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Uninstall hidden network and other devices on Windows

by on October 20, 2008 in Uncategorized

We just moved a lot of our physical server to a virtualization infrastructure. In doing so we wanted to use the same IP-addresses on the virtual servers. That is not a problem, but once you virtualize your server your hardware bound network card is not in use anymore and you will have to replace it with the virtual network card.

But when you address your IP-address to the Network adapter you will get a message saying, that your IP-address is already assigned to another network adapter and because it is not available physically it will also not show in the network connection window! Great, so what to do?

The solution is to find a way to make those hidden network adapters available so we can uninstall them.

  1. Open up a Terminal window with “cmd” (start/run)
  2. Set a environmental variable with “set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1″.
  3. Then type “devmgmt.msc” and the Windows Device Manager Console will appear.
  4. Within the Windows Device Manager Console choose “Show hidden devices”.
  5. You should now be able to see all hidden devices, such as the interfering network adapter and uninstall it.

As always with Windows, you have to reboot the machine to actually make it all work.

Hope this helps someone, it drove us crazy for some time.

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Windows Server 2003 and not allowed to install application as administrator

by on October 9, 2008 in Razuna

Today I wanted to install VMWare Server on a Window Server 2003 machine. While running the installer I was prompted with an alert that said “System Administrator has set policies to prevent this installation.”. Since I was doing the installation as a system administrator I thought that it might be some evil trick of MS to not enable VMWare Virtualization on Windows…

Turns out that there are more hidden “features” to Windows then one knows. After looking around for some time for a solution I found one deep buried down in a forum. So, to save myself (and hopefully others) some sanity I post the solution here.

The magic is that there has to be a software policy in place in order to install an application as administrator (thought an administrator should be able to install application after all, isn’t it? Guess, this is Windows logic).

Bring up the “Domain Security Policy” (or Local Security Policy)

Click on the “Software Restriction Policy”. On the right side you either see a list with items or a white page with “No software restriction policies…”. If that is the case, the right-click on “Software Restriction Policy” and choose “New Software Restriction Policy”.

Then double click on “Enforcement”. In the window that opens mark the radio button that says “All users except local administrators”. Hit “OK” when done.

Close the window and reboot your server or simply issue “gpupdate” with “Start -> Run…”.

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Bug with installing Oracle 10gR2 on a German (Switzerland) Windows

by on January 16, 2007 in Oracle

For users that are using a Windows (XP/2003) German (Switzerland) version and want to install the Oracle 10gR2 database release, they will find that the installation of the database configuration utility will abort with the error messages:

ORA-00604: error ocured at recursive SQL level1
ORA-02248: invalid option for ALTER SESSION

So, what is the problem and how to solve it?

First off, the 10.1 release will install without any problems and this bug is only seen in the 10gR2 release. From my findings there is a problem with the NLS_CURRENCY which is derived from the NLS_TERRITORY setting. Somehow Oracle messes up with it.

The solution to this, is to install the software without the starter database checked. Let the installer finish up and then open up the registry and change the value NLS_LANG within HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SOFTWARE / ORACLE / OraDB10g_home1 (your value might be different according to your values during installation) from:

GERMAN_SWITZERLAND.WE8MSWIN1252

to

GERMAN_GERMANY.WE8MSWIN1252

Once done, you can start up the database utility and create a database without any error messages.

It took me some time to figure this out and I hope it helps somebody out there.

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