I have a Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition VM on linux-xen. It has been working fine until a few days ago apparently it attempted to install an update. I have tried everything I can think of to get passed the 'Preparing to configure Windows' splash screen.
I have tried:
Booting into all three options of safe mode, all three performing the same splash screen step and endless reboot cycles.
Booting into last known good configuration, again boots to splash screen
F8, boot into repair, open cmd and use dism.exe /image:d:\ /remove-package PackageName:, which results in an error that I have found no information google about.
I have tried deleting windows\winsxs\pending.xml, it is currently deleted but still tries to configure updates.
Use dism.exe with the /revertpendingactions switch, which still brings me back to splash.
dism /image:D:\ /cleanup-image /revertpendingactions
Tried to repair via the installation disc, which does not have an OS repair option, just the same 3 options for Memory Diagnostics, Command Prompt and System Recovery
I did not realize that Windows Server 2008 DC Edition did not default to system restore points being enabled. Apparently I have no restore points available to revert to.
I am going out of my mind trying to find some successful way to get passed this splash screen for configuring windows updates. If the pending.xml file is missing then I do not understand how it could still be trying to configure updates.
I am at a loss, any additional troubleshooting steps or advice would be appreciated. In terms of advice, I now realize I need to double check that restore points are enabled and take regular windows system recovery disk image backups so that I have better restoration capabilities in the future.
Being that this is on a linux-xen guest, I could duplicate it and try other means, but I am not sure what else there is to do.
Can I reinstall windows 2008 server back on top of it again and achieve some sort of success without breaking all of the licensing, rdp users, profiles, data ETC? This server is not a member of a AD environment. It is simply a standalone server that allows 10-12 users to RDP to access a few applications.
However, regardless how I move forward the data on the server is needed even if I were to opt for creating a new VM with a fresh install for them to use.
Is it possible to inform Windows to skip the update installation / configuration procedure during boot by adding a particular switch to the Boot options? Currently it has:
/NOEXECUTE=OPTOUT
I am curious if it has some alternate runlevel like linux does that would potentially allow me to bypass this wretched situation.
Mine was stuck until I hit CTRL + ALT + DEL. It seems like it was a service pack that did it. I waited a few hours for it to finish when in fact all I had to do was hit CTRL + ALT + DEL.
Related
I have a simple PHP application running on this server which allows other people to verify some information on-line. The apache was running OK until a few days back.
The application uses Postgrees and the apache service was configured by an add-on "Enterprise Db Apache", it was not configured by me and is connected to a portal to be shown on-line. This was kinda dropped on me and I had no prior knowledge or experience with databases nor servers and need to put it back on-line. How can I start to find out what made it stop?
Here's a link to the error I'm receiving when trying to start it back again:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12837412/Erro%201053.png
Tried updating .NET to no success,
I've searched around SO and all the threads I found were based on custom services people wrote, and found out that this error code is very generic, I'm very lost and have my neck on the chopping block.
EDIT: Tried some fixes suggested here but had no success. I'm thinking about reinstalling the service, is it a really bad idea? Is there a safe way of doing this without loss of data in the Database? Is there a tutorial on this here already?
The problem was with compatibility of the versions of C/C++ libraries in the server which lead to the programs related to the service not being able to start properly. A simple reinstalation of the compatible version of the libraries made the service able to be started again.
Maybe your service is taking longer time than 30 seconds (Windows default timeout) to start and report ready to the Service Control Manager. Usually this happens because of performance issues.
A possible solution for this is to extend it through the Registry.
Go to Start > Run > and type regedit
Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
With the control folder selected, right click in the pane on the right and select new DWORD Value
Name the new DWORD: ServicesPipeTimeout
Right-click ServicesPipeTimeout, and then click Modify
Click Decimal, type '180000', and then click OK
Restart the computer
A really simple but dragged me many days that I cannot figure out how:
I've setup synergy on my Mac as a client, using Ubuntu as the server.
But now I wanted to switch to use Mac as server and Ubuntu as client.
The question now I'm facing is that synergy settings page never show up, each time I try to open it, it just appears in less than 0.1 second, then it disappeared.
Because I've set it up already and I don't need the reconfigure the Ip addresses etc.
This is convenient.
But now I wanted to switch server/client roles, I need to reconfigure it, however the settings page of synergy never shows up to let me configure it, does anyone have the same issue?
