Greatest Hits
Over time I have developed a few posts that I really liked for one reason or another…but they rarely got hits after they aged off of the front page. I’ve been considering creating a “My Favorite Posts” type page…sort of a “Greatest Hits” of this blog. I finally did it tonight…My Favorite Ramblings. Yeah, it’s probably a bit self-centered…but then again…aren’t blogs by their very nature typically self-centered?
Iastore.sys – Status: 0xc0000359
I’m blogging this as much so that I can remind myself in the future what the heck this error means. I’ve come across it several times, and each time I forgot what the issue was and had to figure it out all over again.
So…there is the scenario…I was doing an OSD deployment in ConfigMgr this week…specifically a Vista x64 deployment. The system connected to PXE fine and downloaded the boot image, but when the boot image attempted to start, I got this lovely error message with two key phrases: 0xc0000359 and iastore.sys. (I think the exact message was something like “Windows failed to load because of a critical system driver is missing, or corrupt.”) I know I’ve seen this before, but what does it mean?
Long story short…iastore.sys is part of the Intel mass storage driver. Windows PE needs that mass storage driver to be in the boot image in order to see the hard drive. This is on a Dell system. I had imported the mass storage drivers into my boot images, but had mistakenly put the x86 version of iastore.sys into the x64 boot image.
Although…that leads to a different observation/gripe…Intel…why would you name the x86 and the x64 drivers the same thing? And one more gripe…these are Dell drivers that I have imported into ConfigMgr. If you look at Dell’s version.txt file that is part of the driver, it shows which OSes are applicable for the driver. When you import this driver into ConfigMgr, it imports as being applicable to basically everything (which it is not), and therefore causes problems later. Most of the time this isn’t an issue, but it definitely causes problems at times. The only way to fix it is to manually edit the “applicable to” settings for each driver. I haven’t taken the time to figure out if it is a problem with the way the INFs are created by Dell, or if it is a problem with the way that ConfigMgr parses the files.
All that said…the fix is pretty simple…import the correct driver into the boot image.
More Sam Pictures
Going back to my previous post about how I enjoy macro photography, I have really enjoyed taking some close up pictures of my son. Typically have better results with it when he is sleeping. Here are a few of my better ones from this week.
The Stork and the Sandman
So the stork came to my house this week. Apparently the Sandman thought the stork was a Pterodactyl cause he hasn’t been back since.
The first night in the hospital, Sam slept like a dream…between three and five hour stretches. Julie and I both got decent sleep. Since then…well, we’ve been awake a lot at night. Sleep deprivation is not fun.
I love my son…just would like a bit more sleep.
Sam – A few more pictures
I really enjoy photography. I especially enjoy macro photography. A few of my more favorite shots are posted on this blog. Nearly all of the macro photography (or photography in general really) that I have done has been of either nature or some inanimate object taken from a different perspective. It has been fun today taking some macro pictures of Sam.
Sam is here!
What a day! We both woke up at around 5am. We stayed in bed talking for a while then got up to get ready to head into the hospital for the 7:30am induction. After checking in and getting everything set up, Dr. Manneh broke the water at around 8:30. Based on Julie’s past history of rapid labor, we were expecting to be done well before lunch. Well…God had different plans for us this time. Lunch came and went. Julie was progressing, but much slower than in past pregnancies. When we came in, Julie was at 3cm…by 1:30, she had only gotten to 6cm. However…
About that time, things kicked into high gear. She went through the classic “self doubt” signpost (I’ll try to get a link to that at some point). At that point, I knew that she wasn’t far off. The nurse checked her again…still 6cm. But the self doubt phase (characterized by the woman saying she “can’t do this”, is typically right before transition. Because I was aware of this (and because I had seen her go through the same phase with both of our daughters), I had the nurse check her again pretty soon after. The nurse got a surprised look…”wow, you are completely dilated.” Julie had gone from 6cm to complete in 15-30 minutes.
Right after birth, the nurses were all saying that he looked big…that he was definitely going to be 8 pounds. Once they weighed him, we were all shocked. 8 pounds 12 ounces. Based on the ultrasound from a few weeks ago, they were estimating that he was going to be just over 7 pounds at birth. Uh…really glad we induced early. He would have been well over nine pounds had we not.
