Windows 8/Office 2013/Gentran Server

Figured I had better post this as a heads up, as most of my Gentran developer brethren will more thank likely be purchasing new Windows 8 computers soon.

Two weeks ago I broke the monitor on my Asus laptop and had to go out and purchase a new one. So I got a Sony Vaio with Windows 8. After getting Windows setup and a new office 2013 install I went ahead and installed SQL Express and Gentran Server and all was wonderful in the land; however, the next morning I went to check my email using MS Outlook and I received an error that simply said "Some went wrong", nothing worked, not Word, Excel, anything. After checking msdn the noted solution was to re-install office. However, when I went to run the Office installation utility it told me to close the Gentran Services and it listed all of them. After closing out of the install utility and all the gentran services all of my office products started working fine and I was immediately able to restart Gentran and get to work.

Note: depending on your installation you may have to start your Gentran services manually after you have opened just 1 (any one) of the office products. Funny thing is after following this startup procedure I can enter and exit my office products all day. This appears to only apply upon a cold boot when everything is starting up for the first time.

Happy Mapping,

Stephen

Cisco VPN Client and Windows 8

Ok, so this one is not Gentran related. Like most people today I was forced to purchase a Windows 8 laptop, not because I wanted it but because that was all that BestBuy had in an i5 configuration.

The issue was getting the Cisco VPN Client to work on Windows 8 and it fails with the error: "Reason 442: Failed to Enable Virtual Adapter". I found 2 official answer from the Cisco website:

1. Cisco 64bit VPN Client does not support Windows 8.
2. Contact Cisco support.

Neither of which are answers that are acceptable to me, so I did a lot more rooting around on google before I found a work around that a guy calling himself "Youbrown" posted on learningnetwork.cisco.com. 

Here is the post. All I know is it worked like a champ for me.

Just to update, the legacy Cisco VPN client (5.0.07.0440 for x64, 5.0.07.0410 for x86) is working for some people. You need to apply a small workaround as explained below –

  

• Open Registry editor by typing regedit in Run prompt
• Browse to the Registry Key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\CVirtA
• Select the DisplayName to modify, and remove the leading characters from the value data up to "%;" i.e.
• For x86, change the value data from something like "@oem8.inf,%CVirtA_Desc%;Cisco Systems VPN Adapter” to "Cisco Systems VPN Adapter”
• For x64, change the value data from something like "@oem8.inf,%CVirtA_Desc%;Cisco Systems VPN Adapter for 64-bit Windows” to "Cisco Systems VPN Adapter for 64-bit Windows”
• Try connecting again