Yes, both the T30 and T40 will boot from an NVMe SSD fitted to an adapter in the PCIe x16 slot.
You don’t need a USB stick to boot the machine or any other quirky workarounds. The BIOS / UEFI firmware will boot properly from the NVMe SSD, in a simple, cheap (£10) PCIe to m2 adapter.
Tried and tested.
Yeah, good luck googling for “outlook does not ask for password”! It’s the exact opposite of what used to torment most Outlook users with Exchange accounts for quite a few years after RPC over HTTPS (Outlook Anywhere) was first introduced.
This is Outlook version 2111 Build 16.0.14701.20240 (365 subscription) on Windows 10. a.k.a. Outlook 2019 to 2021 ish.
My customer has a number of mailboxes, all full accounts (added to Outlook as accounts, rather than via delegation), and one of those accounts has quite a few aliases (proxy SMTP addresses). She wants one of those aliases putting as a separate mailbox.
I removed the alias email address, then created a new mailbox with that email address, with an Exchange Online Plan 1 license. Everything went OK server/cloud side, and I could log in via OWA, but any attempt to add the account to Outlook resulted in no prompt for the credentials. It just said ‘done’, but then when trying to access the mailbox, I would get “The attempt to log on to Microsoft Exchange has failed”.
Much faffing around with new Outlook profiles, checking of Saved Credentials in the credential manager, didn’t work.
The solution was to go to Access work or school, and then remove the Workplace or school account of the original account (the one that used to have the problem-address as an alias).
Then, I tried to add in the new account as a Work or School account, but that didn’t work. This may be because it’s an Exchange Online Plan 1 license rather than a full 365 Business Basic license. I stopped using Exchange Online Plan 1 for my customers a while ago and was giving everyone Business Basic licenses, since it was only 80p per month extra in cost, but these licenses are due a 20% price increase soon, amongst other Microsoft price increases and increased minimum-term commitments, so Exchange Plan 1 is back on the cards for basic email requirements.
After the failure to add this new account as a Work or School account, I instead added it to Email & accounts in Windows 10. This then magically added it as a Workplace account as well. I then removed the Email account from Windows 10, because I don’t want to use the Mail app and the Windows 10 notifications. Happily, the Workplace account remained in place.
I reopened Outlook. Outlook prompted for credentials for the original Workplace account that I removed earlier. I gave the credentials and allowed it to add the account back in to Windows as a Workplace account (‘use this account everywhere’. ‘allow my organisation to manage my device’).
I then proceeded to add the new ex-alias problem-account into Outlook. Outlook did not prompt for credentials, but things took a touch longer than last time (when it didn’t work), and this is fine, because the credentials are stored with the Workplace account already. After closing and reopening Outlook, all is well.
Another Sage problem.
The same old crap – program disappears after the splash screen, or after entering your password. In this case it was after entering password.
Only this time, the cause, or at least the fix, was different. After an hour of pissing-about re-installing, rebooting, deleting everything I could find related to Sage, re-installing again, etc., I remembered the dot-net trick, gave it a go, and whaddaya know, it worked.
The fix, is to go into Windows’ Programs and Features, then Turn Windows features on or off, and turn off .NET Framework 3.5, and also 4.8. Let that take effect, reboot, then turn them back on.
Jobs a goodun.
Do yourself a favour and move to Xero.
The machine is a terminal server. Windows Server 2012 a.k.a. Windows 8.
These are the MSI log lines of interest. Specifically the ‘wrong context’.
MSI (s) (88:A4) [11:25:47:730]: Created Custom Action Server with PID 5344 (0x14E0).
MSI (s) (88:A8) [11:25:47:754]: Running as a service.
MSI (s) (88:A8) [11:25:47:757]: Custom Action Server rejected - Wrong Context
MSI (s) (88:A4) [11:25:47:760]: CA Server Process has terminated.
MSI (s) (88:BC) [11:25:47:760]: Failed to get IMsiCustomAction*
11/05/2021 11:25:47.761 [7048]: Assembly Install: Failing with hr=80070005 at RemoveDirectoryAndChildren, line 393
Custom MSI actions & terminal server wrong context is a known thing apparently, introduced as an issue around Windows 7 / Server 2008 times with some updates to Windows Installer.