I tried to uninstall synergy on my Mac, but when I reinstall it back, it automatically configures itself again and quickly disappears and runs in the background.
It's been a pain for me.
You can't start the Server on Yosemite, because you need to grant access to the process (Synergy) to control your computer:
http://mizage.com/help/accessibility.html
doing that with Synergy should work.
I have problem printing reports to PDF through bullzip from Navision Application Server (1) if user is not in Local Admin group (2). Only under both conditions.
In Nav code I'm doing the following: init bullzip automation object (set all parameters to suppress GUI), run report to print document to virtual bullzip printer, catch output file. Thats it. Straight as a rail.
I have two environments: Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 (different versions of Nav, but this is changing nothing). On Windows 7 it just do nothing (but works if user is admin). On server I can see error in Event Log (translated to English)
Faulting application gui.exe, version 9.8.0.1599, time stamp 0x517126dc, faulting module USER32.dll, version 6.0.6002.18541, time stamp 0x4ec3e39f, exception code 0xc0000142, fault offset 0x0006f52f, the process ID 0x3bc, application start time 0x01ce562238369fa9.
Gui.exe is a part of bullzip.
If I run the same code from Nav Classic Client, or from the same NAS launched in command line, or under local administrator account, or if i put the NAS user in local admin group - it works just fine.
To solve this problem i need to find out one of two and how to fix it:
What is the difference between local admin and regular user that could cause application to crash in non-interactive mode (service) under regular user account.
What is the difference in running NAS as service and as command line that could cause application to crash when run as service.
What I've tried so far: extend non-interactive desktop heap, give user all local privileges that admin have in gpedit. Not works. Don't know direction for further digging.
Any alternative free pdf printers advices are welcome.
This question is still actual. Though I've managed to setup PDF printing with PDFCreator. The tough part was to let several different NAS to print simultaneously. And now the setup have a bottleneck - PDFCreator's printing queue. With bullzip automations it could be avoided.
We've had some cases where third party DLL's have crashed within NAV due to permission restrictions.
The only effective way we could narrow down the files that it was trying to access was through using Process Monitor to try narrow down what was causing permission issues.
We found a folder within System32 to do with the System's Network Profile that some DLLs use. On that note, NAS's and such should be run under a domain account.
I think re-installing the application will do that,
Just make sure you are uninstalling each bullzip and ghost script,
Now Ghost script is tricky thing, if you are installing 32 bit over 64 then you are having problem,
refer this download link download appropriate version, install it,
and then install bullzip, after downloading new version from here
this will do..
then also if any problem(if you are using application for automation, you require new com object..) refer Forum, that explains most of application interface problems..
where you need to use public class PdfSettings with namespace bioPdf.
I hope this will help ..
since yesterday my true-crypt partition do not automount on startup with my OS every time (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't).
Yes they are set as system favorites and the checkbox mount on startup is set.
Yes they have the same password, typed with the same (EN INTL) layout.
Yes it worked somehow before a few times.
Thanks for the help.
edit:
OS: Windows 8
Update
It seems only not to work from cold starts.
warm starts seem to work
I have this problem on my Windows 8 laptop. I tracked the problem to the new shutdown process with Windows 8. It won't do a full shutdown/startup when you do, only some sort of hybrid shutdown (https://superuser.com/questions/496241/are-there-downsides-to-windows-8-hybrid-shutdown)
I found that if I use the normal Charm -> Settings -> Power -> Shutdown, it would fail to load the encrypted partition when I got to the desktop.
However, if you use the command line "shutdown.exe /s /t 0" to shutdown, it will reliably load the next time you start up.
I was forced to fix it this way because my Dropbox was on the encrypted partition, and Dropbox would complain that it couldn't find the folder anymore (same with Google Drive and SkyDrive, only worse).
This might fix that problem, but I haven't tried it yet (http://www.askvg.com/fix-windows-8-restart-and-shutdown-problems-by-disabling-hybrid-shutdown-feature/)
Win 8.x seams to offer special shutdown option for a fast restart. This leads also to another special file on the boot driver (besider hypee and page). Therefore the "cold restart" is not a real cold start it's something like hypernation "light".
In the power options you may try to disable the option "turn fast startup (recommended)" selection.