Some may know the significance of the names, but others may not. Sam is named after my dad. My dad was my best friend growing up. I learned a lot from him about hunting, fishing, and repairing things. I worked for him during the summers, and most weekends we were either in the woods or on the lake together. My dad died of cancer when I was twelve…an event that had a huge impact on my life. There was never any doubt that we were going to name our son Sam.
Isaac is a Hebrew name meaning “laughter.” It is a name that has continued to stick out to me over the last few months. As we were nailing down the middle name, I kept coming back to it. When I would look through a list of names, I caught myself just looking to see if Isaac was on the list.
Thanks again to everyone who joined with us in praying that Sam would hold off until Tuesday. That was a huge deal.
Another big thanks goes out to our moms. My mom has done a wonderful job of taking care of our daughters while we have been at the hospital…a job that she did when Marybeth was born also. That is a huge blessing to us. Thanks mom! And Julie’s mom has been in the delivery room at the birth of all of our babies. She is a tremendous help. We are SO glad that they were both able to fly in for this birth.
Samuel Isaac Davis
Quick update…the longest labor (nearly six hours) and the largest of our three babies (8 pounds 12 ounces). Samuel Isaac is here. I’ll update more later (doing this from my phone). I’ll post some pictures later also. Julie is still my hero…she simply rocks! Julie and Sam are both doing well.
Election Day Baby
Tomorrow morning (Election Day 2008), we are supposed to call the hospital at 6am to confirm Julie’s appointment to induce labor. The appointment is at 7:30am, but because it is an elective induction we can be bumped down/off the schedule for various reasons. Based on past track record, once they break Julie’s water, she will likely be in strong labor within 15 minutes. And if the past track record continues, this should be a very quick birth…possibly by mid-morning even.
Thanks to everyone who prayed over the last few days for labor to hold off til Tuesday. God chose to answer your prayers with a “yes”.
Check back on the blog sometime around mid day or in the afternoon. I expect to be able to post the birth announcement with pictures from the hospital.
Our former next door neighbor in Orlando really wanted to see what Julie looks like at nine months pregnant and was bummed when we were moving at seven months pregnant. We promised her that we would put pictures up of Julie at that point, so here you go. Jenn….the picture to the right is just for you. It is Julie at the beginning of the ninth month.
Baby Davis – Coming Soon!!!
We were at the doctor for Julie’s weekly OB checkup. We had already been talking with the doctor about scheduling the birth. With Julie’s history of rapid labor (two babies…a total of 5 hours and 20 minutes of labor), we are very concerned about just getting to the hospital in time. On top of that…Julie has said that with Marybeth she wouldn’t have realized that she was even in labor until transition…which was 20 minutes and a couple of good pushes from birth.
[Stop rambling Jarvis…get to the point of the post] (also…if you don’t want pregnancy details…stop reading now)
Anyway…during the checkup, we were talking with the doctor to schedule the birth for next Tuesday (November 4). When she checked for dilation/effacement/station, she got this surprised look on her face and said, “Wow! You are three centimeters, and the baby is REALLY low. I hope you make it til Tuesday.” We were a bit surprised…Julie was 2cm on Friday and hadn’t had a ton of strong contractions since then, so we weren’t expecting that.
Now…this is where you come in. We really need you to pray that this baby holds off til Tuesday. The hospital won’t schedule an elective induction before that day…and we really don’t want to have the doctors that are on call before Tuesday.
So…check back Tuesday/Wednesday. The hospital has wireless internet, so I should be able to post the birth announcement with pictures here reasonably quickly.
Unattend.xml – case sensitive tags
I’ve been working with a custom unattend.xml file during an OSD deployment at a client location this week. There have been some issues with the unattend.xml file. In the midst of it, I learned something about XML that I didn’t know. Tags are case sensitive. I had assumed it was similar to HTML where tags are not case sensitive.
Anyway, there were a couple of places where the opening tag was <path> and the closing tag of the element was </Path>. No dice. The tags needed to match…the opening tag needed to be <Path>. Now I know.
Gas Prices – the “1” watch
Over the last few weeks, gas prices have been dropping like a rock. I’m paying a full dollar/gallon less now than I paid about 3 1/2 weeks ago. All of the stations in the little town I live in are currently sitting at $2.19, and they seem to drop the price a little more every few days. So…what I’m looking for now…is for the 2 to go away. I’m looking for the first gas station to drop below $2/gallon.
