Network Audit and Documentation, CENTREL Solutions Blog

I've noticed today that the DNS WMI Provider reports the following error Generic failure 0x80041001 When you perform basic WMI queries such as the following SELECT * FROM MicrosoftDNS_NSType. This is quite a simple issue that this can be caused by the DNS server service being stopped which is interesting because other classes such as MicrosoftDNS_Server will return however their property values will be set to null.

I came across and error today with AdvancedInstaller on a 64-bit server and couldn't find the solution online (I'm pretty sure I've had this error before) so decided to blog about it. Summary When the installer is running and reaches the IIS configuration section the following error is shown – Note: PkgMgr.exe has been deprecated. Please update your scripts to use DISM.exe to install, uninstall, configure, and update features and packages for Windows. Operation failed with 0x800700B. Cause The issue is caused on 64-bit systems when the wrong ASP.NET registration tool is run. Resolution Ensure that the “Prefer 64-bit version (if available)” setting is selected for the ASP.NET registration section. Why not take a look at our Network Audit and Documentation Tool XIA Configuration server http://www.centrel-solutions.com/XIAConfiguration

You can now audit NTFS and share level permissions with XIA Configuration Server version 5 as well as general share configuration. This allows you to detect changes to your share and NTFS permissions. Share Settings Description Share name Path Type Cache Settings Access Based Enumeration Directory Exists Share Permissions Account Name Action (Allow or Deny) Rights NTFS Security Owner Account name Inherited Action Rights Propagation Flags XIA Configuration automatically detects and documents user created shares as well as administrative shares such as IPC$, C$, Admin$ and print$. Whilst these shares display the NTFS permissions assigned to the directory assigned to the share it is important to note that share level permissions are not displayed for administrative shares as they are controlled by the operating system and cannot be configured by the user. For more information see the Windows server agent capability on the following XIA Conf...

When accessing the Group Policy Management console (even as Administrator) you may see the error "You do not have permission to perform this operation). Access is denied."          Resolution Ensure that the share level permissions are set correctly on the SYSVOL share of the domain controller (or domain controllers) causing the issue.            To audit share level permissions including those set on the SYSVOL share see the following XIA Configuration page Audit Share and NTFS Permissions                  

The network documentation tool, XIA Configuration Server has the ability to document a range of network hardware and software providing detailed configuration information and change management capabilities including Microsoft Exchange Servers Network Switches Microsoft Hyper-V Servers Microsoft DNS Servers Microsoft IIS Servers Windows Servers Windows Workstations Microsoft Clusters VMware Hosts and vCenter Servers For more information on network switch documentation please see the following link Network Documentation Tool Network Switch tasks are able to document network switches from various manufacturers that support SNMP management. To understand the capabilities of your network equipment please refer the documentation provided by your switch manufacturer.   The following information can be obtained from all switch manufacturers Switch Name Description ARP cache Ports IP addresses Base MAC address Routing table Dependant on the capabilities of th...

The following video shows how to use our server documentation tool - XIA Configuration Server. It includes a walk through of the installation, scanning the local server, IIS installation and SQL server instance. The video then briefly shows the server interface where it's possible to view all of the configuration data in a web browser, see the relationships between the items and export the data to PDF. Server documentation tool - XIA Configuration Server, Video

I've recently had an issue that's wasted an entire day of my life that I'd like to share. We have some classes that serialize to XML. These work correctly in all scenarios. Or so I thought. We have a .NET Custom Installation Action written in C#. During the installation process the custom action opens one of these classes, configured the properties of the class and then saves it as XML. The code works correctly when executed from a test Windows Form application however fails with the following error when it is executed from the installer or from InstallUtil.exe. System.InvalidOperationException: There was an error generating the XML document. ---> System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'filename' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. Very strange as the file specified is in the same directory as the custom action. Looking at the code in the custom action it seems that the codebase is being set t...

With XIA Configuration v5 it is now possible to document servers that are installed with a server core operating system or are running Windows Server 2012 with the server core or minimal server roles installed.

With the latest version of XIA Configuration Server v5 (due in October 2013) it will be possible to document more advanced printer settings including   Availability Priority Spool Mode Advanced Printing Features Hold Mismatched Documents Separator page Print Processor   The new user interface makes this information clearer and quicker to access than with previous version. For more information please contact sales@centrel-solutions.com  or visit XIA Configuration Server - Audit and Documentation        

I thought I'd share my current device manager frustrations as it may help other developers or sysadmins. When trying to access information about device manager classes on a remote machine I've run into a few issues on Windows Server 2012. Using the Win32 API setup functions such as SetupDiGetClassDescriptionEx and SetupDiClassNameFromGuidEx passing a remote machine name would fail with an unknown error however would work locally. The API documentation didn't show any errors. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff551058(v=vs.85).aspx Strange. I thought I'd quickly double check running Device Manager against the remote Windows Server 2012 R2 machine and got the following error. Error running device manager remotely "Make sure that this computer is on the network, has remote administration enabled, and is running the "Plug and Play" and "Remote Registry" services" I then tried to access a Windows 2003 ser...

When using serialization in C# I've found a very annoying problem that doesn't seem to have a good solution. If you rename or remove an enum value the XML serializer reports the following error when you try and deserialize and existing object that uses that enum value. Instance validation error: 'value' is not a valid value for ObjectType . I already use code to standardise enums to "Unknown" on the set accessor if an unknown value is passed in. This however isn't good enough for the XML serializer which pre-checks all possible values. Take the following example where bicycle has been spelled incorrectly but we already have XML data in customer environments with the incorrect spelling so we can't just rename it.   /// <summary> /// The type of vehicle. /// </summary> public enum VehicleType {     /// <summary>     /// The vehicle type is unknown.     /// </summary> ...

With the new version of XIA Configuration Server it is now possible to automatically document your Hyper-V configuration including host configuration settings, virtual networking and virtual machines. http://www.centrel-solutions.com/XIAConfiguration/capabilities.aspx?capability=HyperVServer Change tracking allows you to detect unauthorized changes to the virtual environment as demonstrated in the following PDF report. http://www.centrel-solutions.com/media/XIAConfiguration/Capabilities/HyperVServerDataComparer.pdf Using the customizable reports it is possible to easily identify the global configuration of your Hyper-V hosts and identify bare-metal hypervisors within your infrastructure.