New tools from Quest for Exchange Server 2007

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Exchange Server 2007 has the potential to shake up messaging but there is no direct upgrade path for those organisations still running Exchange Server 5.5 (and there are a surprisingly high number of these). All is not lost though as, earlier today, I heard Joe Baguley, Global Product Director for Quest Software, give a presentation of the various tools that they now have on offer (the list is impressive) and, interestingly, Quest plan to have Exchange Server 5.5-2007 migration tools available when Exchange Server 2007 is released, as well as tools for migrating Exchange public folders to SharePoint.

Keeping files synchronised between data sources with SyncToy

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Several months back, my mate Toffa told me about a tool called SyncToy that is great for keeping two disks synchronised (e.g. a primary and a backup). Last night I installed it (to make regular backups of my digital photos and music to my new external hard disk) and was very impressed. It’s actually a free Windows PowerToy and I was using v1.0 – SyncToy v1.2 is available and includes a number of enhancements.

The tool offers five modes of synchronisation between pairs of folders (left and right) and users can also preview the changes before running the synchronisation job:

  • Synchronise: New and updated files are copied both ways. Renames and deletes on either side are repeated on the other.
  • Echo: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames and deletes on the left are repeated on the right.
  • Subscribe: Updated files on the right are copied to the left if the file name already exists on the left.
  • Contribute: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames on the left are repeated on the right. No deletions.
  • Combine: New and updated files are copied both ways. Nothing happens to renamed and deleted files.

Microsoft are positioning this as a tool for photographers but to be honest it looks good for anyone who keeps data in multiple locations (like backing up a laptop to a server at home). I know people who swear by Novell iFolder (for keeping data synchronised, secure and available wherever they are) but SyncToy looks like a perfect synchronisation solution for many Windows users who just need to make sure that a second copy of their important files is available if the first one is lost or who want to synchronise files stored on multiple devices in a number of locations.

Create customised Windows installations with nLite

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I heard about nLite whilst I was listening the episode 41 of the This Week in Tech podcast. I haven’t used it yet, but it sounds like a great freeware tool for customising a Windows installations right up to creating a bootable ISO image, including slipstreaming service packs, hotfixes and drivers – it sure beats Microsoft’s Setup Manager.

nLite has a dependency on the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 but also has a selection of popular packages ready for integration into the Windows source as add-ons (Firefox 1.5, Adobe Reader, AVG AntiVirus, etc.). If I hadn’t already put a lot of effort into an unattended XP build and didn’t already use WSUS for windows updates I’d be seriously tempted to give it a go.

Nerd TV (how to play back MPEG-4 video without using Apple QuickTime Pro)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

My wife is out tonight, so I’m home alone. I’ve been working pretty hard recently and am very tired so I’m under strict instructions to relax and go to bed early (especially as it’s my turn to get up with our son tomorrow morning… probably at about 5.30am).

The trouble is that I’m also a nerd (as indicated by blogging late at night!) with a geek rating of 40% (this has gone up since I started using Unix) and I have a load of episodes of Nerd TV that I’ve been meaning to watch since it launched last September.

Although the MPEG-4 Nerd TV download is only available at 320×240 resolution, I wanted to watch it scaled to full screen. This was a problem as Apple QuickTime 7 Player only lets me watch it at double size (unless I upgrade to the Pro version) and Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 can’t handle MP4s (Microsoft knowledge base article 316992 has more details).

I tried installing the 3ivX D4 4.51 CODECs to allow MP4 playback in Windows Media Player but playback was too fast (sounded like the Smurfs). The DivX 5.2 CODECs that I had lying around on my external hard disk didn’t work either (and I have a feeling that you have to pay for the latest ones) so I switched to MPlayer on my Solaris box (after first trying the Totem Movie Player, which also failed to play back files with a MIME type of Video/QuickTime).

MPlayer is a really good command line media player for Linux (there are also Solaris and Windows ports available) but I experienced some quality issues when running full screen. Using /opt/asf/bin/mplayer filename -vo x11 -zoom -fs informed me that “Your system is too slow to play this!”, although it did also help out by suggesting various switches to try in order to increase performance.

I didn’t have time to figure out the optimum MPlayer settings so I went back to Windows Media Player with the 3ivX CODECs, thinking I mist be able to do something to fix the playback speed. Purely by chance I found out that simply stopping (not pausing) the playback and starting again corrected the speed and gave a perfect playback.