The issue seems particularly common with ODBC related packages, and I suspect this is because there are separate User and System contexts for ODBC configurations. Something is getting confused somewhere.
People say to revert various Windows Updates to downgrade the Windows Installer version.
Unfortunately none of that could be applied here for this Server 2012 machine – all the discussion I found was around Server 2008 / Windows Vista/7.
The other suggested workaround of using psexec did work though, and after a day of fighting this, it will do.
psexec -s -i msiexec /i "c:\users\administrator\Downloads\Sage Accounts 27_2\packages\Sage50Accounts_DataAccess.msi"
Don’t forget you need the full path, because the task runs in a new session / environment as the system account, and will not have the current working directory as its working directory.
If you are installing the whole thing rather than just the DataAccess components, leave off the msiexec /i and just call the installer executable:
psexec -s -i "c:\users\administrator\Downloads\Sage Accounts 27_2\install.exe"
No it’s not the Windows drivers! The BIOS (UEFI) configuration utility on these things is not built to match the hardware at all. In fact it is wide-open with all the options that the original BIOS-software-supplier has available – most options that are not valid choices for the actual machine at all. A hackers dream perhaps, but a nightmare on this occasion.
Whatever you do, do not do a ‘load defaults’, because you’ll lose the LCD display as well!
If you do lose the LCD display, you’ll need to buy a micro-HDMI to HDMI adapter cable, so that you can plug a big HDMI screen or TV into the tablet, and get back into the BIOS setup, from where you can set the LCD-out to EDP, instead of MIPI or whatever it’s been accidentally set to.
Now, forgetting the above, and even knowing that the problem with the cameras is actually down to the configuration options in the BIOS setup utility, I still could not get the cameras going! There are too many options. It’s not just the list of cameras (front: 6 different camera types, rear: 8 different camera types, or vice-versa), there is more to it than that. I suspect some kind of multiplexer or GPIO module which allows the switching between front/rear camera.. yet more options to which we don’t know the correct setup.
As luck would have it, somebody from LINX / Exertis responded to my email request for help – which was a surprise because their auto-responder said that they would only help with in-warranty requests for hardware support. I had given up hope, but a week or so after my initial email, I received a helpful response from Mr Moores at Exertis, with links to an updated BIOS for the machine, and the promise that loading this would apply all the correct settings for the machine, for camera, and other things that probably weren’t working correctly but had yet to come to light. It also purportedly improves WiFi with Windows 10.
I tried it, and it worked!
You can find the file here.
Lower interface metric takes priority.
Get-NetIPInterface | Sort-Object Interfacemetric Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceIndex <indexnumber> -InterfaceMetric <metric>
certutil -repairstore my <certificate serial number>Upgrading Server 2003 to 2008, with Hyper-V Integration Services installed, results in this boot failure after a few hours :-/
In hindsight, you should remove integration services first.
Without the benefit of hindsight:
After the upgrade finishes, you will probably have no networking, no mouse, and other issues.
You should try (sans-mouse) to switch the HAL from ACPI to APIC (as per here)*. Upon reboot, the vmbus issue may return (did it re-install itself?), and so have to repeat the above procedure.
Once the system has booted up with an APIC HAL, you can try to re-install Integration Services properly.
Fingers crossed :-*
(*incidently, I am all done now – the system is working just fine. I had to re-install the integration services, but device manager still shows an ACPI HAL for me. This is x86 Server 2008 (upgraded from 2003). A very temporary measure).
