Here is a note from Eric’s Blog that may explain your temporary problems.

As you may have figured out by now, I am not at WWPC this year, just couldn’t afford the time or the money.

But I have been following the announcements and blog posts. Vlad is doing a series of Pod-Casts interviewing some of the well known people in our space. Yesterday he did an interview with Mark Crall and today he picked Scott Colson’s (CRM MVP) brain. They run about 30 minutes each, but are well worth the time to listen.

Just try not to get busted looking stupid like I did when my wife walked into my office and said why are you starring at a black screen. If you have a simplex brain like me and cannot do two things at once, open QuickBooks so it doesn’t look like you have lost your mind :>)

So you may have heard that Storage Craft just released 3.0, a new version of Shadow Protect. Since I had purchased maintenance for my clients when I sold them their original licenses, I received new license keys for them all this week. Having no life, especially on the weekends I decided to do the upgrades this weekend, and discovered a few gotcha’s that I thought I would share with you. Why does there always have to be a gotcha?

Anyways the first problem I was watching for as one of my group members (J.R Tatum of Performance Dimensions, Inc.) told me he ran into it, and asked me to watch for it to confirm it was not just something he was doing. It seems if you have Shadow Protect 2 or 2.5 already installed and you try to do an in-place upgrade, you get a bunch of vss errors that look like this.

You can resolve this by either uninstalling the previous version, and doing a clean install or if you have already done the upgrade and have the errors, you can just remove the new version in add/remove programs and install it clean. Either way it is happy after that.

I also tried an in-place on a member W2K3 Server and it upgraded just fine with no errors. It seems to only be the SBS Server that gets grumpy.

Now the next thing I noticed was all 3 of the servers that had CRM on them even if installed clean, got SQL-VDI errors when Shadow Protect ran. The good news is there is already a KB article that discusses this error it is KB934396  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934396/en-us, the bad news is you have to call in for the patch. Of note all these servers are running SBS 2003 SP1, J.R. said he had run into this earlier on his SBS R2 systems. You will know if you have this issue you will see this in your app log when Shadow Protect runs.

Once you have done a clean install and applied the hot fix if you need it, it works like a top.

This was the first image of my server with the new version, about 55 minutes to do the complete server, about 80Gigs of image files which is a bkf file of about 116.5 Gigs when backed up with the regular SBS Backup and takes 5.5 hours.

Hey Larry,

 I just read your blog post and I realized you weren’t following my CRM Express how to, I thought you were aware of it or I would have pointed it out to you earlier today, when you were asking the error you were getting. 

My bad, I owe ya one.

One of the members of my group was looking for a way to print a label for a contact from CRM to his Seiko Smart Label Printer. I told him unfortunatley there was no single click button like in Outlook, even with the Outlook client loaded, the Smart Capture sees no data. I told him I had a work around and in putting together a small how to for him, it seemed like a good thing to share here and maybe someone will reply with a more elegant solution (are you out there Anne?).

What we did was to create a Word mail merge document and save it. Then you highlight the contact you want a label for and open the saved merge doc and merge it and then hit the Seiko icon in Word to print the label I used this label which is close to the SPL-2RL we use.
.

Go through the steps for the first mail merge to labels and save it when it looks like this

Then when ever you need a label just highlight the contact in CRM and click Actions, Mail Merge, and New Document from Existing Document

and then click the Seiko icon in Word.

So like I said it is not the most elegant solution, but it does beat typing out each label.

Maybe one of these days Seiko will give us a button like the one in Word.

So in my previous post I menetioned a slight problem, I thought I would share my log of the repair process in case you find yourself in a similar situation.

Disable Exchange Service, let’s not lose any mail in the process

Restore C Drive to alternate location on usb drive, just to have these files on hand, we know C: is hosed

Fly to Sunny California

Download update bios & firmware, burn to cd’s

Flash Intel Serverboard bios

Flash Intel Raid controller firmware

Boot to Shadow Protect IT Edition, to use it’s tools
Unfortunatley I had not had a chance to image this system yet.
Btw Storage Craft’s great support bailed me out in this disaster, as I lost my IT edition disk and they were able to provide an ISO first thing Monday morning.