Interestingly, in talking to friends from around the country…none of them are even close to this price. Most are at least 30 cents/gallon higher
Notepad++
This is my new favorite text editor. I’ve used EditPlus for years. When I got to my new job I asked if we had a license for a text editor or if I could expense out the purchase of a license for EditPlus. One of my coworkers asked if I had tried Notepad++ before. I had never heard of it.
After giving it a try, I have officially switched. It has all of the features that I liked in EditPlus, plus a few extras. In particular I like the way you can “fold” levels inside a file. Try it out and note the plus signs on the side of a script to see what I mean by that. You can also click between the line numbers and the edge of the text pane to put a little dot there to give a way to easily refer back to a specific line as you are writing a script. It also recognizes a ton of languages to help with formatting and making sure that you’ve closed all tags/elements.
A big thanks to Tim Miller (one of Virteva’s senior consultants) for telling me about it.
Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization
Today I went to a Microsoft virtualization event called getVirtualnow. It was an okay event. I got to play with Hyper-V in a few hands on labs. One of the highlights was when the Delivery Director from Virteva (the company I work for) introduced me to a couple of the Microsoft guys that he used to work with. One of them was named Geoff Choi (I think I spelled that correctly). He was one of the presenters for the third session. He was doing a demo of App-V 4.5 as well as Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V).
Now…I know you are asking…what in the world is MED-V? Do you remember earlier this year when Microsoft announced that they had bought a company called Kidaro? MED-V is what Microsoft has done with Kidaro.
For those who don’t know what this is, I will try to explain it in layman’s terms. App-V is application virtualization. You package an application and can easily stream it to workstations. It makes packaging and deploying apps really easy. And upgrades? Even easier. One limitation of App-V is that you can’t use it to remediate application compatibility issues. The application must be able to install in order to be packaged and deployed in App-V. What this means is that if a program will not run under Windows Vista…you cannot use App-V to get it to magically work on Vista. However…
MED-V doesn’t just virtualize the applications…it also virtualizes the underlying OS. So…when you package the application, you also package the parts of a back level OS that is necessary for the application to run properly. To the user, it is seamless. It just looks like a normal program. But behind the scenes, it has loaded what is necessary to run. Pretty cool. And honestly…game changing.
One of the things you can do with MED-V is that you could package the apps you need up and put them on a USB memory stick…and run them from the memory stick. You can set the memory stick to expire after a length of time. Imagine having a contractor come into your company that you need to give access to your company’s systems. Instead of needing to obtain and provision a computer for the contractor…let him use his own laptop and give him a USB key that securely connects to your company’s system.
One of the key bits of info…was the release date of MED-V. The last I had heard was the it was going to be released 1st Half of 2009…which I (and most sane people) would interpret as most likely late June. Well…according to the guy I talked to at Microsoft, the bits are complete. It will go RTM soon, with general availability of January 1, 2009. Very cool.
Funny HTTP 500 Message
When I got home today, my wife showed me the amusing HTTP 500 message that Overstock.com has implemented. I got a chuckle out of it.
A Few Life Changes
It’s been a while since I posted. I had one friend ask me if the RSS feed was broken because he hadn’t seen any posts in a while. No…it works just fine…it just requires that I actually post something! There have been a few not insignificant life changes going on in my life since my last post on August 4.
First, after a considerable amount of prayer and soul-searching, Julie and I made the decision to leave the missionary staff of Campus Crusade for Christ. We had each served with CCC for over fifteen years. It was a good time and a great place to work. We left behind lots of friends…a ton of really great people who are doing great work for Jesus Christ.
Second, I made the decision to step out of working in a corporate IT environment (the type of work that I had done at CCC) and move into an IT consulting arena. Professionally, consulting is something that I have been considering for a while. It is an opportunity to be challenged and to learn more technology and learn it faster than I would ever be able to do in any single corporate IT department.
