Path is too long

I believe that I should let everyone know that once again Microsoft has not fixed the path is too long issue in his newest release Windows X.

I been deal with this atrocious issue every now and then when writing scripts that run against our file servers, and I must say its a real pain in the rear. I pray one day this will be fixed.

Good day to all.

Edit 9/16/2015: I'm not sure why the pictures are gone. I'll try to replicate the issue once again and repost them soon.

Edit 1/16/2016: I finally took the time to recreate the error and re-upload the picture.

Don't learn many, become an expert at one!

Today I was reading this article. It was talking about the main differences between PHP and .NET what one should learn, and let me tell you something I wish I had read it back when I was younger. 

I took Programming I and II in High School and then again in College, but unfortunately I don't think I ever learned much. Yeah I learned syntax and learned some of the logic behind programming, but nobody ever told me what was said in this article:

"There are benefits to learning either PHP or .NET. Should you learn both? If you’re new to programming, the answer, I think, is No: At an early stage in your career, you need to focus your energy on getting very good at one thing, which will translate into higher-paying jobs down the road. If you try to go to broad, you will stretch yourself thin and not master anything. (I made that mistake early in my career, and it started hurting my job prospects—employers tend to distrust resumes that list hundreds of technologies in which the applicant is supposedly an expert.) Pick one thing and be great at it!" - Jeff Coswell

In this quote he specifies something very important that I wish to pass to anyone starting with programming: Don't learn multiple languages, learn one and become an expert at it, then switch to other ones if you want to. I wish very much wish someone had told me this, but because nobody did, I ran around through most of my amateur days learning Ruby, Java, C++, C#, Python, Perl, even looked at Haskell and learned a lot of the syntax but in reality I learned nothing because I was never an expert with any of them.

I felt strongly that this needed to be shared because I don't think its quite common knowledge. For example, in college Programming I was Introduction to Java, Programming II was introduction to C++, and Programming III was cancelled due to not having enough students sign up, but I believe it was introduction to C#. 

So hear my advice: If you enjoy programming and would like to pursue a career in this field, you need to pick a language, and preferably once that is common enough that you can make a living with, and become an expert. If you then decide you would like to try something else then your transition will be much easier. 

If not you'll probably end up like me learning a lot of syntax and not knowing much.

Good luck if you are starting, and if you are an experience developer please let me know what you think, or if you also went through something like this in your earlier days. 

PowerShell and Scheduled Tasks

I have been setting up some schedule PowerShell scripts through the Task Scheduler; however, I was having a bit of trouble with one of the scripts. 

The script would run perfectly if I ran it manually, but when I ran the task nothing would happen. As you might know this is a bit of a problem because schedule tasks don't not show the console, and won't allow you to see the errors. The Task's log are not very helpful either.

What helped me troubleshoot the problem is this little cmdlet:

Start-transcript -path C:\Temp\Filename.txt

Placing that command at the beginning of your script will create a transcript file. The transcript file will contain everything that would print into the console, and it should look a little like this:

-------------------------------------------------------------

**********************
Windows PowerShell transcript start
Start time: 20141114101902
Username  : DOMAIN\S.AD.Util 
Machine  : HOSTNAME (Microsoft Windows NT 6.3.9600.0) 
**********************
Transcript started, output file is C:\Temp\Transcript_11-14-2014.txt

ModuleType Version    Name                        ExportedCommands     
---------- -------    ----                        ----------------     
Script     1.0        tmp_scev4zye.pet          {Get-DServerSetti...

-------------------------------------------------------------

If there is any errors they will show here, even if they are not stopping errors. Which is great because at one point my script was sending the email and successfully completing, but failing to create the report all together and sending a blank email.

I hope this might help someone out there! 

Update: Locked accounts

This post is related to a previous post.

We have recently been receiving several incidents regarding accounts that are getting locked out. Our Service Desk and Desktop team have been unable to find the cause and so they escalated to us. Following the log trail we have found that this devices are normally getting locked out in our CAS server. This was easy enough to be determined by using a Microsoft tool called Lockoutstatus; however, we had been unable to determine exactly what was causing them to get locked out in the CAS server and we would simply inform the user that their account was getting locked out by a smart device using ActiveSync. 

I recently found in this article though that there is a way to figure out what the device exactly is causing the issue by looking at the IIS logs in the CAS Server. The article explains in detail what the log looks like, and what each field means. 

