Dan B. Lee

I was installing SQL Server Management Studio Express 2005 on my vCenter server to run a clean-up when I found that I was getting this error:

The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 29506

In order to run the software, you’ll need to run it as an admin from a command prompt, seeing as how you can’t right click and run the software as an administrator.

1. Open up an elevated command prompt by right clicking on CMD.exe and choosing to Run As Administrator
2. Browse to the location of your .msi file and type it’s name in. My location was at C:\Users\Dan Lee\Desktop\sql.msi (I renamed the file to sql.msi for the sake of ease).
3. That should it. The software will run and install without the error now.

Let me know what else you find on this, but this is pretty straight forward.

Cheers!

VMware’s Community Forum and website has always been super helpful in providing technology resources and information quickly and easier. The lagging side has consistently been the tough to find downloads that you need in order to upgrade or install new products. VMware Tools can be downloaded quickly and easily using a web browser to review the file structure, instead of heading to the website and navigating through the links. Here’s the site:

http://packages.vmware.com/tools

VMware calls them Operating System Specific Packages - http://www.vmware.com/download/packages.html

This should make finding what you’re looking for a bit easier. Be sure and use the folder with “…latest” appended to the end of the name, if you’re looking to download the latest, depending on the version. Also, pay attention to x86 and x84_64 versions as well.

Cheers!

Just for reference, here’s a list of popular prefixes for LANs based on the bits in their subnet. This can basically server as a guide to which subnet you’d like to configure your network with when determining how many IP’s you’d like available internally. Beyond this chart, LANs can become unmanageable and even subnets with higher available IPs are less likely to be needed.

A list of prefix sizes, network masks, and available hosts\IPs:

A Quick Example:

Let’s say you have an office space with 200 users and 10 servers and you’re trying to determine which subnet to use. The gut instinct would be to choose the /24 as it offers more IP’s than needed with room for growth. But realistically, there are many more devices and tools that need IP addresses than one may originally think. Your DHCP Pool alone will need to be more than 200 and wireless devices or visitors to the office must be considered. At that point, you’ll probably want to go with a netmask that gives you more IP Addresses.

Best Practices:

The golden rule when working with IP Addresses, be it load balancing a DHCP Server or determining capacity, is 80\20. Find a netmask that’s going to offer IPs that are 80% of what you’ll have available, leaving 20% for growth or unexpected needs. Resubnetting after everything is in place can be a nightmare, so plan carefully.

Cheers!

OS: Windows 7

I recently purchased a new monitor and noticed when I open photos using the Microsoft Photo Viewer I got a nasty yellow tint on the photos. There’s a fix for this out there. Here’s the fastest steps to fix the issue:

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Here’s a quick and easy way to reboot a server or computer remotely. No extra steps needed.

1. Log into a computer as an admin. By default, the command will use your credentials on the remote side.
2. Open up an elevated (Run As Administrator) command prompt.
3. Run the following command. Note that you can use the computer name or the IP Address if you know it: shutdown /m \\computer-name /r /f
4. Done!

The /m switch means you’re trying to connect to a server that’s somewhere else. The /r switch is for reboot (leave this switch out if you just want to shut the machine down). Finally, the /f is to force shutdown any programs that may be prompting you for something that you can’t see.

Cheers!

To brand our XenApp product a little bit at work, I created a favicon.ico file for web browsers. Nothing big, but it’s the little things, right? Unlike throwing the favicon.ico file in the root of your site, Citrix has a special place for the .ico files.

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Overview

I came across this issue not too long ago and wanted to share my findings. First, this issue is not just an OpenVPN issue. If a service is dependent on certain sockets and ports being open but they are in use or closed, the service is going to fail. The good news is that the issue is fairly easy to fix on a running server with a little detective work and a few easy commands.

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I was recently looking over an environment running VMware vCenter 4.1 and saw in the tasks that a task called “check new notifications” was queued about a dozen time or so. The schedule for the tasks varied. Some of the tasks were before the current time and others were afterwards. Either way, there were about a dozen or so of them and they needed to be dealt with.

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I wanted to post a quick blurb in regards to a demo we just had from the Avaya Team. We were invited to demo the AvayaLive Engage interactive environment and we were really impressed with what we saw.

For those who are unfamiliar, AvayaLive Engage is a web based interactive environment. Their marketing team would probably scoff at my use of the word “game” because its intentions are strictly work and collaboration, but the whole realm is designed using the Unreal Engine.

Once inside the AvayaLive Engage realm, you have the ability to walk your character around to the many collaboration areas. Much like real world conference rooms, these areas are full of tools that users can “engage” with to share and brainstorm.

Some of the features include:

• Spacial Audio that understands the virtual distance between you and other avatars.
• Left to right association, so you can hear people out of the appropriate speakers, depending on where they are located.
• The ability to use “Conference Rooms” where leaders can take a podium, address the entire conference room, offer up all kinds of media and display them on the walls.
• Administrative tasks and controls that allow moderators complete control over the actions of avatars inside the environment.

Here’s a quick screenshot:

From AvayaLive’s website:

Accessible from any Internet connection and web browser, AvayaLive™ Engage supports one-on-one conversations or group brainstorming sessions—any collaborative-style meeting. Enterprises can connect remote-working and on-the-go teams in a “real-world” experience.

Feel free to look into their free demo. You can actually walk around their demo the environment and all of its features. All you’ll need is an up to date browser: https://webalive.avayagov.com/1/html/index.html

Cheers!

I had originally posted a while back in regards to getting the “Windows can’t activate right now…” error in windows 8. The easy fix for this is to run a command prompt as an administrator and execute the following command:

slmgr.vbs -ipk "YOUR_PRODUCT_KEY"

This will apparently work if you are trying to change the product key to something else. However, if you’d simply like to clear out all of the product keys, you can run this command with this switch:

slmgr.vbs –upk

As Windows States here (For Windows 7, but the same applies to 8), “…the slmgr.vbs –upk command clears all product keys that are present on the computer. For example, these may include the Multiple Activation Key (MAK) and the Key Management Service (KMS) key.”

And for you cmd junkies, you can activate it right after you enter your new product key using this:

slmgr.vbs /ato

Or you could just click activate in the explorer window. Keep in mind, you must be running Command Prompt as an administrator in order for this to work!

Cheers!