On 32bit vista the PC is unable to connect to the Internet. At boot time a balloon comes out of systray:

Failed to connect to a windows service
Windows could not connect to the System Event Notification Service service.
This problem prevents limited users from logging on to the system. As an administrative user, you can review the System Event Log for details about why the service didn’t respond.”

I tried to check the event viewer but was told:
“Event Log service is unavailable. Verify that the service is running.”

So I thought I’d start the service manually but received:
“Windows could not start the Windows Event Log service on Local computer.
Error 1747: The authentication service is unknown.”

So I tried to start IPsec but this time:
“Windows could not start the IPsec Policy Agent service on Local computer.
Error 10107: A system call that should never fail has failed.”

So perhaps System Restore could put me right, but no “No restore points have been created on your computer’s system disk”

So I looked in System Properties and found that automatic restore points are enabled for the system disk. I then booted of the installation DVD and attempted to repair a computer unable to start, but was told that the PC would start. I then wished I had XP where I could just do a repair install and all my problems would be solved.

When you try to install the SQL Server 2005 on clustered environment you may get the following errors:

Task did not appear to start on machine:
\ servername: 267013

Or

\ servername: 267015

Simply avoid using the RDP, although the article number: 327270 clearly mentioned that you can, but it will fail.Now imagine you are deploying it on a Blade system, or remote servers 🙂

UPDATE: the article 327270 now mentions only it’s doable for SQL 2000

You must use iLO (a remote management port, allows KVM traffic over Ethernet on HP servers and requires license, I don’t know about other vendors) with the required license to use the remote management applet for the deployment.

I’ve faced this as well on IBM servers with SQL 2000 Server. But I could work around it using the “Remote Desktops” MMC tool. It seems this tool connects using RDP but doesn’t start a new terminal session in the memory, instead it utilize the desktop session.

If you were (for any reason) trying to remove and redeploy the Exchange Server 2007 on one node in an Active/Passive cluster, and when finished tried to failover the group to the next node and you got something like this in the Application Log:

Source: MSExchangeIS, Type: Error, EventID: 5000
Description: Unable to initialze the Microsodft Exhcnage Information Sotre service. Failed to find the working directory parameter from the registry – Error 0x80004005

Then just check the registry (exactly as the message told you) and find the differences under the HKLMCCSServices<theservicewiththeerror> and compare it to the working node in the cluster. You’ll find a missing string value (REG_SZ) named: Working Directory

And the value would be something like this: C:Program FilesMicrosoftExchange Server\MailboxMDBTemp

Now if this didn’t solve your issue, use a registry tracking tool to find the differences 🙂

If you are deploying Microsoft Windows Vista in your home or work network you may face a slow network performance. Some people reported this as an overload of the TCP/IP stack as Vista comes with IPV6 loaded by default along with other Layer Link protocols.

I tried to unbind these from the interface, then disabled and re-enabled the interface but have very minimal increasing in performance. However, searching a little bit more at Microsoft site about changes between XP and Vista networking guided me to other options. Unfortunately the particular option that is changed, supposed to increase performance but it’s not, and additionally, it’s not something that a regular user can change.

So jumping to the solution, you’ll need to change the TCP global “autotuninglevel” option. This option default value is “normal” if you change this to “disabled” or “high” then disable and re-enable the interface you’ll be saved 🙂

The command must run under administrative permissions, the command would be:

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

Just restart or stop the ALG service on the NAT box, yes it is as simple as that.

After two days searching the Internet and trying to figure out the patch the causes this issue, found nothing related to RRAS or natting. However, by chance founded the ALG relationship with FTP access. ALG provides a hidden layer for applications doesn’t support proxy option to allow it to access the Internet. But FTP has it’s own buit-in filter in Windows Server. Which is affected in somehow by the ALG/NAT combination.