I’ve written previously about running Windows Server 2008 as a workstation (I do it on the notebook PC I use for work) but now it’s even easier. Steven Bink has published details of a Windows Server 2008 Workstation conversion tool (via Garry Martin).
A couple of years back I was writing about trying to squeeze Windows PE onto a 128MB/256MB USB thumb drive and how times change – these days I have piles of unused 128MB, 256MB and 512MB USB sticks that have become redundant because I have larger portable data storage devices available.
Then, as I was preparing to image a PC, I found myself using 1.44MB floppy disks and it all got very frustrating. Just enough to boot the system used half the disk and that was without any utilities – the version of Symantec Ghost that I used recently won’t even fit on a floppy disk. So, I decided to put one of my old USB sticks to use as an “ultimate boot disk” – much easier to update than the CD-based versions we were putting together a few years back.
Despite having a pile of smaller USB thumb drives doing nothing, I decided to use one of the 1GB sticks that EMC were giving away at the Windows Server 2008 launch (plenty of space for expansion).
The first step is to make the drive bootable – I used the HP USB disk storage format tool v2.1.8 (SP27608) to format the drive and put a basic Windows ME boot subsystem on it (using a disk created with the Windows XP disk format tool as a reference image) but there are other options.
Why Windows ME? Well, because it’s easy – Windows XP creates ME boot disks – and because it was a prerequisite for the the next stage – network booting using Brad Driver’s universal TCP/IP network boot disk. There are many sites on the ‘net that offer network boot disks (including bootdisk.com) but the one I chose manages to include a huge range of drivers and it fits on 1.44MB floppy.
Basically, the disk boots a very basic operating system before expanding itself to a RAM disk and reloading the command shell. USB device support is still experimental (at v6.2) but after much experimentation I worked out that I could use the makedisk script provided with the download but in order to avoid a loop of pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart the computer I needed to edit the config.sys file so that the line shell=n:\command.com /e:4096 /p used c: instead of n: for the command interpreter (my drive was formatted as USB-HDD, this may not be necessary for other USB boot options) and I also removed the hidden attribute from command.com to avoid a file not found error (that didn’t seem to affect the operation of the disk in any other way). After this, the NIC is auto-detected and an appropriate network driver loaded, obtaining TCP/IP information from DHCP and logging on to the network.
With network booting working well (at least on the IBM ThinkPad T40 that I tested against – older machines may not have the necessary BIOS support), I added an autorun.inf file for when I use the drive within Windows. This file includes the following items and really just sets the drive icon and description:
[autorun]
label=USB Network Boot Disk (1GB)
icon=shell32.dll,12
Finally, the whole purpose of this disk is to run some utilities. At this point you can name your own poison but I created a C:\Tools folder (C:\Utilities is too long for 8.3 file naming, although C:\Utils could have worked) and started to pile in my favourite 16-bit .COM and .EXE files – I’m sure the list will grow substantially over time. There may be some issues with memory management but there is plenty of space to add a variety of tools and theoretically there could be multiple boot options too.
It’s been a long time since I played around in MS-DOS and there is very little call for it these days (I should really be doing this with Windows PE) but every so often it’s good to return to your roots.
I’ve started to use Flickr recently (I’ve had an account for 3 years, but I haven’t done much with it until now) and tonight I started to upload a selection of my photos.
I used the Flickr Uploadr tool and then set to work adding location details and generally familiarising myself with the site. After a while I noticed that, even though Flickr had read the EXIF data on the images to pick up the date taken, the photostream was ordered by the sequence in which I had uploaded the pictures (which was not chronological).
It seems that, even though individual sets can be re-ordered, photostreams are always presented in the order of posting, so effectively the only method to edit the order of images in a photostream is to change the posted date – an operation that cannot be performed in bulk, at least not with the Flickr interface.
After reading Jennifer Lyker’s post about bulk photo management in Flickr, I was just about to try out h4ppierphotos until I stumbled across details of a Mac OS X application called PhotoStream Sortr. The download link didn’t work but I found a copy on MacUpdate.
Despite its name, PhotoStream Sortr only seemed to recognise sets (not the photostream) but, by adding all of the photos that I wanted to re-order to a new set, I was able to use it to update the posted time to match the date taken. Following this, I deleted the “re-order” set that I had created in Flickr, leaving my PhotoStream in the order that I’d like it to be viewed.
