From Cork to Toronto

I was having some trouble migrating one of my print servers (Windows 2008) to a stable 2008R2 file server. I intended to use the DNS name of the existing server as a CNAME alias on the new server, and didn't think it would cause much difficulty because the SMB shares are already advertised via a similarly migrated CNAME and the print queues worked fine when referenced by the server A record. Not so. It turns out the print spooler service needs to be allowed access the network in such circumstances, and failure to do so results in a 0x00000709 error. The situation is detailed here at TechNet Blogs. Even though it refers to a non-Microsoft DNS server I encountered the issue with a Windows 2003 R2 DNS instance. There is further reference to DNSonewire in this Knowledge Base article . Implementing the suggested reg key and restarting the spooler service resulted in a working connection to a CNAME referenced queue. Now I have to find the next cutover window...

We use a third party inventory and patch management system to roll out Microsoft updates silently. Unfortunately every once in a while a patch or patches will cause the icons for the updated applications to turn white on certain machines which wasn't noted during the test cycle. We've just seen that happen in our Windows 7 environment while rolling out the April Patch Tuesday patches, where Word and Outlook icons were borked on certain machines. I haven't confirmed this yet, but there were only a few packages pushed so it looks like KB 2863811 (Outlook) and KB 2878237 (Word) were involved. We did not see this on machines patched by WSUS or Microsoft Update. There are a lot of articles out there about fixing icons by deleting iconcache.db but that's of little help if the base icon is borked. The trick of repairing Microsoft Office Picture Manager within the application didn't help either. I isolated the issue to two shortcut sets: C:\Users\Public\Desktop and C:...