Dynamics AX – JohanPersson.nu

Activating Dynamincs AX 2012 VMs deployed to Azure from LCS

Our company has retired all of our lab hosts which we used to have internally which means thet we need to have our lab servers on Microsoft Azure. To install the servers we use LCS (Lice Cycle Services) which deploys a VM in our Azure Subscription. The problem is that the VM is not activated, which on an internal server would require a product key and a Windows Server License… When running VMs internally we used to handle this by rearming the VMs 3 times which gives us a total of 180 days and then set up a new one which was a little hassle but it worked. But since we now have deployed VMs on Azure there is actually a license included in the Azure VM which means that there is no need to run a server which is not activated. Here is a short description on how to activate the AX VM…

Install the new VM on Microsoft Azure using LCS
Log into the the server using RDP (the logon info is in LCS)
Start an elevated command prompt
Find the edition of the VM by running this command:
DISM /online /Get-CurrentEdition

We get: Current Edition : ServerDatacenterEval
Find out which edition you can upgrade to by running:
DISM /online /Get-TargetEditions

We get: Target Edition : ServerDatacenter

This means that you can upgrade from the evaluation edition of datacenter edition to the full version of datacenter edition. Now we need a license key… Microsoft uses Automatic Virtual Machine Activation to license the VMs in Azure… This means that if the host is activated (which it hopefully is ) the guest gets activated but to use this feature the guest VM still need a product key. The keys are available on Technet.
Use the correct key to activate the VM by running this:
DISM /online /Set-Edition:ServerDatacenter /ProductKey:XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX /AcceptEULA
Restart the VM and verify that is is not using Evaluation Edition anymore

That’s all for today

Links:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn303421.aspx

Email errors in AX 2012 R2

One of my customers have migrated to new servers for their AOSes, these are brand new Windoews Server 2012 R2 servers… nice. We hade one issue though… When trying to send emails using batch from a batch jog we got the following error:

Microsoft.Dynamics.Ax.Xpp.ClrErrorException: Exception of type ‘Microsoft.Dynamics.Ax.Xpp.ClrErrorException’ was thrown.

at Microsoft.Dynamics.Ax.Xpp.CLRInterop.staticInvoke(String typeName, String methodName, Object[] parameters, Type type)

at Dynamics.Ax.Application.WinAPIServer.cryptUnProtectData(Object[] _encryptedDataBlob) in WinAPIServer.cryptUnProtectData.xpp:line 39

at Dynamics.Ax.Application.SysEmailParameters.password() in SysEmailParameters.password.xpp:line 18

at Dynamics.Ax.Application.SysEmailDistributor.Processemails(Guid _emailProcessorId) in SysEmailDistributor.processEmails.xpp:line 39

at Dynamics.Ax.Application.SysEmailDistributor.Run() in SysEmailDistributor.run.xpp:line 78

at Dynamics.Ax.Application.BatchRun.runJobStaticCode(Int64 batchId) in BatchRun.runJobStaticCode.xpp:line 54

at Dynamics.Ax.Application.BatchRun.runJobStatic(Int64 batchId) in BatchRun.runJobStatic.xpp:line 13

at BatchRun::runJobStatic(Object[] )

at Microsoft.Dynamics.Ax.Xpp.ReflectionCallHelper.MakeStaticCall(Type type, String MethodName, Object[] parameters)

at BatchIL.taskThreadEntry(Object threadArg)

It took me some time to figure it out… Apparently the password for the SMTP account is saved in the AX database, but using an encryption key from the computer which saved it (a.k.a. the server that was retired) so when moving to the new server it was not able to read it. To fix it I simply entered the password again from the new server and Presto!

