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June 2005 - Posts

Are Virtual PC for Windows files compatible with Virtual PC for Mac?

A frequent question by many. The answer is yes in both directions, with one caveat. The .vhd files can easily be moved between the two environments, but before you do, I would recommend that you uninstall the VMAdditions before moving the file across, Read More
posted Thursday, June 30, 2005 9:06 AM by jhoward | 1 Comments
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Generic Exchange Backup Script (Backing up Exchange 2003 Part 2)

Update: 4th Nov - See updated and improved script here As part of my backup for Exchange I was playing with at the weekend, I ended up writing a pretty simple script to run as a scheduled task. Although my Exchange environment is  simple as well, Read More
posted Wednesday, June 29, 2005 9:18 AM by jhoward | 11 Comments
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Event ID 8017 Backing up Exchange 2003 Virtual Machines (Part 1)

I was thinking about this also at the weekend (I really should get out more) about how to reliably backup my Exchange 2003 SP1 Virtual Machine running at home. Now it only supports five users and a few resource mailboxes, but now that my wife's email Read More
posted Tuesday, June 28, 2005 9:27 AM by jhoward | 2 Comments
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Windows Sharepoint Services SP1 on Exchange 2003

This weekend, I was playing around yet more with my home infrastructure, "dogfooding", so to speak. One of the things I wanted to get running was Windows Sharepoint Services SP1 (the baby brother of Sharepoint Portal Server). However, I've pretty much Read More
posted Monday, June 27, 2005 8:04 AM by jhoward | 1 Comments
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Branch Office Infrastructure Solution - lots of new information now available

The Branch Office Infrastructure Solution, or BOIS (which is far too easy to mis-type if you've worked in computing for a lot of years - think about it) has been released. The BOIS guidance and tools are designed and structured to address the needs Read More
posted Friday, June 24, 2005 10:49 AM by jhoward | 1 Comments
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Understanding Active Directory in the Real World

For those of you who are available on Monday (27th June), this is a reminder that there is an all-day Technet event running at Cavendish Conference Centre in London about how you can deploy, manage, migrate-to, secure and extend the value of your Read More
posted Thursday, June 23, 2005 5:23 PM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Windows Server 2003 SP1 Blocking Toolkit

As for the capability (now expired) to stop Windows XP SP2 being delivered through Microsoft Update, now a similar toolkit is available for download from Microsoft.com to block SP1 for Windows Server 2003. It is critically important to realise that the Read More
posted Wednesday, June 22, 2005 1:42 PM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Differencing Disk walkthrough under Virtual PC

Although I don't myself use Differencing Disks a great deal for my test environments (mainly as I spent a while building set of about eight finely tuned VMs serving my needs for just about every demonstration), they are a great feature of Virtual Read More
posted Wednesday, June 22, 2005 8:37 AM by jhoward | 3 Comments
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Don't be flamed - use the Image Resizer Powertoy

Continuing the theme of digital imagery and photography, I happened to notice an email go through on an internal discussion group today which had something like 4MB of attachments in the form of photos. As you can probably imaging, the Read More
posted Tuesday, June 21, 2005 11:26 AM by jhoward | 3 Comments
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File Server Migration Toolkit

Virtualisation for migration and consolidation isn't always the best answer. I'm not saying it isn't appropriate always, but there are alternatives. One great example which I was asked by a customer last week about was for migrating and consolidating Read More
posted Tuesday, June 21, 2005 10:29 AM by jhoward | 1 Comments
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Updated Server Performance Advisor Performance Diagnostic tool for AD and Windows

The latest version of the Server Performance Advisor was released at the end of last week for download here. SPA helps you diagnose the root causes of performance problems in a Windows Server 2003 deployment by collecting performance data and Read More
posted Tuesday, June 21, 2005 8:57 AM by jhoward | 1 Comments
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Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer

As I blogged about a little while ago, the Microsoft RAW Image Thumbmailer and Viewer application was released last week. You can download it from here. It doesn't install directly under Windows 2003 server as on my laptop, but it will soon :-) Officially, Read More
posted Monday, June 20, 2005 11:01 AM by jhoward | 2 Comments
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VSMT cscript error 0xc0000008 at DeployVM.cmd stage

While setting up for the roadshows and my VSMT migration, during testing I was getting occasional popups (1 in 5 times maybe) during the DeployVM stage from CScript indicating error 0xc0000008. This also happened last Friday when I was setting up the Read More
posted Monday, June 20, 2005 9:44 AM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Virtual Server Roadmap and Windows Virtualisation (Virtualization) aka Hypervisor

If you're interested more in the future of Virtualisation (Virtualization if you're from the other side of the Atlantic from me), or where Microsoft is heading in terms of the broad architecture of the Windows "Hypervisor" check out this Read More
posted Friday, June 17, 2005 9:14 AM by jhoward | 3 Comments
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Identity and Access Management Series

This is a collection of technical papers designed to help organisations understand identity and access management issues and related solutions that can be achieved with Microsoft technologies in heterogeneous IT environments. Version 1.2 of these documents Read More
posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 5:54 PM by jhoward | 2 Comments
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Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition is free