Even though Inbox Zero has helped me gain some control over my e-mail, I still need all the help I can get. Last week, Simon Coles sent me an invitation for Xobni – a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that offers fast search, conversation threading, a social networking platform, and many other features designed to make email better – or as Xobni (inbox spelt backwards) like to put it:
“Xobni is the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox.”
It’s already becoming very useful – earlier today I couldn’t find a document that I was sure I’d been sent (and the Outlook 2007 search functionality didn’t seem to find it either). I used Xobni to highlight another e-mail from the same correspondent and there was the missing document – one of the listed files that we had exchanged – from where I could open the original e-mail, or the attachment that I was after. Xobni will pull contact information out of e-mail messages (even if I don’t have an address book entry for a particular contact) and tells me who my contacts correspond with that I do too. There’s also an analytics feature that lets me track the volume of e-mail I receive (and how long it takes me to process), ranking my correspondents and telling me what time of day they tend to send me e-mail. It can also read my calendar and automatically highlight the times that I am available over the next few days, placing the details in an message, all ready to send. There’s VOIP integration too – although clicking on the Skype logo launched Office Communicator on my system (I don’t have Skype installed but I do have OCS). Finally, Xobni has its own built in search capabilities, which I’ve used a few times this evening to track down long lost e-mails based on the snippets of information that I could recall from the recesses of my mind. In fact, the only niggle I found was in my work e-mail, where it struggles to differentiate between first and last names (our display names are formatted with the lastname in front – e.g. “Wilson Mark” – and, even though the e-mail address is something like mark.wilson@country.companyname.com, Xobni thinks my name is “Wilson” but has no such problem for contacts with sensible display names – like “Mark Wilson” – or with punctuation in the display name – such as “Wilson, Mark”).
Xobni’s invitation-only period is over (although they are still banding around the beta tag in true web 2.0 style) and the product is available for all to download. I’ve only been using it for a few days but I’m very impressed with the information that it gives me – even so, I’ll leave the product review to those who know it best – check out the video below:
What I can say is that I reckon Xobni is pretty cool. It seems I’m not alone as Bill Gates demoed the product in his keynote at the 2008 Office Developers Conference and Xobni was selected for Microsoft’s Startup Accelerator Program but the founders are reported to have walked away from an outright takeover. If you use Microsoft Outlook for your mail, then Xobni is worth checking out and could save you a lot of time.
Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) is great for occasional access to e-mail but if you’re using a non-Microsoft browser (as I often do) then it degrades to a rather sorry state. Consequently, for a couple of years now, I’ve been meaning to get RPC over HTTP (aka. Outlook Anywhere) working so that I can use a full Outlook client to access my Exchange Server mailbox when I’m on the road (iPhone access to Exchange Server via IMAP or Outlook Mobile Access from my Nokia 6021 are useful for checking for messages throughout the day but I need to run the full Outlook client to filter out the junk e-mail). After doing most of the preparation work some time ago, I didn’t get around to testing it fully – mostly because a lot of my access is from behind an authenticated proxy (and I’m told that Outlook doesn’t like anything getting in the way).
Tonight, I’m in a hotel, and the iBahn connection has no such restrictions, so I finally got around to testing the connection, using Outlook 2007 to communicate with an Exchange Server 2003 (SP2) server.
Full details may be found in Microsoft knowledge base article 833401 but, as ever, I found Daniel Petri’s articles on the subject more useful:
For me, the process was simplified as I already had OWA working over HTTPS but, as Daniel highlights, Harry Bates’ RPCNoFrontEnd utility can save a lot of time in checking that the registry keys are correctly set for the RPC proxy server ports and the Windows Server 2003 resource kit rpccfg /hd command is useful to confirm their operation:
Secondly, running outlook /rpcdiag gave some useful diagnostic information for confirming that the connection was indeed using HTTPS:
Ironically, I’ve finally got this working with Exchange Server 2003 just before I’m about to move my mail over to a new server running Exchange Server 2007!
Some time back, I wrote about my plans for a living room PC but before this could happen there were several hurdles to overcome:
Fortunately, the first two items came together for me quite easily – after I decided to raid my savings and buy a MacBook a couple of months back, my wife asked me which PC it was replacing and I said “that one” (pointing at the Mac Mini), never expecting the response that she gave – “Oh. I like that one. It’s cute.”! This was a revelation to me – my wife has never before referred to any of my IT as “cute” – so I grabbed the moment to say something like “yeah, I thought it could go in the living room for when we watch films and stuff” (and the lack of any objection was interpreted as implicit approval).
