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This turned out to be simpler than I had first imagined. Reading the Microsoft documentation looked like we had to make changes to the DHCP, however this was not the case.

To make it clearer, our current environment looks like this:

1. DHCP is a Linux CentOS Server
2. WDS and DHCP servers are on the same subnet
3. Client machines are on various subnets
4. Cisco core switch and router stack

For our setup, we only needed to make sure the Cisco ip helper-address was set to point to the IP address of BOTH the DHCP and WDS. Once this was done, everything went as intended.

Another quick post regarding a nagging issue I’ve had for awhile now. Every time I wanted to connect to my local optical drive it would complain with the following error immediately:

Remote device disconnect
The remote device on <host> connected to <path> is disconnected.

Digging around I found that the cause of this is because of Windows 7 permissions again. Running the application as Administrator or checking off the “Run this program as an administrator” under the Compatibility tab of the vSphere Client shortcut solved the issue!

Hope this helps you all as well.

As old as it may be, we still use a sendmail API from way back to NT4! Having said that, there was a slight blip when we migrated to a new Server 2008 R2 server, the dll file was missing! I had to copy the file from the old server and move it to the new server.

1. Copy CDONTS.dll from another server to C:\Windows\SysWOW64 and C:\Windows\System32
2. Run regsvr32 c:\windows\SysWOW64\cdonts.dll
3. Run regsvr32 c:\windows\System32\cdonts.dll
4. Grant the appropriate permissions on C:\inetpub\mailroot\pickup (I granted USERS group Modify permissions). You could get permission denied if the folder security isn’t adjusted.

You don’t need to restart the server at all, just hit your site and again it will work!

Although both products are from Microsoft, they don’t seem to play nice together. Most likely due to the fact Office 2010 came out recently and has changed the way it interacts with the system. Either way, when installing CRM the following error showed up:

(Error) Setup failed to determine whether a supported version of Microsoft Outlook is installed

The only solution is the ignore this manually. To do so, create the following into the registry (the entry does not yet exist):

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \MSCRMClient]
Key Type: DWORD
Key: IgnoreChecks
Value: 1

The installer will still state the error but it will now allow you to continue with the install! Good luck!

Another day at work, another interesting problem. A user was connecting to a terminal server and tried to print to a printer that was installed locally on her PC. Logging into the terminal server via RDC showed no printers available.

First step was to ensure that the printer was a shared local resource. This was alright, however the printer still does not want to show up. Frustrated, I tried to install the printer locally by downloading the printer drivers on the terminal server. Running the install file did nothing so I had to find another way to force the drivers onto the system.

Logging onto the terminal server as Administrator, I found a way to trick the server and force feed it the drivers.

1. Enter into the control panel and install a new local printer. Install manually and do not search for a printer.
2. Select a printer port to be “FILE: (Print to File)” and choose your own printer drivers (select have disk).
3. From the downloaded driver file, select the INF or if it is already in the list of available drivers, select your printer from there.
4. Continue through with the installation and allow the printer to be installed. Remember to name it something random as this is only temporary and you will delete this printer after.
5. Once the dummy print to file printer is installed, log off the terminal server and re-log back in.
6. As you log in, you will notice that Windows has now installed the printer that was having troubles.
7. Remove the dummy printer so that it doesn’t show up in the printer list!

So, that’s what I did to make this work. You can also check in the system logs to see that whether or not this method is necessary. In the system log, you will see an 1111 error code stating that the printer driver could not be found and the printer was not installed.

Hope this helps!