There is an alternative to disabling hybrid boot/shutdown. You can also get it to work consistently if you go to TrueCrypt, Favorites, Organize System Favorite Volumes and then tick the option to Allow only administrators to view and dismount system favorite volumes.
Source.
If you look at the Linux ecosystem (especially the Ubuntu and Alestic EC2 images) there is a common technique where the VMs are pre-configured to look at the EC2 user-data and use it as a boot script. The nice thing about this approach is that you can write a boot script that further provisions your machine, allowing you to avoid making a new image every time your software that runs on the machine changes.
I want to do the same thing for Windows, but given that I'm an Mac and Linux guy, I'm a bit lost on where to start. My requirements are:
This must run on Windows Server 2008
A bootstrap script needs to start when the machine boots up, read the user-data file by pulling down the contents http://169.254.169.254/1.0/user-data
The bootstap script then needs to run the contents of that file as if it were a script
The script embedded in the user-data needs to run in such a way that it has access to the desktop environment (ie: it can launch a browser, etc).
I'm not quite sure how services work in Windows or if I need to enable auto-login, so any advice here would be appreciated. The ultimate goal is to run a Java program that launches some custom software that in turn launches a web browser (IE, Firefox, etc) and is capable of taking screenshots.
The screenshot part is interesting, because in the past when I've tried this the only way I could get something other than a black screen was to have UltraVNC or RealVNC boot up as a service, though I don't know why that helped.
I'm looking for answers to three specific questions, as well as any general advice:
Should I be focussing on a Windows service or auto-login + bat file in the "Startup" folder?
If I use a Windows service, is there anything special that I need to do to make sure desktop access and/or screenshots are available?
Do you recommend any tools for common Linux commands, like curl or wget? Last time I used Windows I used Cygwin a lot, but is there something more appropriate to use here?
I have not tried auto-login on Windows instances in EC2, but here's the support document on how to enable it.
We boot-strap our Windows instances using a custom AMI with a custom Windows 'install' service already installed. The boot-strap installer reads a URL from user-data at startup. The URL points to a ZIP file stored in S3. The installer then downloads, un-zips, and executes the actual application installer -- in our case a simple CMD fie.
This setups allows us to have one base AMI and then be able to easily overlay 15+ different application configurations (without having to rebuild the AMI). If you only have one application configuration this may be overkill for your situation.
The only trouble we ran into was having our installer service start to early -- changing the service startup mode to "Automatic Delayed" fixed that issue.
We wrote our boot-strap installer in Java, launched via YAJSW, because we're comfortable with it. If you just want a few simple Unix tools, most are available pre-compiled for Windows, for example wget.
For something completely different, you could try PsExec to configure the instance after it has booted.
You can try using RightScale's free developer account to create plain Powershell scripts and associate them with your Windows instances to run at boot time. The RightScale dashboard solves exactly the problems you are trying to solve above.
DISCLAIMER: I work for RightScale.
As for screen capture CutyCapt is a simple tool you can point at a URL and generate an image from.
Unxutils is a great solution for those looking for unix tools on Windows. It's got the wget.exe that you're looking for, however, using Powershell to download stuff is not so bad either:
$wc = new-object system.net.webclient
$wc.DownloadFile("http://stackoverflow.com","test.html")
If you can write a batch file to do your setup, then you can run it at startup of the vm by doing this:
1. Run REGEDT32.EXE.
2. Modify the following value within HKEY_CURRENT_USER:
Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ParseAutoexec
1 = autoexec.bat is parsed
0 = autoexec.bat is not parsed
As an answer to #3, I would say that you can do just about anything in a batch file that you need which includes downloading from a ftp server (but not from a http server). I am really interested in this stuff and so if you have questions, try asking me.
If you use Elastic Beanstalks you can use this:
Customizing the Software on EC2 Instances Running Windows
It uses YAML formatting standards, e.g.
packages:
msi:
mysql: http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/Connector-Net/mysql-connector-net-6.6.5.msi/from/http://cdn.mysql.com/
or
sources:
"c:/myproject/myapp": http://s3.amazonaws.com/mybucket/myobject.zip
I know this is a little bit late to help out with the original post but for anyone who is still reading this one solution is to use the http://cloudinitnet.codeplex.com/ project. The service is easily installed using a powershell script and will create a local administrator account to use while running.
The goal for this project was to replace the Cloud-Init project used in Amazon Linux and Ubuntu.