Came across a strange one last week.  IAG 2007 with SP2, ActiveSync trunk, using an Active Directory Repository.

Working fine for pretty much everyone, except one user, who is getting constant prompts from the Windows Mobile device to ‘correct your password’.

IAG is showing an authentication failure, and is logging the correct username and domain, which only really leaves the password.

Further investigation determined that the user had a # symbol in their password.  When the password was changed to one without a #, ActiveSync started working fine.

I’ve since tested a non-IAG ActiveSync installation with a password including a #, and it works fine, which suggests that IAG is the problem.

I’ve now got a ticket logged with our IAG vendor, and I will post again here when I’ve worked through the issue with them.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, and last night I finally got around to creating the 3G Commuter Forums.

Its all a bit empty at the moment, but hopefully it will start getting some traffic soon.

If you use a 3G dongle, or a laptop with built in 3G, please do sign up, comments and suggestions for new forums, etc, are welcome.

Anyone fancy designing me a logo for the site?

Our existing environment is all 32-bit, Windows 2003 R2 SP2, MOSS 2007 SP1, with the Infrastructure Update and the October Cumulative Updates applied for WSS and MOSS.

We want to migrate to a 64-bit platform, so we provisioned some new 64-bit servers, and installed the x64 binaries for MOSS, with the above updates slipstreamed in, without any problems.

We then ran PSCONFIG on one of the new servers, in order to join it to the farm.

At this point, it throws an exception 1387, failed to connect to the configuration database, so PSCONFIG then exits.

Looking in Central Administration at the Servers in Farm, the new server is now showing up, listed as ‘not configured’, and with a version number matching the existing servers in the farm.

We logged a ticket with PSS, who got us to try various things, including updating the credentials for all the various service accounts using stsadm.exe, forcing an upgrade, etc.

Nothing helped, however…

Whilst in Central Administration, updating the credentials for the various application pools, I noticed that there were a couple of pools / credentials listed relating to Web Apps that were removed ages ago.

(You can use stsadm.exe to manage credentials for Web App pools, but it can’t cope with different accounts for different pools, so you have to use Central Administration if you are running in Least Privilege mode like we are)

A quick google led me to this blog posting, which details how to identify and remove such orphaned configuration objects.

I identified the IDs of the offending pools, and followed the instructions to remove them using stsadm.exe.

I also found that in IIS Manager on my new server, there were pools configured using those orphaned details, despite them not showing on the existing (working) servers.

I can only assume that PSCONFIG read everything (including the orphaned items) and tried applying them, only to get stuck.

Needless to say, having cleared the objects using stsadm.exe, and removed the pools from my new server, my subsequent attempt to join the new server to the farm was a success.

So I’ve got my HP NX7300 laptop dual booting Vista SP2 and Windows 7 Beta, and I have to announce I am very impressed with Windows7.

Performance

I’ve installed Office 2007 SP1, Firefox 3.0.5, Live Mesh, Live Messenger and Live Writer 2009, NewsGator FeedDemon, plus the usual Acrobat Reader, Flash Player, etc.

Boot time is better than Vista with a similar software install base, as is login time.

Sleep and recover from sleep is hugely improved compared to Vista SP2 – the recovery time especially.

The networking and file handling side of things has evidently been sorted out as well, because network file copies, as well as copies from removable media are significantly quicker too.

To put this in perspective, the laptop is a 1.7GHz Celeron M, with 2GB of RAM, and I’m running W7 in a 20GB partition, so its not exactly a supercomputer!

Other Stuff

I’m running as a normal user, and I’ve not felt the need to turn off UAC yet – something which got turned off almost straightaway on the Vista install, never to be see again.

I have found that the National Rail Widget doesn’t work – it just displays a white box, with no options button.

Fortunately Stuart Preston has found and fixed the problem and made an updated version of the gadget available on his blog.

Overall, I think W7 is going to be a massive improvement on Vista in performance terms, particularly on marginal hardware.

I am considering talking my wife into letting me install it on her HP TC4200 tablet……

David McWee has just announced the release of the ECTS Extension, available now from the CodePlex site.

The extension adds a number of useful features and options to ECTS, which I will be investigating with interest, as I am using it at the moment, but in its ‘vanilla’ form, which has some shortcomings, some of which I’ve blogged about before.

The Skyfire mobile browser is now available as an open beta for Windows Mobile Standard and Professional for UK based users.

Up until now, it has only been available to US and Canadian users.

Get it here.

I’ve installed it on my HTC Touch, and all seems well so far, although I’ve only had a brief chance to play with it.

Kevin Tomlinson is currently touring with his one man show Seven Ages.  I had the pleasure of lighting his performance on Friday evening at The Phoenix.

I can thoroughly recommend the show as being one of the funniest I have seen in a long, long time.  It got 5 star reviews when he performed at the Edinburgh Festival, and now I know why!

The show is about the seven stages of life that Shakespeare says we go through, in ‘As You Like It’. True stories are taken from Kevin’s – and the audience’s – life and then weaved into scenes of comic or dramatic nature, for the entertainment of the audience. Masks, storytelling, improvisation – and sometimes puppetry – are all used in the process.

Check out the tour dates for your nearest venue.

SP2 for the 2007 Microsoft Office System, which covers the Office 2007 applications themselves, as well as SharePoint, etc, is slated for release sometime between February and April 2009.  More details can be found here.

The Live Mesh team have recently announced the Mobile client is now available.

I’ve been experimenting with the Vista client for some weeks now, so the availability of the mobile client for UK users is great.

One of the limitations of Windows Mobile has always been an inability to sync to the storage card using ActiveSync / WMDC.  Mesh provides a great solution to this.

The only issue I’ve found so far is that it installs on the phone, rather than allowing me to select the storage card.  I had to move a few things around to get enough space on the phone.

Cool tip for calendar viewing in Outlook 2007:

Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog : Living in Outlook: Multi-Day Calendar Views