server. Everything was working fine until I rebooted the DNS server. After the reboot server started to return “SERVFAIL” errors instead of resolving the names. It took me more than 2 hours to fix the problem. The problem had been caused by small syntax error in Bind’s zone config file. OK, you can say that that was me who was responsible for the situation. Well, partially, because the changes to the config file had been made many months before I rebooted the server. I remember, that the Bind server did not warn me of any problems while reloading the configuration after I made changes to the zone config file. Moreover, there was no entry in log files about problems with Bind or its configuration either after reloading Bind’s configuration or after rebooting the server.
So, if you make any changes to zone config files for Bind 9 servers make note, that if you do some syntax errors in the config you will not be warned and as the result, the DNS server after the reboot or Bind’s service restart will be unusable constantly throwing “SERVFAIL” errors because it will not be able to load its configuration properly.