My recent hate is System Center Essentials 2007. Thankfully, I actually quite like Essentials 2010.

Anyway, while installing the SCE2007 agent the other day, I encountered an odd error message while trying both a push install and a local install of the agent.

Error 25211.Failed to install performance counters.. Error Code: -2147023886 (The configuration registry key is invalid.).

Sadly, there’s not a lot on the web in relation to this error. The only pointer that might have helped was this technet article: How to manually rebuild Performance Counter Library values.

This starts out pretty nasty, involving copying files from your install media and hacking about in the registry, which Microsoft always massively caveats. The one item of help on the page was the command:

lodctr /R

According to the help, this will rebuild the perf registry strings and info from scratch based on the current registry settings and backup INI files. And accorting to the KB article: “/R is uppercase. You must have administrative rights on the computer to successfully perform this command.”

That did the trick for me and completely avoided all the nasty work of actually finding the install media for this server

I’ve included below a larger chunk of the installation error log below which will hopefully help people find this page via searches.

My personal opinion is Microsoft shouldn’t have been forced to release this. If you FORCE a choice for a web browser, you should also force a choice for every single application that comes with Windows.

Additionally, I fail to see why people should be forced to pick from a number of free products. Perhaps a better option would be for Microsoft to allow third parties to produce branded versions of Windows and then users can make their initial choices at the point of purchase.

This, of course, assumes a level of knowledge of the end users so questions like “where have all my favourites gone?” don’t happen…

Anyway, this was supposed to be a vaguely technical post and not a rant.

So, as a systems administrator, how do you block this update?

If you are using an internal update server such as WSUS or SCCM (which I love), then you have the simple option of not approving the update for release.

Otherwise, Microsoft have released a KB article showing a simple registry key that can be set to prevent the Browser Choice screen running – KB2019411.

So, as a sysadmin, how do you implement this?

Well, you can custom roll a Group Policy to set this as a preference on your client machines. I’ve written some GPOs before, but in this case I’ll simply direct you to this blog post by Christoffer Steding where you can download his version.

However, in my opinion, a much more graceful group policy to set is a software restriction policy. This has been documented by The Angry Technician.

The look of the site seemed to be better with just the excerpt from a single post on the front page.

Now, that sounds really straight forward and something that WordPress should be able to do out of the box. And it is.

However, if you want the “Older Entries” pages to then show, say, 10 posts you’re knackered as all subsequent pages will just show 1 entry. I tried the Custom Post Limits plugin, but it still didn’t work as page 2 started at post 6.

After reading a lot of entries on this topic (it seems I’m not the only person keen on this!) and getting nowhere fast. Lots of “read this link then work it out yourself” type replies I finally got something to work. Using both the offset AND paging attributes of the query_posts() function!

The only issue with this is that the last page wouldn’t show at all. This was due to the fact that the front page misses all but 1 of the entries, then the 2nd page starts at entry 2. In effect you’re missing a number of entries up to the usual number per page minus 1 – everything that would be on the last page. To get round this, I simply double the number of entries displayed on what WordPress believes is the final page.

To get this to work, add the following snippit to the top of the home.php file in your theme directory.
If you don’t have a home.php file then copy your index.php in your theme directory to home.php which will then take precedence according to the WordPress Template Heirarcy. I do not recommend adding this to your index.php file.

Theres a big hoo-ha going round at the minute about a number of viruses that are exploiting autorun.inf to spread.

You can read all the gorey details over at CERT “Microsoft Windows Does Not Disable AutoRun Properly”

Essentially, the recommended fix is to set a registry key. I did read somewhere that this makes windows handle the file as a Win95 ini file but sadly I can’t find the blog/article where I read that anymore.

Approaching this as a sysadmin and wanting to undertake minimal effort to resolve this issue I’ve create a Group Policy adm file to solve apply it to all the machines in an Active Directory domain. I’ve copied the contents below and attached the file to this post.

To use it:

1. Create a new group policy object in your AD
2. Edit it, right click on the Administrative Templates folder and remove all the default ones listed and add the one below.
3. Right click on the Administrative Templates folder and change the view filtering to not hide settings that can’t be fully managed
4. Group poicy editor will now display the setting to disable autorun which will set the appropriate registry key

ADM files are just text. You can either download the one below or copy and paste this (watch for the line wrap on the last line!):

You need to know very little about How The Web Works™ to know that this can be a good thing.

DNS is where your computer takes a name like www.livejournal.com and turns it into a number that is used to route your computer to the right webserver.

OpenDNS doesn’t just give you the correct address for a website. It maintains a list of Phishing websites and redirects these to a safe page warning you about the site you were about to visit.

Of additional interest to me for its use at my work (and to parents who’s kids have access to the Internet) is that they don’t just categorise phishing websites, but they also have categories of adult and mature sites you can bar if you want (once you’ve signed up)

Took me a few minutes to setup (a little extra poking required at work, naturally). Very unintrusive – no software to install, just a couple of settings to change and they have lots of help pages on how to do that.