/JP

Trying to give my AX 2012 demo VM in Azure Internet Access

Today little issue was a bit frustrating…. to say the least

I have set up a new AX 2012 Vm in Azure for my colleagues to do some troubleshooting on. The need to install a Hotfix there and thus needs Internet Access from the VM. Normally this is not a problem… there are normally no issues accessing the internet from a correctly configured VM… the key phrase being correctly configured

I installed the VM from LifeCycle Services which is the normal way for AX machines which means I get a preconfigured VM with AX 2012 and it also has Active Directory installed locally to decrease dependencies. I am able to access the VM but no internet access… so I do some basic testing and I can do nslookup when using an external DNS which tells me 1) the VM has internet Access and 2) there is something wrong with the DNS settings. The local dns setting is pointing to the address is pointing to 10.20.12.4 which has nothing to do with my VM. So I tried to change it to 127.0.0.1 and as soon as I saved the settings the connection to the VM dropped… that is strange. I tried again after restarting but got the same result. So what to do…

I tried changing it using Powershell… Success!! Restarted the VM and it was back to 10.20.12.4… Fail!! Something is rotten in the state of Denmark…

I started by looking through Group policies for something strange but could not find anything. So I fired up Sysinternal Autostart and found a strange script:

Hmmm… Looking at the script:

I found it!! This is not OK!!! Well, well… I changed the script and restarted and it worked… So if your AX 2012 VM is behaving strangely look at the c:\scripts\start.ps1 script. It also fiddles with services autostart settings and some other things

/Johan

Updating a secondary AOS instance

Today one of my colleuges had an issue with applying a hotfix in a customers environment. The environment had three AOS instances installed on the same server which had the correct version and they installed a fourth one which they missed to patch.

When we ran the axupdate install file we got this screen:

It said that there is nothing to patch… which there was… weird. So looking around the internet I found out that there is a command line parameters for axupdate called AOSINSTANCENAME… great… that should work…

Doh… turns out you cannot use comandline parameters unless you run a completely silent install…

axupdate.exe AcceptLicenseTerms=1 AosInstanceName=04-AX183ByggUserTest AosStart=0 HideUI=1 InstallAos=1 LogDir=”c:\Temp”

If you miss the HideUI=1 it will also ignore all of the other parameters Sad smile

Well… all well that ends well

Merry Xmas

/Johan

Can not create default Keyset when using AXBuild

We have a large deploy with a customer this week which is a very bad time for AXBuild to stop working… really bad time. And ofcourse that is what happened Smile (screw you Murphy). There are of course other ways to to a compile in AX byt doing it from within AX is really slow so AXBuild is much nicer and faster.

The problem was that when I launched AXBuild the process kept crashing with this error:

I also got the following events in Event viewer:

Error 14.11.2016 17:49:05 Dynamics Server 01 110 None
Object Server 01:
Can not create default Keyset. Error code -2146893809.

Error 14.11.2016 17:49:05 Dynamics Server 01 110 None
Object Server 01:
The license information can not be decoded.

Error 14.11.2016 17:49:06 .NET Runtime 1026 None
Application: Ax32Serv.exe
Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception
Exception Info: System.Runtime.InteropServices.SEHException
Stack:
at <Module>.wmainCRTStartup()
at <Module>.wmainCRTStartup()

When doing research we found that this is most likely a permissions issue and I got somen hints on what to check:

Are you running elevated: Check
Are you local admin on the AOS computer: Check
Is the AOS user local admin on the AOS computer: Check
Check AOS user permissions on the AX database and modelstore: Check

I was not able to find the solution so I resorted to Microsoft Support and they sait the same thing… it is a permission issue. So finally I fired up ProcessMonitor (which I don’t do often enough) and the it was after some looking around and filtering. I filtered out everything except the Ax32Serv.exe process and I also removed the SUCCESS lines.

The issue was that my user (the one doing the the compiling) got access denied on a file in the folder:

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys

I changed the permission on the file and Presto! (or as one of my colleugues said – I am going to get a Cappuchino with cinnamon)

The compile is running and things are good

/Johan

Using Office Integration in Dynamics AX

Today one of my customer had trouble using the Excel Workbook Designer in Dynamics AX (“7”). He got the following error when he tried opening the workbook in Excel:

The Error is No Applet Registration found

Turns out he had not installed Microsoft Dynamics Office Add-in which can be found here: https://store.office.com/microsoft-dynamics-office-add-in-WA104379629.aspx?assetid=WA104379629&sourcecorrid=a8afb77b-cfe0-4b70-baeb-f93fa38ad77b&searchapppos=0

Once this was install it worked great Smile

/Johan

Adding users from another AAD tenant to AX7

In AX 2012 and prior it was a little tricky to add external users. You basically could not, so you needed to add an Active Directory Account to your AD and import it as a AX user. You might not want to add external users in your AD.

