Category: Windows

[sc:windows-category ]Last month Microsoft released several patches and KB3002885 was included in the list.  When my 2012 servers applied the patches, this patched failed.

To compound the issue, when a single patch fails, Windows rolls back all the patches that were applied at the same time.

This meant that every couple of nights, my servers would reboot and try once more to apply the patch, fail and roll back the changes.

I didn’t have time to look at the problem until recently and really just kind of expect Microsoft to release a new version of the patch which would solve the issue, but that hasn’t happened so it was time to do some investigation.

Checking the “Update History” revealed a couple of different error codes (80073AA2 was common), which didn’t really seem to help, so the first step was to track down exactly which update was failing (Windows doesn’t tell you which one failed, it just marks them all as failed).

While a simple task (just select half the updates and see if it fails, if so select half of those and try again) it does take quite a while to go through the 20 updates and find the one that was broken.  In the end it as the patch for KB300285 that was failing.

Doing some research didn’t turn anything obvious us, but after searching the net for a while I did find a reference to a similar problem being caused by corruption in registry, specifically the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WINEVT hive.

The general consensus was to simply delete the entire hive, instead I renamed it and then re-applied the patch, which worked.

Windows recreated the hive with much less information in it, doing a quick comparison to the original hive turned up only a single key that was missing.  I exported that key (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WINEVT\Publishers\{8c416c79-d49b-4f01-a467-e56d3aa8234c}), deleted the new hive, renamed the old one and re-imported the changes.

On my next server I decided to try and just import the missing key and then apply the patches, but that didn’t work.

I had to rename the hive and apply the patches on each of the servers by hand.  While this was tedious, it has resolved the issue.

 

[sc:windows-category ]With any product that has been around for a few years, numbering always becomes a problem.

When first released, numbers are technically significant, you want to see the “1.0” release before you really start relaying on it and your excited to “2.0” for all the new features that were missing from “1.0”.

But then it starts to lose that meaning, is 6.0 really all that different from 7.0 or 9.0?

Microsoft has clearly understood this with the next release of Windows and decided to jump straight to 10 from 8.

It’s a pretty slick move really, it makes it clear it’s still Windows but is a big enough bump to separate it from previous releases.

The technical preview is focused pretty much on the enterprise clients so they’re left out quite a bit of the end-user features, but they have detailed some of them.  Also it looks like a least next summer before a release so we’re going to have a long wait to see something close to a final release.

Start Menu

Yes it’s back and it kind of looks like a Windows Phone start page.  I guess after the uproar of Windows 8 they had to bring it back, but I hope they still support the start page on desktops as well.

I do like the start page, I think it provides a much better interface even on a desktop, but I’m obviously in the minority there 🙂

Windowed Modern Apps

Just like the start menu, it only makes sense to make the modern apps work on the desktop in windowed mode.  I’d be using more modern apps if they did.  Now it looks like I’ll get my wish!

Multiple Desktops

Unix and Mac have had multiple desktop support baked in for years and it has been an option through third-party software for Windows, but Microsoft has included it in 10.  I’ve never been a fan of multiple desktops, but I understand why many people will find this a great addition.

Paste in to the Command Prompt

The command prompt has always been a pain if you want to copy and paste stuff around, Windows 10 now lets you use Ctrl-V to paste text from the clipboard directly in to the command window!

Charms Bar

I like the charms bar, but many people found it to be less than useful.  Microsoft is keeping it in Windows 10 but they’re going to be changing it in some unspecified manner before release.

 

[sc:windows-category ]Recently I went on vacation to Europe for two weeks, I of course took my laptop with me and as always I have BitLocker enabled.

The trip started off with all the classic travel issues you might expect, family emergency at the last-minute, hotel booking being cancelled without any notification and a near death experience at the airport.

However by the second night things had seemed to be going well and I went to bed for a good nights sleep.  The next morning I booted up my laptop to check e-mail and was greeted with the BitLocker Recovery screen.

Normally that wouldn’t be a big issue, my recovery keys are stored safely at home and I’d be able to grab a friend’s computer to use to get them.  Of course, on vacation that became a bit more of an issue…

My first thought was to check OneDrive, but I didn’t place them there and still believe that to be a bad idea.

Next was to see if I had opened RDP to my home computer as I have the RDP client on my phone unfortunately I hadn’t and so that failed.

I do have SSH available to my Linux box and so I opened the Store on my phone and find a SSH client, which I did.  However it turns out I hadn’t installed the packages needed to get access to a Windows file share and trying to use the SSH client was problematic on the phone as it’s keyboard was limited and every time I switch to the web browser to look something up it disconnected me.

Finally I gave in and went out looking for an Internet café I could use.  The first one was packed, the second one had several stations available.  They were running XP but it had most of what I needed.  I downloaded Putty, connected to my Linux box, used the port forwarding in Putty to then RDP to my PC and retrieve my recovery key.

My laptop booted up cleanly after that and I didn’t find anything wrong.  I still don’t know why it needed the recovery key but it’s been fine since them.