stuart test blog

Now that I have a 64 bit notebook, I get to do fun stuff like install the 64 bit version of Windows Server 2008 (beta 3). I wasn’t too sure how well the experiment would go, but so far it’s been pretty successful.

Drivers weren’t such an issue as most of the Vista x64 drivers worked flawlessly. I still have 3 unknown devices in the device manager and I haven’t yet tried to configure the finger print scanner, but everything else is good.

Obviously the first thing I did once the graphics drivers were installed, was to make it look like Vista with all the eye-candy. You need to install the “Desktop Experience” option from the “Add Features” section of “Server Manager”. Once that’s installed and you’ve rebooted, you need to enable the “Themes” service and enable all the performance options by going in to the “Advanced System Settings” and turning on all the visual stuff. Then reboot again and you can select the “Windows Vista” theme and the “Windows Aero” appearance settings. As you can see from the screenshot below, it’s all working well.

I also needed to configure wireless networking which isn’t installed by default (this is a good thing!) Just get back to the “Add Features” section and you can install the wireless networking option from there.

I have my key apps installed (Firefox, Live Messenger, Live Writer) and it all feels quite solid so far. Now to get some real server stuff running…

I attended a briefing session at Microsoft this morning to learn about how the legislative changes to daylight savings time (DST) in NZ affects Microsoft’s products and other I.T. related technologies. Nathan Mercer from Microsoft also blogs about the DST changes and briefings that are coming up around the country.

Here are my notes from the meeting I attended.

Date:
Changes come in to effect on the 30th September which is one week earlier than usual. (Background: New Zealand Standard Time and Daylight Time)

Microsoft Products Affected:
There are around 40 Microsoft products that are affected by the changes. Updates will be provided free-of-charge to all currently supported products. Those products that fall into mainstream support require manual adjustment, or patches can be purchased with a support request.

Here are some of the more common products that are eligible for free patches:
Windows Server 2003 – Service Pack 1 or higher
Windows XP – Service Pack 2
Exchange Server 2003 – Service Pack 2 (but the updates only need to be applied if CDO calls are being made against the Exchange server – e.g. OWA, or ACT!)
Windows Mobile clients – version 5 or higher

The most commonly used Microsoft products that will not receive updates are the members of the Windows 2000 family. I know of lots of Windows 2000 Servers out there and several large organisations still running Windows 2000 Professional. Exchange 2000 servers also seem to be in abundance, as well as many client computers not on the latest service packs. Microsoft are not providing free patches for these products, but they have provided several tools that can be used to configure the time zones.

Tools:
Microsoft recommends using TZedit to manually adjust the time zone on a single server.
For multiple machines, use scripting techniques to roll out registry files to the affected machines.
More info on the manual updating techniques are found here: http://www.microsoft.com/nz/msdn/timezone/manual.mspx

Patching plan:
Try to patch all servers/clients/devices in your organisation within a windows of 72 hours.
Patch domain controllers first.
Then Exchange servers.
Then all other servers.
Then all clients and other devices.

International organisations:
If you are a branch office of an international organisation, or if you have branch offices in other countries, all servers/clients in your organisation should be patched – not just the ones in this country.

What could go wrong?
Don’t forget – the time is going forward, so if your systems aren’t up to date, you will be an hour late for everything.
The most common problem for end-users will be missing appointments by an hour if mobile devices haven’t been patched. This may not seem critical until you miss an important flight, or arrive an hour late for a high-profile meeting.
Other extreme problems could arise, for example, in the medical field where medicines are administered to patients based on the time.

Other notes:
These changes do not just affect Microsoft products, or even just I.T. products. Any device you have in your organisation which relies on the time could be affected by the changes. This includes things like ATMs, alarm systems, medical equipment, aviation equipment, and any other equipment which uses time for input or output.

More information:
Microsoft will be keeping the following URL up to date with all the information required to prepare for the changes: http://www.microsoft.co.nz/timezone

I’ve been using a lot of evaluation software at home recently to build up a virtual lab that I’ll use for testing and demos. I needed to know when my eval copies of Windows Server 2003 were due to expire but couldn’t figure it out without having to trawl through Google Groups first.

Turns out it was fairly simple, just run “winver” and it tells you the exact date and time that the copy is due to expire.

Windows Script Host 5.7 has just been released for Windows 2000, XP and 2003. WSH 5.6 shipped with Windows XP and version 5.7 shipped with Windows Vista so this is the first that 5.7 is available for the other operating systems. I’m not sure how many changes and incompatibilities there are between versions as there is very little documentation available at the moment.

Download links for WSH 5.7:

• Windows 2000
• Windows XP
• Windows 2003

I need an extra four or five hours in each day at the moment. I’m adding these videos to my to-do list.

System Center Essentials 2007 Training Videos

Presenter Biographies

Scott Bleasdell

Scott Bleasdell is a program manager on the System Center Essentials team responsible for product planning, focusing on future releases. Scott has been with Microsoft since 2005 and has a vast background in the Systems Management space including roles in consulting and software development.

Dustin Jones

Dustin Jones is a program manager on the System Center Essentials team responsible for the deployment, upgrade, configuration, monitoring and service provider experiences. Dustin has been with Microsoft since 2004, working in both the field and product groups with systems management products.