This is much easier in AX7 (it should be Dynamics AX but it is much harder to search for on the internets)… much, much easier… you see AX 7 does not handle identity at all… it trusts Azure Active Directory for this. A requirement is that the external company uses Azure Active Directory.

Note (Added later): If you have set up the AX install in Azure using LCS the “default” Azure Active Directory is the one connected for your Azure tenant. These users are not treated as external users and do not need the modification below.

So, to add an external user to AX you go to System Administration – Users and click New to add a new user. The user we want to add in our example is Kalle Kula, Kalle has the email address kalle.kula@innoworks.com

The only thing missing is that we need to specify the Azure AD tenant in the domain field and set it to https://sts.windows.net/innoworks.com (which is not completely visible in the screenshot)

Save the user and add roles and we are all set!

/Johan

Exporting to Excel in AX7

So, last week Microsoft released the RTW version of the new AX version called Microsoft Dynamics AX.

One of my colleagues was playing around with it a bit and bumped into a problem. When he tried to export to Excel he got the following:

The browser tries to connect to this address (and obviously this does not exist)

http://127.0.0.1:10000/devstoreaccount1/office-exports/

The reason for this is of course that the web app is trying to access the server on IP 127.0.0.1 port 10000 and since I am not doing this logged into the server console it will not work (it does work if i am logged in to the console)

To get this working you need to do these operations:

On the server edit the file C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Azure\Storage Emulator\AzureStorageEmulator.exe.config and change the IP to the correct address (or name)
Edit the file C:\CustomerServiceUnit\DOBind\Packages\Cloud\AosWebApplication\AosWebApplication.csx\roles\AosWeb\approot\web.config and change <add key=”AzureStorage.StorageConnectionString” value=”UseDevelopmentStorage=true” /> to <add key=”AzureStorage.StorageConnectionString” value=”UseDevelopmentStorage=true;DevelopmentStorageProxyUri=http://YourLocalIP” />
Open the tcp ports 10000, 10001 and 10002 to the server
Links:
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Faxforum.info%2Fforums%2Fshowthread.php%3Fp%3D325949 (with a little help from Google Translate)

Workflow issues in “AX 7” Onprem Demo environment

We have set up the new AX demo environment on our Hyper-V lab environment. Most of the features are running fine but there are some issues which we are trying to fix as they arise. Today my colleague was trying to edit a workflow and got an error. Turns out you need a specific application to edit the workflow and this app is downloaded and installed on the fly when you click the link. The problem here is that the SSL certificate in the AX environment is not trusted, this is not an issue when you use a normal browser since you can ignore the error, but it prohibits my computer from installing the application. Here is how you solve the error:

NOTE: THIS IS A TEMPORARY SOLUTION, IT IS IMPLEMENTED TO ACCESS A TRUSTED LAB ENVIRONMENT. YOU SHOULD NEVER EVER EVER DO THIS WITH A CERTIFICATE YOU COMPLETELY TRUST!!!!! IF YOU DO THIS WITH THE INCORRECT CERTIFICATE IT MEANS THAR BAD GUYS CAN SPY ON YOUR SECURE TRAFFIC!!!!!

Browse to your AX site, click on the Certificate Error button and select View Certificates
On the windows that appears click Install Certificate and select to install it into your Trusted Root Certificate
Restart your browser and log back into your AX environment and verify that there no longer is a certificate warning

Now when you go to edit a Workflow you do not get an error Smile

You just login and the install will start automatically and you can edit the workflow.

NOTE AGAIN: THIS IS A TEMPORARY SOLUTION, IT IS IMPLEMENTED TO ACCESS A TRUSTED LAB ENVIRONMENT. YOU SHOULD NEVER EVER EVER DO THIS WITH A CERTIFICATE YOU COMPLETELY TRUST!!!!! IF YOU DO THIS WITH THE INCORRECT CERTIFICATE IT MEANS THAR BAD GUYS CAN SPY ON YOUR SECURE TRAFFIC!!!!!