Third, we moved from Orlando to Minneapolis. Yep…from Florida to Minnesota. And yes…nearly everyone up here has asked us the question, “Why?” It’s almost like they are all asking…”why would you do something stupid like that?” So far the weather has been nice…personally I never liked the brutal humidity in Orlando. Ask me in a couple of months when we are at 20 below zero…maybe I’ll acknowledge the insanity then. :-)
So, here I am. Living in Rogers MN. Julie is eight months pregnant. I’ve been working as a consultant for three weeks so far…and yes…I like it. I’m working for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner named Virteva. We are currently renting a home from a very nice couple while we wait on our home in Orlando to sell. So…if you would like to buy a home in Orlando…consider buying ours.
SAS Window error during OSD Task Sequence
Last week I was building out an OSD Task Sequence for deploying XP w/ SP3 to hardware. The Build and Capture for creating the image worked fine, but during the deployment to hardware I kept getting an obscure message as it was running the step “Setup windows and ConfigMgr”:
SAS Window: winlogon.exe
The instruction at 0x12345abc referenced memory at 0x98765zyx. The memory could not be “read”.
When I looked at the smsts.log, I saw the infamous 80004005 message during the ConfigMgr client installation.
Executing command line: “C:\_SMSTaskSequence\OSD\ABC00099\ccmsetup.exe” /useronly /config:MobileClient.TCF /status:1604
FALSE, HRESULT=80004005 (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\client\osdeployment\osdgina\installclient.cpp,1078)
Client installation failed, code 1
In doing some more digging through the smsts.log file I found log entries showing what appeared to be a previous attempt at installing the ConfigMgr client…one that was successful…14 minutes earlier than the 80004005 error above. The key line that struck me was:
Delete source directory C:\_SMSTaskSequence\Packages\ABC00099
Well…that would explain the 80004005. If the source directory had been deleted 14 minutes earlier…it didn’t have a prayer of executing the file that doesn’t exist any more. Now…what is causing the client installation 14 minutes earlier? To make a long story short…an automated process that I had put in place was interfering with the Task Sequence.
A while back I put a GPO startup script in place on all of the OUs where my workstation computer objects exist in AD. The script I am using is the Client Health script from DudeWorks. The script checks a few common issues that could occur on a client, and if any of those are messed up, it fixes the issue. It’s about a 1300 line VBS…Rob Olsen did an awesome job with it! One of the things it checks is whether the ConfigMgr client service is running and set to AUTO.
During the execution of the Task Sequence, that service is installed, but disabled. The Client Health script was kicking in during the Task Sequence…and reinstalling the client…which caused the source files to get deleted too early…and eventually caused the failure.
The fix was quite simple…don’t point that startup script at the OU where the Task Sequence is set to put the new computer account.
[A big thanks to my co-worker Jeff for realizing that it was the startup script causing the problem…we had both been beating on the problem for entirely too long.]
Ultrasound #2
Last week when we went in for the monthly OB checkup, the doctor said that Julie’s belly hadn’t grown as much as expected. Probably nothing, but she wanted to send Julie in for an ultrasound just to make sure. The ultrasound was this afternoon. The ultrasound tech (Megan) was fantastic. Definitely the best experience we have ever had in an ultrasound. I made sure to brag on Megan to her boss.
Towards the end of the ultrasound, Megan switched the machine to 3D. WOW. It was really cool. I hope to get more pictures up in this post later tonight, but in the meantime, check out the picture of my son eating his own foot!
Slow OSD download fixed (HTTP/WEBDAV issue)
This week I’ve been beating on a problem with an OSD Task Sequence. It is a TS for deploying the Vista image that I build with my Build and Capture TS. What I was noticing was that in my Deploy TS, it was simply taking entirely too long to download the WIM file. Now granted it is a 3.5gig file, but it was taking approximately 15 minutes to download. With the gigabit connection, it should have been about a minute and a half. WHY???
I enabled command support on my boot image, ran the TS, and pulled up an F8 CMD prompt to take a look at the smsts.log. It has some errors where the HTTP transport was failing with a 405 code. After failing three times, it then switched to SMB and proceeded to download…very slowly. Here is what I saw in the log:
Initializing HTTP transport.
Setting URL = http://SCCMfqdn/SMS_DP_SMSDPE$/SMSPKG/SMS00024/.
Address = SCCMfqdn, Object = /SMS_DP_SMSDPE$/SMSPKG/SMS00024/, Port = 12345.