Casey McKinnon

Casey McKinnon is a Program Manager on the System Center Essentials team responsible for user experience. Casey has been with Microsoft for over 4 years, designing and implementing Operations Management tools for Microsoft’s Live services, as well as with System Center.

David Mills

David Mills has been with Microsoft for 7 years and is the senior technical product manager for System Center Essentials 2007. Before joining the System Center Marketing team, David led User Assistance teams in the Windows Server division shipping IT professional technical documentation for Core Networking and Management technologies.

Lost in the hoopla of the announcement that Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 has been released, was that their ‘Express’ counterparts have also been updated to Beta 2 and are now available to download from here: Visual Studio 2008 Express Downloads

This is great news for us part-time coneheads and there’s a whole bunch of great resources such as the Facebook Developer kit for developing apps for the Facebook platform.

Darryl Burling from Microsoft NZ was kind enough to provide me with the links.

As far as I’m aware, Microsoft have been keeping very quiet about Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. Paul Thurrott even theorised that Microsoft may never release a SP3 for XP.

So it was interesting to read two posts on the TechNet Blogs site, mentioning the “forthcoming XP Service Pack 3.” This is the first official mention of it in a while, so perhaps we may see a beta of it sooner rather than later.

Posts are here:

• NAP FAQ: Are you planning on releasing NAP Clients for Mac, Linux, BeOS, etc?
• NAP FAQ: How much does NAP cost?

Most large organisations employ dedicated packagers to create automated software installations that can be deployed enterprise-wide using distribution tools such as Microsoft’s SMS 2003 or Group Policies. Smaller companies, however, can’t afford to package applications and often revert to manually installing the software on computers as required. Adobe provides a useful utility to help administrators customise and deploy the latest Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat products.

I won’t actually do an in-depth write up here, as the documentation provided by Adobe is more than enough to create your first package:

• White paper (PDF) – this provides all the information needed in PDF format.
• Solutions for IT professionals – this page discusses how to deploy, maintain and support Adobe Acrobat and Reader software across your organisation.
• Extract the Adobe Reader 8 msi installer for enterprise deployment – Adobe TechNote describing the process of extracting the required MSI file from the download package. (also see note below.)
• Adobe Reader Distribution Agreement – this is the agreement you need to fill in before getting the link to the full download package.
• User forums – a quick search of these forums will find you the link to download the full Adobe Reader package if you don’t feel like filling in the Distribution Agreement.
[tags]deploy,packaging,wise,microsoft,windows,group policies,active directory,sms,adobe,acrobat,reader,package,downloads[/tags]

The Disk Cleanup tool can be incredibly useful but is often underutilised. Here are some tips I’ve picked up that can help you utilise the tool to its fullest.

• Launch the tool quickly by opening the Run command (Start -> Run or Win Key + R) and type: “cleanmgr” (without quotes)
• To configure the settings to be used while running the tool as scheduled task or in  script, open the Run command and type: “cleanmgr /sageset:1” (This creates a profile that contains the settings.)
• To configure additional profiles, just increment the 1 as needed such as: “cleanmgr /sageset:2” and “cleanmgr /sageset:3”
• To run the Disk Cleanup tool with one of the profiles that you have configured, use: “cleanmgr /sagerun:1” (or the number of the profile that you created.)
• If you find that the Disk Cleanup tool is hanging on the “Compress old files” action, follow the instructions in Microsoft’s KB812248 which says to delete the “Compress Old Files” key from the “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches” registry key. Don’t forget to backup the section of the registry first, by clicking on the key and choosing the Export option.

Let me know in the comments if you have any other tips that you’d like to share.

A utility that I’ve just recently started to use a lot is the Contig tool from Sysinternals. What it does is check one or more files for fragmentation and then attempts to move the file to an area on your hard drive where the whole file can live contiguously (is that really a word?) on your disk – in other words the whole file is in one piece with no fragmentation.

The utility is really simple to use:

Usage:
    contig [-v] [-a] [-s] [-q] [existing file]
or  contig [-v] -n [new file] [new file length]

  -v: Verbose
  -a: Analyze fragmentation
  -q: Quiet mode
  -s: Recurse subdirectories

The best use of this utility comes from when you’re working with virtual machines on your computer. The virtual disk drive files grow to be very large and if you use dynamically expanding disks then they are prone to getting very fragmented very quickly. This obviously degrades disk performance – especially on slower drives such as in laptops. The fix for this is to run the Contig command which moves the file into a contiguous part of the hard drive like so:

contig -v c:\virtual-hard-drive.vhd

You can also use Contig to defragment a whole folder (or even the whole disk drive) by using the “-s” option which performs a recursive defragmentation on all files in all of the subfolders:

contig -v -s c:\virtual-machines\

You can get more information about Contig at the Sysinternals site, and check out some of their other utilities like the wonderful PStools, the old favourites Filemon, Regmon, and Process Explorer (and yes, I prefer these three individual tools to the combined Process Monitor utility.)

UPDATE: I just noticed a new download from the Sysinternals website, and that is all of their trouble shooting tools bundled into one zipped download called the “Sysinternals Suite“