I'll try to provide a bit of a summary, but please visit the full article for more details. 

The logs can be found in the following locations:

• In Windows Server 2003: C:\WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles
• In Windows Server 2008: C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1
• In Windows Server 2012: I believe it should be the same but since we don't have a CAS server on a 2012 machine I wasn't able to confirm.

Here is the example provided, and I'll try to break it down as I understood it:

2012-01-10 14:42:26 172.32.22.12 POST /Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync/default.eas User=ratishnair&DeviceId=Appl8xxxxx4S&DeviceType=iPhone&Cmd=FolderSync&Log=PrxFrom:10.123.33.88_Error:BackingOffMailboxServer_ 443 CONTOSO\CAS01$ 10.123.33.88Apple-iPhone3C1/901.405 503 0 0 765

• 172.32.22.12 : The IP address of where the command was sent to.
• POST : The type of command that was issued on the Log.
• /Microsoft-Server-ACtiveSync/ : States that the type of command is ActiveSync.
• Default.eas : States the ActiveSync policy - this might vary depending on your settings.
• User= : The username who is running the command.
• DeviceID= : The ID that was assigned to the ActiveSync Device by the Exchange server when it was first setup. 
• DeviceType= : The Device Model - We've been using this to point the users to their device having issues.
• Apple-Iphone3C1/901.405 : The device's firmware version.
• 503 : This is the error code, which can be any of the ones found below:
• 200 – Authentication pass
• 400 – Bad/invalid request
• 401 and 403 – Unauthorized/server refusing request
• 404  – File not found
• 449 – Retry
• 500 – Server error
• 503 – Service unavailable
• 0 0 765 : I'm not 100% sure what this part means; however, the last 3 digits appear to change from log to log. I'm doing further research on this.

Well I hope this might help you troubleshoot this type of issues! I know it will help us a lot, and I am even thinking about allowing the Service Desk read access to this logs, though our Exchange admins aren't too fond of the idea, yet. 

Windows Server 2003 You did it again!

We recently had an outage on some of our VMWare hosts and after the outage was resolved and the hosts came back online we brought up all the VMs back online. Later that day one of my co-workers received a call regarding one of the VMs that was not able to be accessed.

After thoroughly troubleshooting the issue he asked me for some input.

He had done everything anyone would do to troubleshoot an issue with a VM Network:

• Made sure the IP address and subnet were correct.
• He double checked the VLAN on the VM host. 
• He deleted the virtual NIC and added a new one with a different driver

Unfortunately nothing was working. I took over the issue, and I was honestly at a stomp. After redoing everything he had done and a few other things I finally decided to check the Windows EventLog - I probably should have done that sooner. I found an event that said the following:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: IPSEC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 4292
Date:
Time: 
User: N/A
Computer: COMPUTER_NAME
Description:
The IPSec driver has entered Block mode. IPSec will discard all inbound and outbound TCP/IP network traffic that is not permitted by boot-time IPSec Policy exemptions.

After some researching I found the following VMWare article. It turns out this is actually not that an uncommon occurrence on VMs running Windows Server 2003. 

I followed the given instructions and I disabled the IPSec service - even though it wasn't even running - and rebooted the VM. When the system came back online so was the network. 

I hope this might help someone out there! 

Web Platform

So for the past few weeks I have put on my learning hat and been learning the ways of the website development. This of course was no easy task, but after many headbangs against my desk I feel like I'm finally making some progress. I was finally able to create a Master page using VS Express 2013 for Web. I got a HTML5/CSS3 Template going, and I believe I can finally start creating pages, backed by C#. 

This is all still a huge learning curve but I gotta say I feel more confident now. So far the resources that I've used to learn this is training on cbtnuggets, I've also used this link here to get a better understanding of CSS http://learnlayout.com/position.html. 

So far what I been learning is very well documenting so I haven't really posted anything, but once I start dabbling into deeper issues I'll try to post some cool stuff. 

Stand-alone Application to Web Application

My learning c# project that I had been working is being changed. One of the Architects saw what I had and really liked it and wants me to transform it into a web portal instead of a stand alone application. I agree to this changed, but now I have to learn HTML/CSS/JavaScript and i feel like I'm back on step one.

I hope to get some good knowledge out of this though and I'll keep posting when I find cool things.