Hint: if the special function keys (start menu, ctrl-esc, alt-tab, etc), are not passing through to the guest: Ctrl-Alt-End will get you to task manager, from there Alt-F -> Run, cmd to open up a command prompt, from the command prompt: taskkill /im taskmgr.exe so that you can get rid of the always-on-top taskmgr that’s in the way, then do your stuff. sysdm.cpl for system properties/device manager, etc.
run cleanwipe, reboot
run cleanwipe again
run NRnR, remove-only mode
sc delete SsPaAdm
sc delete ssSpnAv
sc delete ssPaSetMgr
taskkill /f /t /im paui.exe
(you can do above before clicking ‘Restart’ and the end of NRnR).
after reboot:
rd /s /q “C:\program files\symantec.cloud”
(UKFast FastDrive is Citrix ShareFile rebranded and using a StorageZone at the UKFast datacentre.)
Frustrating is the word. It’s not a good start when even the basics are totally wrong and broken 🙁
Some other general ShareFile and SFMT problems:
So, you try plan b – some sort of File sync utility to the ShareFile mapped drive. This appears to complete, but nope, there’s 10 gigs of stuff still missing in ShareFile!
Further to this, the ShareFile Drive Mapper allows you to specify (via Group Policy) an AccountSubdirectory. You can set this to your main root SF Shared folder, e.g. ‘Data’. You would then think that the mapped drive would show the contents of this folder, but nope – even though the Drive itself shows with the label ‘Data’, when you click into it, you are shown a folder called ‘Data’. So it is showing the shared folder within the shared folder. It’s basically completely stupid and useless.
The only way around this I have found is to make the MountLocation something like %userprofile%\ShareFile , and run subst X: %userprofile%\ShareFile\Data in everybody’s login script.
In fact – it’s not even as simple as that (subst in the login script is a no-go). Instead, the login script must copy a script (e.g. sharefile.cmd) to “%appdata%\microsoft\windows\start menu\programs\startup”. This will then cause Windows Explorer to run the subst command in the correct user context.
sharefile.cmd looks like this:
@echo off
REM this causes the script to re-open itself, but minimised.
if not defined IS_MINIMISED set IS_MINIMISED=1 && start "" /min "%~dpnx0" %* && exit
net use t: /del /y
if not exist "%userprofile%\ShareFile" mkdir "%userprofile%\ShareFile"
:startloop
echo Waiting for ShareFile to mount at %userprofile%\ShareFile
ping localhost -n 2 >NUL
if not exist "%userprofile%\ShareFile\Data" goto startloop
echo Doing Subst for drive T: to ShareFile folder
subst t: "%userprofile%\ShareFile\Data"
exit
None of this should be necessary – it’s pretty poor all round really. We’ll see how the go-live goes on Monday.
Update: The rollout was eventful and a followup to this post is forthcoming!
notes to self in case I forget: DriveMapper confirmed as a total fail by about midday of day-two. New files not appearing even 45 mins after creation by colleagues, even though saved ~20 plus times by the creator (as per version history in ShareFile web GUI – so we know the saves are making it up to the cloud, but the change notification to other clients is either broken or (could it even be? would they dare???) simply does not exist). Confirmed not caused by subst workaround. Users can’t create new folders because explorer’s default/initial temporary new folder name of ‘New Folder’ already existed, but wasn’t showing so explorer tried to create same folder as already-existing, instead of its usual trick of making a ‘New Folder (2)’. This resulted in an Access Denied error that made no sense. Citrix Files Beta (which isn’t even available to this customer but I happened to find it via a random popup at another customer) seems to: resolve the issue around mapping to a shared folder (no subst needed any more), and also in my testing seems to show up new creates/saves/deletes from one PC to another in near real-time (couple of seconds).. Should I be having to install beta software to make this thing work though? DriveMapper uninstall on win10 leaves behind explorer namespace, had to create a [-HKCU blah] reg file to delete it en masse, as well as undo all my previous logon script / subst work. Must also rant about the need to use Group Policy to customise anything worthwhile. The whole point of this is to become serverless/decentralised, yet I need to import the policy definitions, make policies (which I can’t do on server 2008 because the templates aren’t compatible with the group policy editor, so I have to install remote server admin tools onto a workstation), and *then* (sheesh) I can export the policy from the registry, to import onto non-domain-joined PCs, just so that Citrix Files Beta will mount ‘Shared Folders\Data’ to the letter T:
F.U.C.K. .M.E.
Yet another I.T. person.
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