Technology Insights

Turn Off Automatic Updates Using Active Directory in Windows Server 2003

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I recently had a client who kept complaining that their office server was randomly rebooting through out the night. I knew when I had done the install of server 2003 I had turned off auto updates so that I could control the update procces myself but the problem sounded like auto updates. Once I did a little investigation I noticed that auto updates was still on and when I tried to change it via the control panel all the options were grayed out and I had no control. I then remebered that active directory’s group policy determines pretty much every thing on a domain controller and since I had just reused the existing policy when I did the reinstall, the automatic updates were still on.
In this article I will show how to turn off auto updates on a domain controller running active directory:

Technology Errors

Simple SEO URL: Request Exeeded The Limit Of 10 Internal Redirects

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I was hired to install some ZenCart plugins recently one of which included the Simple SEO URL add on. The installation was fairly easy besides a dependency that was missing which I will describe in a future email. After the installation was complete I got excited when I was ready to test but was let down when I got a 500 Internal Server Error back from the Apache web server. The virtual host that the client was using didn’t have Error Logs enabled so I had to enable them and wait until they started archiving. Below is a description of the errors in the Apache Error Logs and how I resolved the issue.

Technology Insights

Internet Explorer Won’t Launch, Need To Update Windows With Windows Update Service

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Earlier this I had an interesting problem where Internet Explorer would not launch all the way on a friends computer. When the IE application was clicked on it would flash on the screen and then close immediately. I believe there was either some form of virus left on the computer that was closing Internet Explorer or that the upgrade I had just performed of IE6 to IE7 was causing a different issue. My initial plan was to continue upgrading Windows XP on this friends computer but I could not do this on the Windows Update site without Internet Explorer. Below is a work around if your Internet Explorer is not functioning properly and you would like to try to apply Windows patches from the Windows Update site anyway.