Many years ago if I had seen any errors during the installation of Windows my first assumption would have been that some of the hardware wasn’t compatible or had failed. Now its been at least three years since I’ve seen a bad stick of RAM. Three years made it easy to forget to check most of the basics when I saw the following error during an install of Windows Server 2003:

File setupdd.sys could not be loaded.
The error code is 4

Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit.

The quick solution: try pulling all but one stick of RAM (hopefully you have at least a 128MB stick for Windows XP or a 256MB stick for installing Server 2003 or the Windows Vista Beta…).

According to MS Knowledge Base article #330181 the resolution is the old school - pull any add-in cards and then pull RAM and add it back one piece at a time. Forget wasting time on that much effort. I did some searching to save myself from pulling the SCSI controller and all the other fun stuff out. Based on anecdotal evidence from a number of web forums the most likely problem is a bad stick of RAM. Should pulling and switching RAM fail, try to disable the CPU’s L2 cache or switch out the video card. A bad CPU or video card seems more common than a PCI card issue based on the web forums.

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Microsoft’s OWA browser compatibility chart is the only concrete listing that I have found for Outlook Web Access compatibility. The limited support shown in the “other” browsers category applies to FireFox, Opera, Netscape, Safari, and older Mozilla browsers.

I suspect that most of those brosers support much of the coding in the OWA “Premium” client. Unfortuantely, sticking to Microsoft’s standard procedure, OWA disables many features in browsers other than Internet Explorer 5 and 6. Likewise, they haven’t followed standards and the code in the “Standard” client doesn’t degrade gently in non-IE browsers.

Are Microsoft’s decision-makers tying to play the same hand as all those anti-drug educational programs that just end up making kids more comfortable around drugs? Personally, I’m surprised that by Exchange OWA’s lack of support for other browsers. After all, if OWA worked right then Exchange would have a bigger advantage over the OpenExchange or NetMail XE groupware and SquirrelMail’s web client.

FYI: A “503 Service Unavailable” message in the web browser when OWA is visited does not indicate a compatilibility issue. It is actually a problem on the server; the davex.dll file can not correctly reach the mail or public folder store. Microsoft’s KB article #823159 details the 503 error fix for Exchange Server 2003.

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One thing worth activating on any server hosted user shares (hosted user profiles, redirected “My Document” folders, or folders assigned on a per-project basis - by using Active Directory groups) is Windows Disk Quota Management. I see it turned off, its default state on new Server 2003 installs, all the time. Many admins assume that it’s only useful if they plan to enforce user quotas, while many of them don’t spend the time to use quotas right.

So, on any server: right click on the drive letter > select the “Quota” tab > check the “Enable Quote Management” box > make sure “Do not limit disk usage” is checked and then click OK. Quota Management is now enabled without any quotas being established or enforced. Revisit the Disk’s Quota tab in an hour (or less for smaller domains) and click the “Quota Entries” button at the bottom of the tab. A window will open to display a per-user list of disk usage. That’s some good info to have, even if quotas aren’t going to be enforced (and it’s accessible from WMI scripts, and I may share some scripts to harvest it at a later date).

The reason most admins never implement quotas is that they assume the only way to do so is the “Limit disk space to…” option in the Disk’s Quota tab. What good is it to set a quota if a few users are constantly bumping into it (ie: Administrator, your supervisor, and some C-level Exec who makes a lot of noise every time he can’t use more disk space). …thankfully Server 2003 supports per-user quotas. Revisit the “Quota Entries” window and right-click on any user-name > select “Properties” from the menu. That’s it! Per-user quotas can be configured from this pop-up. Unless your server is sporting a few spare terabytes, I would recommend adding quotas for everyone, including the C-level Exec. Try to set a quota that spares a few GB of disk space. With a few GB spared from disk-hogs there aren’t 90 other users who can’t save anything to the server. Plus, if your disk-hog is an Executive, they’ll sometimes pass on enough budget dollars to buy new disk space.

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