Finally, I remembered that Apple iTunes is built on QuickTime… I wish I’d tried this an hour or so earlier as I found that my MP4s will play in full screen mode within iTunes. Having said that, Windows Media Player 10 with the 3ivX CODECs looks to provide a smoother image when scaled to full screen; however that could just be my eyesight (or my Microsoft-tinted glasses).

So there you go – three methods to play back MP4s at full screen without using QuickTime Pro: Windows Media Player with 3ivX CODECs, MPlayer, or iTunes.

Booting Windows PE from a USB flash drive

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Something that I’ve been playing around with for a while now is booting Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) from a USB flash drive and a few weeks back I finally found enough time to have a proper look at this and make some progress.

There’s lots of anecdotal evidence of success (or otherwise) on the ‘net, but because Microsoft restricts access to Windows PE, many people are using Bart Lagerweij’s BartPE as an alternative. I do have access to Windows PE and specifically wanted to get this working using the Microsoft version. Some people (e.g. Niko Sauer and Dag at bootdisk.info) have done similar things with Linux variants such as Knoppix.

It seems that not every USB flash drive is capable of acting as a boot device and not every PC BIOS supports USB boot. If there is no BIOS support, then it’s just not going to work (I think USB 2 is also a prerequisite). It’s also unlikely that a USB stick will work as shipped from the factory – it will need a boot partition to be (re)written and the easiest way to do this is with a USB disk format tool.

I got a Dell Latitude D600 to boot MS-DOS last year using a Dell 128MB USB flash drive (which is a rebadged Lexar Digital Film device) but didn’t get much further because Windows PE was too large to fit on the device. More recently, I’ve been using a 256MB SanDisk Cruzer Mini that I bought from MyMemory.co.uk for £9.99. I’ve use this to successfully boot an IBM Thinkpad T40 and a Compaq Evo D510SFF but can’t test on the Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S7010D that I use for work because I don’t have access to the BIOS (thanks to my employer’s corporate information systems administrators).

Here’s my process for taking a USB flash drive from new to booting Windows PE:

  1. Check that the PC BIOS supports booking from USB-attached removable media and enable this.
  2. Download and install a USB flash drive format utility – I used the HP USB disk storage format tool v2.1.8 (SP27608) but alternatives include the Dell USB memory key utility revision 1.0.6.25 (R69131) and Martin List-Petersen also recommends MBRTool, which formats a USB flash drive in hard disk mode and installs a FreeDOS kernel (with FAT32 support); however he also reports that it seems to have trouble with USB keys of 256MB or larger.
  3. Format the USB flash drive with a FAT16 file system, including ability to work as an MS-DOS startup disk and with quick format deselected.
  4. Perform a test boot into MS-DOS using the USB flash drive.
  5. Download BootPart and copy this to the USB flash drive (I used v2.60).
  6. Copy a Windows PE installation that is known to work from CD/DVD to the USB flash drive.
  7. Rename the \i386 folder to \minint.
  8. Copy ntdetect.com from \minint to \.
  9. Copy setupldr.bin from \minint dir to \ and rename to ntldr (no extension).
  10. Reboot from the USB flash drive and run bootpart (you can now delete the DOS files on the stick and remove the boot. ini entry for MS-DOS (if really needed, personally I would leave it there).
  11. Reboot from the USB flash drive once more and Windows PE should load.

Some notes I’ve read suggest that there is an extra step – i.e. that of copying winbom.ini from \minint dir to \; however, using a colleague’s pre-built Windows PE 2005 images I couldn’t get the normal PE one to work – only the one which was configured to to use a RAM disk (and that didn’t have a winbom.ini). The downside of this was that it took about an hour to boot! I thought this was because the reference PC only had 256MB RAM but tried on a 512MB machine and no difference. Obviously need to do more work in this area, but the basic principle of booting from the USB flash drive is now proven.

