Creating Windows 2003 Trusts: The VMWare connection

We've been testing our software for Citrix compatibility lately and wanted to try out some Domain Trust situations to make sure that we either worked, not work and schedule a new feature, or could document a known issue.

Creating trusts between Windows 2003 domains is usually pretty easy.

1. Start up MMC
2. Add the Active Directory Domains & Trusts snap-in
3. Select your domain, right click and select "properties"
4. Click on the "Trusts" tab
5. Click "New Trust" and follow the wizard to create your trust.

This time however, I was having problems. I was creating the trust between a VMWare hosted domain, let's call it P, and a MS Virtual Server hosted domain, let's call it O. When creating the trust, I was getting the error "Local Security Authority is unable to obtain an RPC connection to the domain controller". I verified that DNS was working, RPC services were running on both domain controllers of domain P and O. So what the heck?

Enter Citrix Tools Shared Folders. It appears that if you have Citrix Tools installed with the Shared Folders option, it interferes with the trust creation. The fix is a simple as removing the option from the Citrix Tools install and then creating the trust.

1. Open Add and Remove Programs
2. Select Citrix Tools and click Modify
3. Mark Shared Folders to be removed and complete the wizard.
4. Create your domain trust

Now we haven't been using the Shared Folders option in Citrix Tools so we haven't added it back in, I suppose that you could re-add it after having created the trust and it'll probably just work. If you know for sure please chime in!

Mouse Fix for Ubuntu 7.4 on Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

This is the fix and credit belongs where it is due. I'm just posting it here for easy reference.

1. reboot in recovery mode by pressing ESC on the GRUB screen
2. wget http://librarian.launchpad.net/7583925/unsupported-patch-for-87262.sh
3. chmod +x unsupported-patch-for-87262.sh
4. ./unsupported-patch-for-87262.sh
5. reboot

You can find the whole thread on fixing the mouse support on Arcane Code.

Props to paperino.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Stopped Working? Missing MSXML6?

So we've been working with the Visual Studio 8 Beta via the Microsoft provided VHDs, which seems to be working quite nicely except if I'm running that vm on my workstation, that's pretty much all I can run. Any way I rebooted my machine after removing SQL Server 2005 and went to start up my VS8 beta vm and BOOM! It wouldn't start at all. After checking the Virtual Server Event Log we found the following error:

Virtual Server encountered an unexpected error, 0x00000003.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Dang! After some digging it turns out that when I remove SQL Server 2005 it also removed my already registered MS Xml parser 6 dll which is required by Virtual Server... Gah.

So the fix is easy, either download Microsoft Core XML Services 6 from Microsoft or otherwise get a copy of msxml6.dll, copy it into your Windows\System32 directory. On the command line type:

regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\msxml6.dll

And then like magic when you go to start the Virtual Server service it should start up like it should have in the first place.

Thanks for nothing SQL Server installer.