Monday, March 31, 2014

Fix for jerky mouse movements in remote desktop/Citrix sessions to Windows Server 2012

When connecting with Citrix to a Windows Server 2012, you might experience that the mouse pointer is lagging severely causing a jerky movement and making it a complete dud trying to make any proper work on the server.

If this is the case, you should make sure that the Enable pointer shadow checkbox in the Mouse Properies is unchecked. This feature has been the issue with many machines I've encountered lately and unchecking the property has made the UI more enjoyable.


Friday, March 7, 2014

Recreating a BizTalk Active Directory group will cause access to BizTalk to fail

When setting up and configuring a BizTalk environment you will also add the necessary Active Directory groups to allow access for different accounts to the platform.

In most cases, you will not touch these groups again, but there might come a time when you remove and add the groups with the same name within Active Directory. Doing so will change the SID of the group and it will no longer match the SID stored in SQL Server for the Login.

Trying to access the BizTalk Server Administration Console as a BizTalk Server Operator will for instance yield the following error when the corresponding AD group has been recreated:


You will get an error saying "BizTalk Server cannot access SQL Server. [...] Access permissions have been denied to the current user. [...] Login failed for user [...]".

You will also notice a logged error in SQL Server saying that "Login failed for user [...] Reason: Could not find a login matching the name [...]"

When looking at both the Active Directory accounts/groups as well as the SQL Server security settings, everything will look ok.

In order to correct this, you will have to remove and then add the corresponding Login in SQL Server. This might also cause you to have to delete and then add the corresponding User in the different BizTalk Databases (in general the BizTalkMgmtDb, BizTalkDTADb and BizTalkMsgBoxDb). This will also be notified by SQL Server when removing the Login.

After doing these remove/adds in SQL Server, you should be able to access the resources as expected.

Note that this is documented briefly in the Troubleshooting BizTalk Server Administration page on MSDN, but you more or less have to know where/and for what to look in order to find it.