WinHttp credentials set
CLibSMSMessageWinHttpTransport::Send: URL:
SCCMfqdn:12345 PROPFIND /SMS_DP_SMSDPE$/SMSPKG/SMS00024/
Error. Status code 405 returned
dwHttpResultCode>=200 && dwHttpResultCode<=299, HRESULT=80004005 (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\framework\tscore\downloadcontent.cpp,590)
Http result: 405
SendResourceRequest() failed with 0x80004005
SendResourceRequest(), HRESULT=80004005 (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\framework\tscore\downloadcontent.cpp,371)
oDavRequest.GetDirectoryListing(setDirs, setFiles), HRESULT=80004005 (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\framework\tscore\resolvesource.cpp,2419)
Retrying download…
Tried all the available http based locations. SMB based locations will be attempted now.
In Memoriam – Jane Clark
The Realm of the Verbal Processor has been on mute for the last week. We got an early morning phone call on Sunday June 29. Julie’s grandmother died. We were able to get reasonable flights to PA the same day (and Julie’s grandfather offered to pay for the flight). Grandma was 85. She and Grampa had been married for 64 years. They had been dating since they were both 14 years old. Needless to say, this had been really rough on him losing his sweetheart of the last 71 years.
In a brief conversation with Grampa this week, he mentioned that they had grown a lot closer after they retired to Florida 25 years ago. What struck me was that after 40 years of marriage (25 years ago), they grew significantly closer in years 41-64 of their marriage. That is really cool…something that Julie and I aspire to. For that matter, we have a great marriage legacy in our families. Thinking about that prompted me to write the post just below this one.
Grandma will be missed. It is only just becoming “real” to Julie. It hit pretty hard yesterday…capped off by a birthday card last night. My birthday is June 30…the day after Grandma died. They had already sent me a birthday card…it was in Grandma’s handwriting. With our traveling to the funeral over the last week, I didn’t open it until last night. Seeing her Grandma’s handwriting on my card tipped things over the edge for Julie last night. It’s very possible that this was the last birthday card she mailed.
That Sunday morning when we told my five year old that Grandma had died, she had this very brief look of shock and horror and then quickly recovered and said, “We won’t get to see Grandma any more til we get to heaven. So when we go to Grandma and Grampa’s house, we’ll only see Grampa? So now Grandma gets to see the fence?”
Julie was a little confused at first until she realized what Marybeth was talking about. “You mean the one with the pearls?” “Yeah…that one.” Then Marybeth started talking about all the things that Grandma gets to do now. She wrapped up with this (in what is a typical stream of consciousness conversation with MB): “It’s very sad for us that we won’t get to see Grandma for a long time til we get to heaven. We’ll get to see her when we go to heaven, but I don’t think God wants me to go to heaven when I’m five…when I’m a grown up. Then some day we’ll all get to go be in heaven, and there won’t be any more earth, and it will be great because no one will have to die any more.”
She just had a perfect balance of appropriate sadness because we will miss Grandma mixed with appropriate joy at recognizing that death is not the end of things. She even got the end of things right. I’m not sure how she knew this because I haven’t been teaching her any lessons from Revelation, but she nailed it.
Marriage Legacy
It has occurred to me a few times that Julie and I come from a tremendous legacy of long marriages.
Both of my sets of grandparents celebrated 55 years of marriage before my grandfathers passed away. Until last week, all four of Julie’s grandparents were still living…and both sets were approaching 65 years of marriage. My parents…nearly 21 years before my dad passed away when I was 12. Julie’s parents…more than 35 years and going strong. Julie and I will hit 13 years in August. We are in really good company…and proof that marriage not only CAN work…it can work well.
Not all of those 300+ years of marriage were easy ones. Just speaking from my own experience, somewhere around years 7-9 were tough for Julie and I…mainly as a result of me working through some anger issues in my life. But during those rough times, Julie and I never considered bailing on the marriage. Our commitment to each other from the beginning was that our marriage is for life. That is the way that God designed it…I’m not going to argue with him about it. I committed that as long as Julie and I were alive, we are together. That commitment was to her, but more importantly, that commitment was made to God at our wedding. He is the one who prepared each of us for the other.
And what we have seen is that our relationship with each other just continues to grow stronger. The rough times have actually helped our relationship to deepen. No doubt that the rough times were not fun…they definitely were not. But without the conflict, our relationship would not be as strong as it is.
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The Realm of the Verbal Processor 