I’ll post an update with the final configuration when I manage to make Windows PE more performant but, at present, the file system on my USB flash drive looks like this:

\bootpart.exe (01/08/2005 02:06 44,544 bytes)
\winnt.sif
\winpex86.iso
\ntldr (25/03/2005 11:00 298,096 bytes)
\ntdetect.com (25/03/2005 11:00 47,772 bytes)
\minint\bootfix.bin (25/03/2005 11:00 1,024 bytes)
\minint\ntdetect.com 25/03/2005 11:00 47,772 bytes)
\minint\setupldr.bin (25/03/2005 11:00 298,096 bytes)
\minint\winnt.sif

The winnt.sif file contains the following text:

[SetupData]
BootDevice = "ramdisk(0)"
BootPath = "\i386\System32\"
OsLoadOptions = "/noguiboot /fastdetect /minint /rdexportascd /rdpath=winpex86.iso"
Architecture = "i386"

Links
USB articles at bootdisk.info
MSFN forum – Boot PE from USB flash drive
Oliver Aaltonen’s USB booting tips
Jacopo Lazzari’s USB pendrive how to
The CD Forum – boot your WinPE or UBCD4Win on USB flash drive

Migrating e-mail from Mozilla Thunderbird to Microsoft Outlook

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Since the end of November, I’ve been using the Mozilla Thunderbird client for my personal e-mail. It’s quite good (and in many ways better than Microsoft’s Outlook Express, which is no longer being developed), but it lacks many features that I used daily in the full Microsoft Outlook client (and quite frankly, Outlook was doing a better job of filtering out spam). The biggest drawbacks for me were a lack of calendar functionality, no longer being able to send SMS messages from within my e-mail client and that the address book only has space for two e-mail addresses per contact.

Anyway, sometime this afternoon, my laptop is due to be collected for repairs, so I needed to get my e-mail data out of Thunderbird and into a format that I could use on my work PC for a week or so (i.e. Microsoft Outlook personal folder – a .PST file).

Finding the Thunderbird data was easy enough – the Thunderbird FAQ pointed me to %appdata%\Thunderbird\Profiles\randomstring.default\; however, Thunderbird uses the standard Unix .MBOX format whilst Outlook Express uses proprietary .DBX files (but understands .EML, which are plain text files) and Outlook stores messages in binary proprietary .PST files.

Outlook can import data from Outlook Express, and Outlook Express claims to be able to read Eudora data (which is also in MBOX format); however I couldn’t get Outlook Express to read my Thunderbird files, instead displaying the following message:

Import Message
No messages can be found in this folder or another application is running that has the required files open. Please select another folder or try closing applications that may have files open.

A Google search turned up some anecdotal evidence of successful conversions using Eudora as an intermediary, but this was based on Eudora v5 (v7 is the current version available for download). After digging further, I found two articles which used third party utilities to convert the .MBOX data to .EML – one from Robert Peloschek (aka. Unic0der), and the other from Broobles. The principles are the same:

  1. Compact folders in Thunderbird (optional, but prevents conversion of deleted messages).
  2. Back up Thunderbird mail data (a simple file copy is fine).
  3. For each Thunderbird file without an extension (e.g. Inbox – but not Inbox.mfs), convert this to a series of .EML formatted files, for example using the Broobles IMAPSize utility (this is what I used) or Ulrich Krebs’ Mbox2eml (which relies on a Java runtime environment being present).
  4. Drag and drop the resulting files from the file system to Outlook Express.
  5. Import Outlook Express data to Outlook.

It worked for me, with one caveat – messages I had sent, but that were filed in locations other than in my Sent folder, all have the date stamp set to yesterday. I’ll live with that (after 2 hours of converting the data in each individual folder to a series of .EML files and the dragging and dropping them to the appropriate locations in a new folder structure, I’m just glad to have my data back where I want it) but I did read that this can be controlled by changing the sort order from received to sent before the file conversion and import.

So, that’s my Thunderbird experiment over. I’ll probably try out the e-mail and calendar client on my Solaris box soon (so will be back to .MBOX format I guess) but for a long while now I’ve been meaning to set up a mail server at home so that I can keep the mail there and use IMAP to access it online from whichever client I choose.

Dealing with winmail.dat files

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few days back, a business contact e-mailed me a copy of a presentation as a .PDF file. No problems there, except that when it got to me (using the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client), it was called winmail.dat. I tried saving the file as a .PDF but Acrobat Reader didn’t like it so I had to do some googling to find out what to do with this strange file (I remember having problems with this during a migration from Pegasus mail to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook a few years back and we had to resort to using plain text e-mails until everyone had been migrated).

I found an article on the PC Hell website that not only explained the purpose of the winmail.dat file (used by Outlook Rich Text e-mails to carry the formatting information in transport-neutral encapsulation format), but also gave links to various programs that can process the winmail.dat file. One of these is Steve Beadle’s WMDecode utility, which successfully extracted my .PDF from the winmail.dat file.