...if you attend TechEd Europe this year. See here for more information. Need I say more? Read More
posted Wednesday, June 15, 2005 1:09 PM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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How to create a Custom Group Policy Administrative Template to change Hide File Extensions for Known File Types

I was asked by a customer, or rather a colleague of mine took the query who passed it on to me, how you could use group policy to affect the Windows Explorer setting to hide file extensions for known file types. This isn't a setting which is directly Read More
posted Wednesday, June 15, 2005 7:11 AM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Rebel or Safe? (aka NT4 vs Windows 2000). Your opinion counts

So right now, I'm somewhat in a quandry. "Why John", I hear you ask. "Well readers", I respond: At TechEd Europe this year, I'm going to present a couple of sessions. One will be around the contents of the Solution Accelerator for Consolidating and Migrating Read More
posted Tuesday, June 14, 2005 12:47 PM by jhoward | 9 Comments
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Forms Based Authentication and RPC/HTTP over single IP using ISA 2004

You would think that this would be something fairly simple to do.... Well, think again, unless you know. In the scenario I was trying to get working, there are essentially three servers involved - a domain controller running Windows Server 2003, Read More
posted Tuesday, June 14, 2005 11:41 AM by jhoward | 2 Comments
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Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) Download Link

While on the subject of patching here is the home page for the newly released Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), the next generation of SUS. To find out more about patching, management and securing your networks, have a browse through Eileens Read More
posted Monday, June 13, 2005 1:41 PM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Deleting Web Listeners from ISA 2004 SP1

Enhancing the configuration of my ISA server at 3AM this morning (couldn't sleep), I was trying to resolve an issue that's been nagging me for days now. I wanted to delete a couple of old network Web Listeners I had previously created Read More
posted Monday, June 13, 2005 12:23 PM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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ISA 2004 Patch Caching - new feature to cache BITS traffic over HTTP

You may have missed TechEd last week in the US. I did due presenting at the Technical Roadshow, but something rather significant caught my eye just now from an internal email, which I wasn't aware of before. Gordon Mangione in his security keynote mentioned Read More
posted Monday, June 13, 2005 12:52 PM by jhoward | 1 Comments
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Microsoft Update is live - patching on steroids

OK, so Kevin beat me to this one. I've been busy in meetings is my excuse. Microsoft Update is now live. I've been using this for a while now and it is fantastic. You can patch not just your base OS (as in Windows Update), but Office (as in Office Update) Read More
posted Monday, June 13, 2005 12:42 PM by jhoward | 2 Comments
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Better day at the office - disk problems solved

After my bad monday a few weeks ago with a corrupt hard disk, the good news is that I picked up my new laptop disk (finally!) yesterday and am for once having a reasonably good Friday. It's been a generally quiet day having been offline for most Read More
posted Friday, June 10, 2005 6:07 PM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Virtual NT4 Guest Server auto power off after shutdown under Virtual Server

I know from the presentations, customer meetings and emails I get, many of you are running NT4 server as a guest under Virtual Server 2005. While NT4 itself as a guest is supported, remember that this doesn't increase the supportability of the NT4 OS Read More
posted Thursday, June 09, 2005 1:16 PM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Peformance improvements with Virtual Server 2005

Yesterday, I blogged about turning off the thumbnail on the Virtual Server admin interface for a couple of reasons, one being performance or load time of the admin interface. I found it in the admin guide, in the section relating to "Improving Virtual Read More
posted Wednesday, June 08, 2005 10:10 PM by jhoward | 4 Comments
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Stopping Virtual Machines accidentally starting from Virtual Server admin interface

As much as I think the admin interface into Virtual Server 2005 is great, it does have a couple of really annoying feature for me. One is that it is what it is - a web interface, not a thick client. Hence, certain fields aren't as rich in capability Read More
posted Tuesday, June 07, 2005 9:43 AM by jhoward | 0 Comments
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Stopping beeping from Virtual Machines under Virtual Server

This one crops up frequently on the discussion groups internally at Microsoft but I'd never seen it until a couple of days ago. On some hardware, Virtual guest machines have a very annoying habit of causing the built-in speaker on the host beeping under Read More
posted Monday, June 06, 2005 11:44 AM by jhoward | 8 Comments
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KB 900076 - Windows Server 2003 SP1 as guest under Virtual Server

I blogged a week or so ago about issues when running Windows Server 2003 SP1 under Virtual Server 2005.Two days after that, there was a knowledgebase article published (now why didn't that appear in my RSS feed off the support web site?). The KB Read More
posted Friday, June 03, 2005 11:26 AM by jhoward | 4 Comments
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New Windows Support for RAW file format - RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer

If you're a fan of Digital Photography, read on. There was an interesting press release yesterday (which I can't unfortunately find on the Presspass site) about how Microsoft is going to be natively supporting the commonly used RAW file format in Digital Read More
posted Thursday, June 02, 2005 8:46 AM by jhoward | 2 Comments
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Windows Management through Remote Desktops Snap-in. Save space on your TaskBar

I was speaking to a customer this morning about Windows management generally and this happened to come up in conversation. There are many ways to manage servers remotely in Windows, but the customer was asking if there was a way to avoid his Read More
posted Wednesday, June 01, 2005 2:56 PM by jhoward | 10 Comments
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