We currently have a Windows 2008 x64 Server with print services installed and we are sharing several network printers through that server. Every time a user logs in, a vbs script is run that maps certain printers for them depending on which groups they belong to in Active Directory. All was well and good until randomly we started getting the error message "The specified port is unknown" on one of our servers when trying to add the printers. So, instead of mapping the specified printers, the logon script failed leaving the user printerless. I then went on to test adding the printer manually through the control panel, and to my surprise, I got the exact same error. What gives?
I tried several things on the server hosting the printer, but it made absolutely no difference whatsoever. Finally, I thought, maybe if I just restart the Print Spooler service on the server the user was logging into. As soon as I did that, everything worked again! So, I'm not exactly sure what caused the problem to occur in the first place, but I'm glad that I know how to fix it now.
Bonus: We were also having issues with the wrong username/job owner showing up on the printer separator sheets. Instead of printing the username of the person who printed, it would print the username of the last Domain Admin to print something. We searched Google near and far and came back with nothing. After running out of ideas, we pinged Microsoft support on the issue to discover that this is a known problem with Server 2008 and Vista SP1 and there's actually a hotfix available for it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958741 I hope that someone finds this useful, since I had such a hard time finding the solution.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Getting around the Windows Rearm Limit with Sysprep and Altiris
We are currently in the process of deploying 9 IBM Blade servers as a Citrix XenApp farm for our employees. After evaluating the options for maintaining the servers, and their images, we settled on using Altiris. The past several weeks has been consumed with coming up with a "Golden" image that we can use across all 9 servers so that each user's experience will be consistent and predictable (well, as much as possible anyway). Coming up with this "Golden" image required going through a few iterations of a Server 2008 build, installing applications, customizing options and updates, etc. We finally came to the point yesterday when we were ready to make one last change and take a final image -- and this is when I ran into a problem. For the life of me, I could not get Altiris to take the image properly from the "Golden" server.
For the record, we've never used Altiris before, so for the most part we kept most of the default settings: we chose a path to save the image to, we chose to sysprep (using the default answer file) the server, and then take the image. I was finally able to narrow down the problem to sysprep not running correctly. So, at that point, I went on to the server to try and manually run sysprep and got a fatal error! (A full description of the problem can be found in this MS knowledgebase article).
Basically, it boils down to these facts: When Altiris syspreps a server it generalizes it (as it should since this strips out all of the uniqueness of the server, so it can be applied to other servers), resetting the licensing information (or rearming it), and whatever else it does to prepare the image. Now, this is all well and good except for the fact that Microsoft limits the number of rearms to 3 for any given Vista/Server2008 image. So, not really being exposed to this world before, I burned up these 3 rearms very quickly :)
At that point I scoured the internet for workarounds for this problem, since I had a golden image, but could not sysprep it. I tried the answer file solution proposed in the knowledgebase article above, but could not get it to work for whatever reason. Finally after much searching I came across this article, which describes how to get around this limitation.
So, to solve this problem (if you've read the entire post until this point, well done -- but if you just skipped down here to the solution, I don't blame you), I just went into the registry on the "Golden" server and set the following key to a value of "1":
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurentVersion\SL\SkipRearm (For Windows 7: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\SoftwareProtectionPlatform\SkipRearm, thanks Mike!)
Without a restart, I was able to run the Altiris imaging job again successfully. It cost me a day of work, so I hope someone finds this helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.
Note: I also noticed that I had to do this registry change EVERY time before taking an image. The image does not retain this value, it gets reset after doing the sysprep.
For the record, we've never used Altiris before, so for the most part we kept most of the default settings: we chose a path to save the image to, we chose to sysprep (using the default answer file) the server, and then take the image. I was finally able to narrow down the problem to sysprep not running correctly. So, at that point, I went on to the server to try and manually run sysprep and got a fatal error! (A full description of the problem can be found in this MS knowledgebase article).
Basically, it boils down to these facts: When Altiris syspreps a server it generalizes it (as it should since this strips out all of the uniqueness of the server, so it can be applied to other servers), resetting the licensing information (or rearming it), and whatever else it does to prepare the image. Now, this is all well and good except for the fact that Microsoft limits the number of rearms to 3 for any given Vista/Server2008 image. So, not really being exposed to this world before, I burned up these 3 rearms very quickly :)
At that point I scoured the internet for workarounds for this problem, since I had a golden image, but could not sysprep it. I tried the answer file solution proposed in the knowledgebase article above, but could not get it to work for whatever reason. Finally after much searching I came across this article, which describes how to get around this limitation.
So, to solve this problem (if you've read the entire post until this point, well done -- but if you just skipped down here to the solution, I don't blame you), I just went into the registry on the "Golden" server and set the following key to a value of "1":
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurentVersion\SL\SkipRearm (For Windows 7: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\SoftwareProtectionPlatform\SkipRearm, thanks Mike!)
Without a restart, I was able to run the Altiris imaging job again successfully. It cost me a day of work, so I hope someone finds this helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.
Note: I also noticed that I had to do this registry change EVERY time before taking an image. The image does not retain this value, it gets reset after doing the sysprep.
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