Using RIS to PXE boot non-Windows images

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve written a few posts previously for this blog about Microsoft Remote Installation Services (RIS), but today I needed to do something I knew was possible in theory but had never done before – using RIS to serve a boot image of something that’s not an unattended Windows setup.

Although slightly complicated by the need to use Active Directory for security, RIS is, at its most basic, a PXE server, capable of serving boot images via TFTP to suitable client PCs (before an operating system is loaded). In theory, any bootable floppy can be converted into a RIS boot image file but Microsoft doesn’t provide the tools – for that you will need the 3Com RIS Menu Editor (RISME). The original version of this is a free download from 3Com – later versions (e.g. emBoot RIS Menu Editor 2.0) are available for a small price (with a free trial period) but I found the 3Com version to be perfectly adequate (although it only runs locally on a Windows 2000 RIS server, whereas v2.0 of the emBoot product allows remote creation and editing of RIS menus and boot images, and supports Windows Server 2003).

After running RISME to capture an image from boot media, an additional folder structure will have been created on the RIS server, either in \\servername\RemInst\Setup\English\Images\3com\i386\ or in \\servername\RemInst\Setup\English\Tools\3com\i386\, depending on whether or not the image was created via the Automatic Setup or the Maintenance and Troubleshooting tabs.

Along with the image (.IMG) file (which can be edited directly using a utility such as WinImage), is an appropriate boot loader (.LDR) file and a RIS setup information (.SIF) file containing something similar to the following text:

[OSChooser]
Description = "description"
Help = "helptext"
LaunchFile = "Setup\English\Images\3Com\i386\tool1.ldr"
Version = "1.00"
ImageType=Flat

RIS should automatically pick up the new .SIF file and offer it as a menu choice in the OS Choices menu although it may be necessary to edit the User Configuration | Remote Installation Services | Choice Options within the Default Domain Policy group policy object in Active Directory to allow access to some of the RIS menus (e.g. Maintenance and Troubleshooting).

I now plan to use this method to deploy Ghost images (via an MS-DOS boot disk, captured as an image) and a PXE boot to a RIS server but for more information (including links to enable PXE booting of Linux), check out Google’s cached version of an article on how to use RIS to bootstrap other operating systems (unfortunately the original is no longer available online).

Some handy system utilities

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Most system administrators are used to using utilities from Sysinternals – Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell’s operating system internals site – and last year I blogged about some free network scanning tools from eEye Digital Security (although with some trepidation as for those of us who need to keep systems secure, they are valuable tools, but there are others who may wish to use them for nefarious purposes, which I’m certainly not encouraging).

A couple of days back, I stumbled across Nir Sofer’s NirSoft site which is full of freeware utilities, some of which are quite frankly frighteningly easy to use to obtain information that should remain secret (e.g. the product keys for Windows and Office installations and stored passwords for various common applications).

Of course, I’m supplying this information all with a health warning – although these utilities look useful, I haven’t checked if there are any side effects (e.g. rootkits or trojan horses, although these days all you need is to play a CD to get infected by a rootkit) and the anti-virus software on our corporate firewall is certainly preventing access to some of the utilities – highlighting them as password crackers.

You have been warned!

Time for a new feed reader

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Ever since I started using an RSS aggregator, I’ve used Feedreader. It’s a simple, but functional RSS and ATOM feed reader and I like it a lot, but twice now it has lost my headlines. The first time was probably about a year ago, so I downloaded the latest version and installed it. Then, a couple of days back, my PC crashed and when I restarted, Feedreader couldn’t read the headlines file. There was no option to retry. It just recreated it, downloaded the most recent headlines again, and I didn’t have a clue what I’d read and what I hadn’t (and of course had lost most of the earliest posts that were cached). I was running version 2.7, build 646 (the latest version is 2.9) but instead of upgrading (that’s the mixed blessing of open source software – there’s always a later version), I think I’ll try something different…

I thought about using Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, but they are just not quite what I’m after (and I couldn’t import my blogroll via OPML). Then I found Sage – a feed reader for Firefox.

Sage: a feed reader for Firefox

One of the things I love about Sage is the “newspaper style” rendering of feeds, as shown above. Another thing that I found out is that the line breaks do actually work in the RSS and ATOM versions of the feeds from this blog (sometimes there seems to be problem whereby the text appeared in Feedreader as one long block and I thought the problem was Blogger‘s ATOM generation).

It’s early days yet, but Sage is looking good so far.