Windows cannot open Help and Support because a system Service is not running

I was auditing a server this week and attempted to open MSINFO32 but received the following message "Windows cannot open Help and Support because a system Service is not running".

When investigating services.msc, I couldn't find the Help and Support service listed, so I Googled a little regarding registering services and found a fix in the form of the following commands.

Open a Command Prompt  and run the following commands

%SystemDrive%
CD %windir%\PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries
start /w helpsvc /svchost netsvcs /regserver /install

The Help and Support should now be listed and can be started and was enough to get MSINFO32 running.. hooray!

vmware.exe - No Disk

When starting up VMware Workstation I was receiving the following error which I believed to be related to the recent change of the removable USB drive's letters on my laptop.

I researched this and found that there was no obvious registry entries but instead that the details of the VMware Workstation favourites tab were recorded in a %appdata%\vmware\favorites.vmls

By deleting this file, I found that this resolved the error and then found that it's then recreated once VMware Workstaiton is restarted.

VMware vCenter 4.0 - 4.1 Migration with OS Reinstall

In order to move our infrastructure to VMware ESX/ESXi 4.1, I needed to upgrade our vCenter 4.0 install to 4.1 which now requires a 64 bit OS. I performed the reinstall from Windows Server 2003 SP2 Std. to Windows Server 2003 x64 with SP2 using the same HP DL360 G5 chassis as I didn't have any spare hardware at the time. In order to give myself a roll-back strategy I popped the original disks and installed Windows and vCenter on a new pair of 146GB 15k SAS disks.

The upgrade of vCenter from one machine to another is recognised process in the vCenter 4.1 upgrade guide (here) and therefore I didn't see a reason why it couldn't be performed but using the same hardware and difference disks, so I planned my approach based on it and I've listed my steps below.


Preparation

• Complete vCenter Installation Worksheet as supplied by VMware
• Document "Server Name" Network Configuration
• Acquire vCenter 4.1 Install Media
• Back Up VirtualCenter or vCenter Server Configuration with the Data Migration Tool (Page 40 vSphere 4.1 Upgrade Guide)
• Copy datamigration folder from "Server Name" to "Network Location"
• Copy legacy licenses from "D:\Program Files\VMware\VMware License Server\Licenses" to "Network Location"
• Power Down "Server Name"
• Remove Current Disks holding "Server Name" config and store
• Backup VC Database on "Database Server Name"
• Grant DBO on MSDB and VC Databases

Server Rebuild

• Insert new disks into "Server Name" chassis
• Build server using Windows 2003 Enterprise x64 SP2
• Configure Network and test
• Join to Domain

Install vCenter 4.1

• Copy datamigration folder from "Network Location" to "Server Name"
• Download and Install 64-bit SQL Native Client from Microsoft 
• Create a 64-Bit DSN (page 40 of vSphere 4.1 Upgrade Guide)
• Restore the vCenter Server Configuration and Install vCenter Server on the Destination Machine (page 41 of vSphere 4.1 Upgrade Guide)
• Follow the install prompts for vCenter install
• Verify install was successful
• Install VMware License Server
• Copy Licenses from "Network Location" to "D:\Program Files\VMware\VMware License Server\Licenses"
• Reload the licenses into "Server Name"

Post Install Checks

•  Open vCenter and check that the new vCenter agent is being deployed to the ESX/ESXi hosts (the tasks may not appear immediately)
• Remove DBO for the SQL user on the MSDB SQL Database

  Note: If you intend to deploy pre Windows Server 2008 operating systems (2000, XP and 2003), the Sysprep tools require installing back to the vCenter server. Details can be found here

AdminLib GetBTSMessage: hrErr=80070002; Msg=The system cannot find the file specified.; when installing BizTalk 2006 R2

I'm building a test BizTalk 2006 R2 server for our test environment and as part of the BizTalk Group Configuration, the wizard failed and showed the following error in the log file.

AdminLib GetBTSMessage: hrErr=80070002; Msg=The system cannot find the file specified.;

 I found this to be a result of Network DTC not being configured correctly. The following needed configuring on both the BizTalk server and the remote SQL Server 2005 machine.


Goto Component Services / My Computer / Properties / MSDTC Tab / Security
Configuration and Enable Network DTC Access

Enable Network DTC Access
Allow Remote Clients
Allow Inbound
Allow Outbound
Mutual Authentication Required
Enable Transaction Internet Protocol (TIP) Transactions

I found the fix here

RSA AM 7.1 SP3 Replication - 'Needs Action'

After a SAN outage and a restart of our RSA infrastructure, the replication status of the Replica Instances from Primary to Replica was showing the status of 'Needs Action'. It appeared that RSA believed that it had not replicated in almost 3 weeks.

In order to reinitialise replication use the following command from the command line on the Primary Instance

rsautil manage-replication -a resume

After a few minutes and a refresh of the 'Check Replication Status' screen, the 'Data Transfer Status' should show as 'Complete'.

Unrestricting users of RSAUTIL.CMD

I'm using rsautil manage-backups to perform scripted backups of our RSA AM 7.1 SP3 database in conjunction with the disabled password prompt that I posted yesterday. Although when initially trying to run it under a separate service account from that which I used to install the product, I received the following error.

Error: Cannot run as user 'serviceaccount'. 'rsautil' can only be run by 'myusername' user

I contacted support and received the following response, which was very simple to implement.

• Use Windows Explorer to locate rsaenv.cmd in the ACEUTILS directory
• Open   rsaenv.cmd  in WordPad (or other editor)
• Locate the line set CLU_USER={username} where {username} is the user name of the user who installed the RSA Authentication Manager 7.1 software and comment out the line (this will preserve the user name)
• Add this line after the commented out line in point 3 "set CLU_USER=%USERNAME%"
• Save the change

Now any user who is a member of the local Windows Administrators group can use rsautils.cmd

Disable RSA AM 7.1 SP3 Backup Password Prompt

It looks like RSA have realised what a nightmare it is to backup their Authentication Manager product and have therefore eased the burden somewhat by allowing the disabling of the password prompt when ruinning a command line backup using "rasutil manage-backups".

to disable the prompting for the password when running a backup using rsautil manage-backups run the following as documented in the RSA PDFs.

rsautil manage-backups --action disable-pwd-prompt

Once entered, the RSA Master password is required to apply the change.