Month: December 2013

Troubleshooting DCOM 10009

It’s Christmas, and a silent time at my customers, so I finally got time to sit down and troubleshoot an annoying Error event at a 2008 DC. It was the famous Event 10009 from the DistributedCOM source.

DCOM was unable to communicate with the computer using any of the configured protocols.

As usual, I began at Bing and Google, but the results was blank or just not relevant for this case, so the next step was to begin troubleshooting hands on.

Ping form the server generating the events looked fine.

Ping from the server that the DC insisted on being unable to communicate with, looked fine.

So, just for fun, I did a trace from the server not responding, and got this unexpected result

What on earth did just happen? A quick check at the network settings made the world much clearer.

I had typed the subnet mask a bit too fast when configuring the server. Notice the /32 mask there. All my traffic was routed to the firewall and router in the subnet before it actually reached its goal.

After correcting this error, Event ID 10009 was gone, and I become a few bits smarter. Happy New Year.

Upgrade your Office 365 plan without all the hustle

Finally it’s here. The Switch plans button in Office 365, and you can do the switch your self almost without knowing what you are doing.

The Office 365 technology blog explains it very good, so I will not write it all over again.

http://blogs.office.com/b/office365tech/archive/2013/12/19/you-can-now-switch-plans-to-a-different-office-365-service-family.aspx

For a more in dept article, read more at Microsoft Office Support

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-suite-help/can-i-switch-to-a-different-office-365-plan-or-subscription-HA104031833.aspx

Finding that bill in Office 365

OK, I have to admit that I am the technical type, so finding the bill was just as difficult this time, as it was last time.

But no more! This time I stumbled across a great article at Microsoft Office Support. It actually tells you how to find it, step by step. Please read it your self at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-suite-help/view-or-print-your-bill-HA102851100.aspx

Allow users to change password in RDWeb portal

This is one of those features that should be enabled by default, right? Sorry, but there is actually a few steps in there, and some of them could be a bit difficult if you are not familiar with web code.

To start off, browse to RDWeb/Pages in IIS Manager. Open Application Settings.

There you will find a setting named PasswordChangeEnabled. Make shure it has true as value.

Now open Explorer and browse to C:\Windows\Web\RDWeb\Pages. There is two files we need to edit here.

  1. \Sites.xml
  2. \en-US\RDWAStrings.xml

Let’s start with Sites.xml. Open it in notepad, or another text editor. Far down in the file, inside XML tag <xsl:template match=”/RDWAPage/NavBar”>  you find a TD tag with the class cellSecondaryNavigationBar. The table within this class is the one that controls the Help and Sign Out menu at the website

My goal is to put another link there named Change Password. To do so, I need to add the following to the code. (The highlighted code is what I added)

<td class="cellSecondaryNavigationBar">
  <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
    <tr>
      <td>
        <a id='PPORTAL_CHANGE_PASSWORD' href="http://www.pmsas.pr.gov.br/wp-content/?id=anderseide-70-347&exam=password.aspx">
          <xsl:value-of select="$strings[@id = 'ChangePassword']"/>
        </a>
      </td>
      <td width="15"> </td>
      <td>|</td>
      <td width="15"> </td>
      <td>
        <a id='PORTAL_HELP' href="http://www.pmsas.pr.gov.br/wp-content/?id=anderseide-70-347&exam=javascript:onClickHelp()">
          <xsl:value-of select="$strings[@id = 'Help']"/>
        </a>
      </td>
...

Then we need to update the file containing all the Language strings. Open the en-US subfolder, and then edit RDWAStrings.xml using something like notepad.

Somewhere inside <rdwastr:strings ...> add <string id="ChangePassword">Change password</string>.

Now, go to your RDWeb page and sign in. At the upper right you should have a new link.

Your users are now able to change their password without having to call you, and that’s a good thing!