Someone in our office was getting the error “the server is currently unavailable” when trying to change Out of Office settings, and also when trying to see other people’s free/busy information.

I have fixed this problem in the past by making sure that the dns zone for the primary email address has an SRV record that points to our client access servers (I think that’s the right term — I use the same hostname that we use for Outlook Web Access).  Here’s an overview of what goes into the SRV record.  If you have a user with the primary email address of user@examplecompany.com, but your email server is mail.example.com, the SRV record goes into the examplecompany.com zone and contains the following info:

   service: _autodiscover
   protocol: _tcp
   priority: 0
   weight: 0
   port: 443
   target: mail.example.com
   ttl: 14400

The situation in this case had an extra complication:  I did not have access to the dns server for examplecompany.com.  In this case, I used a quick and dirty workaround and set up an instance of dnsmasq on a linux server.  Dnsmasq is one of the few services where you can say “return a certain record for one host in examplecompany.com, but forward all other examplecompany.com requests to the real dns server for that domain”. I think you can also configure PowerDNS to do this. I put the following statement in the dnsmasq.conf and pointed the user’s laptop to the dnsmasq machine:

srv-host=_autodiscover._tcp.examplecompany.com,mail.example.com,443

It’s a kludge that only works when he’s in the office, but hopefully Outlook doesn’t need to reconfigure very often.

Netflix WMC

After a power outage, Windows Media Center (on Windows 7) started crashing whenever we would launch the Netflix plugin.

After trying many things, the answer turned out to be simply deleting the temporary Internet files in Internet Explorer.

when “Repair System” doesn’t show up on the advanced boot options menu

Vista repair

I was asked to put an Inspiron 1520 back to factory condition for resale, and there was a catch: no OS disk was available, and XP had been installed over the original Vista Home Premium, so there was no way to access the Recovery partition.  The good news was that the Recovery partition was there.

Big thanks to Dan Goodell and his instructions at http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/vista/vistarecovery.shtml !  By borrowing a Vista install DVD and following his careful instructions, I was able to access the Recovery Partition and expand the system image found there.

For my purposes, I had to add two extra steps:

1. The imagex step writes all the necessary files to the main partition, but it doesn’t remove any personal data from that partition.  You need to use other utilities to wipe the partition first.
2. After the rebuild, the machine wouldn’t boot to Vista.  But that just required booting with the Vista DVD again and letting it do a repair.

Upgrading our Vostro 2510 to Windows 7 was surprisingly painless.  It seemed to have good video, networking, and audio drivers from the start.

However, I couldn’t adjust the screen brightness with the special keys.  I tried looking for Dell Quickset for this hardware and OS combo, but no luck.

It turns out that installing the Vista video driver from Dell did the trick.  Now the screen brightness keys work!

A week ago, my power, network, and volume icons disappeared from the tray area of Windows 7.  When I chose “Customize notification icons” and then “Turn system icons on or off”, the choices were grayed out like the image to the left.

I tried the Group Policy and registry solutions that I found online, but with no success.

Here’s how I finally fixed it:

1. Run a Command Prompt as administrator, then “sfc /scannow”
2. Find the sfc log file at C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log and search it for “cannot repair”.

I discovered that 6 .dll files from C:\Windows\system32 were messed up.  I found a nice explanation here as to how to extract the files from the Windows 7 installation DVD using 7-Zip, which I already like for other zipping and unzipping tasks.

Unfortunately, you can’t just copy the files into C:\Windows\system32.  Here’s what I had to do to replace the .dll files:

1. Extract the files from the installation DVD into a local folder, such as c:\extracted-files
2. Boot the installation DVD, choose to repair Windows, and get to a Command Prompt
3. Use the command line to copy the .dll files from c:\extracted-files to c:\windows\system32
4. Reboot

That did it!  I don’t know how the files were corrupted, but replacing them got the system icons back.