Delete C partition

Create C partition bootable (sorry can’t do bootable)

Boot to sbs cd1 repair console

Bootfix, sucessful

Bootcfg, fails

Verify boot.ini

Copy files from alternate restore location on usb drive

Copy root files from backup to xp machine, remove attributes

Copy to root of server from repair console, ntldr snd ntdetect will still not copy

Boot to IT Edition again, find clean spot to install w2k3

Start gold w2k3 install to W:, not going to be time efficient

Contact kb get download of SBS R2 w/slipstream beta I just tested for them, Thanks Kevin !

Do Time bombed install to G:, no key

Boot to DSRM

Do system state from 6/24/07, pre original corruption

Disconnect Internet Cable

Boot to OS I hope, yippee it boots

Do online exchange restore of 7/27/07 bu, it fails

Do offline restore of the 3 chunks of mdbdata to original locations

Reboot, stores mounted :>)

Breathe

Verify mail via owa locally, we got mail

Connect Internet Cable let mail flow

Send and receive test message, we are talking to the world

Logon to bookkeeping station, ok

Test 4 QB Data Files, one needs to be rebuilt

Rebuild successful.

Logon to Kenny’s station, logon denied

Take off domain

Put on domain

Logon OK profiles intact

Logmein to remote, verify mail flows via Outlook Anywhere

Image Server with SP IT

Set backup to run tonight

Go to hotel for the evening, 11 hours is enough for one day

Logon to marketing station, logon denied

Take off domain

Put on domain

Logon OK profiles intact, CRM will not open, credential problem

Duh moment, I rolled system state back to before CRM rollup 2 was applied, system grumpy

Apply CRM rollup2 and reboot, CRM opens fine now

Logon to sales station, logon denied

Take off domain

Put on domain

Logon OK profiles intact

Logon to process station, logon denied

Take off domain

Put on domain

Logon OK profiles intact

Logon to lab station, Logon OK profiles intact

Logon to shipping station, logon denied

Take off domain

Put on domain

Logon OK profiles intact

Logon to accounting station, Logon OK profiles intact

Need 4 updates on server from wsus allow all 4 and reboot

Delete demo install and gold install used to restore system state

Reconfigure backup to run regularly

Re-enable offsite copy scheduled task

Verify Hazard Waste database is operational

Clear Logs

Grab jpg of drive layout save to C:\

Grab ipconfig /all save to C:\

Image again with Shadow Protect IT

Install Shadow Protect Server

Give Kenny the good news, no data lost everyone back online

Goto Bella Vista tonight to celebrate :>)

Tomorrow back to hot and humid North Carolina

Well it was almost a year ago when I first started fighting with CRM SBE trying to publish it over the internet. It has been a painful process and I have called on some of the smartest people I know to try and get this done. We have gotten very close, but have not found a complete solution until yesterday when I got a note from a guy I have never met in Brazil with the missing pieces. So Thank You to Marcelo Sauaf! I hope to meet you and buy you a drink one day soon.

HaveI told you all lately how much I think this community rocks!

If you would like step by step instructions to publish CRM SBE over the internet, see my site at http://www.sbs-rocks.com/CRM/CRMSBEviaISA2004.htm

And they told me it couldn’t be done,
HA

So I am a little behind and haven’t installed WSUS 3.0 yet and hearing all the success stories of how easy it installs I jump ring in on my production server, install the prerequisites, KB927891 , MMC 3.0 & Report Viewer and then reboot the server. When she comes back up I run setup for WSUS 3.0 and it is going along very nicely until near the end when it dies a horrible death.

And once more and get

So you might have guessed at this point I wasn’t smiling, so I did what anyone in my position would do, no I didn’t start crying, I pinged the community to see if anyone had any ideas. Sometimes just talking through a problem bring the obvious to light. Yours and my favorite detective Susan found in the error log where the W3SVC service had trouble stopping so opened a DOS Box and try to stop it manually, it did in fact stop, but it took a little longer than one would expect. When I was explaining this of course I pointed out that it was normal due to CRM being on the box so there was more to stop. So that’s when she stated the obvious solution that I had looked right past, stop the CRM service before you run the WSUS setup.

So hopefully I can save you the agervation of the initial install failure and let you know about this before you try. Once I stopped the CRM services the install went through without a hitch (ymmv), unfortunately the second time through it doesn’t do an upgrade, it does a full install so you have to reset all the options.