The hardest part was the software setup. I still feel that Windows Vista’s Media Center capabilities are vastly superior to Apple’s Front Row – there’s TV support in there for starters. There are other options too: EyeTV would add TV support to the Mac (the problem is that it only has a 1 year TV guide subscription in Europe); Center Stage looks promising, but is still an alpha release product (and has been for a while now); Myth TV could work too (but my research suggested that USB TV tuner support could be a bit of a ‘mare). Then I thought about it a bit harder – we have lousy terrestrial TV support in my house (digital or analogue), so the clearest TV signal I have is on satellite (Freesat from Sky). Unless I can find a way to interface the Mac with my digibox, TV on the living room PC is not going to happen (this solution looks interesting but is for Windows/Linux only). Which meant that the criteria for a living room PC were:
So, ruling out the need for TV integration meant that Apple Front Row was suddenly a contender as the OS X 10.5 (Leopard) version of Front Row can access shared libraries from other PCs (so I don’t have to copy/convert the media) and the remote control supplied with the Mac Mini does not rely on line of sight to control the PC. Vista Media Center could do this but I’d need to have that huge IR receiver and ugly remote control. Of course, I could just buy an Apple TV, but the Mac Mini gives me so much more (and it can output to my aging, but still rather good Sony Trinitron 32″ widescreen TV). I will stress though, that if I ever manage to get a decent TV signal from our aerial, Windows Vista Media Center would beat Front Row hands down.
It’s ironic that I’m writing this in a hotel room in Bolton (nowhere near my living room) but so far, the software stack on the Mini is:
I may have to add a few more codecs over time (but Perian seems to include most of what I need) and furthermore, this headless PC (sorry, Mac – for the purists out there) is suiting my requirements pretty well. I’ve watched films from the hard disk with no issues at all, and streamed video podcast (and audio) content from my MacBook across an 802.11g Wi-Fi network (with no apparent playback issues – despite the signal having to travel through several walls and to the furthest corner of my living room – although I wish iTunes would mark podcasts as played when viewed remotely). There is one caveat though (and that’s a hardware issue) – even though the Leopard version of Front Row supports DVD playback, I still watch DVD content on my home theatre setup as that gives me true 5:1 surround sound (it’s only stereo on the Mac Mini).
Other applications that will probably find their way onto the mini over time include:
Those are for the future though – at this point in time, I’m ripping my content (and performing iPod conversion as required) on other machines and transferring it to the Mini across the network (see below). I also tried running a Windows XP virtual machine for downloading from BBC iPlayer and Channel 4 On Demand but didn’t manage to set up the tools that are necessary to remove the Windows Media DRM in order to play the content on the Mac (I do at least have a PC running older software releases that I can use for that).
As for getting media onto the living room PC (the stuff that I don’t want to stream across the network), I can always plug in a USB drive and control it remotely using the screen sharing capabilities in OS X.
OS X screen sharing is only VNC but it works well across my network (and scales the display accordingly – it even gave a decent representation of my 1680×1050 resolution display downscaled to fit on a 1280×800 MacBook display, although the picture here is with the Mac Mini hooked up to a standard definition TV). One point to note – it’s necessary to disconnect the shared screen session before trying to control the living room PC with the remote control or else it won’t work.
Wikipedia article on Apple Front Row.
MacInTouch Intel Mini Home Theater.
ARS Technica review of various Mac Mini media solutions.
This guy has some great details of how he set up his Mac Mini in his living room – he uses MythTV but gives some good details about mounting the hardware to only take up 97mm (3.8″) of room space.
One of the downsides of running Windows Server 2008 as a workstation operating system is the lack of native CD/DVD-burning capabilities. Quite why Microsoft decided that administrators don’t need to write optical discs from servers is anybody’s guess but it’s kept me busy for the last hour or so.
First, I installed the copy of Nero 7 Essentials (v7.8.5.0) that was supplied with my notebook PC. That looked good (apart from the number of “essentials” that it provides) until I came to create a CD and found that it would only let me record to an “Image Recorder” and not to the drive in my notebook (despite having been provided by Fujitsu-Siemens with the computer, it seems that this OEM copy doesn’t work with my hardware).
Next up, I tried cdburn.exe from the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit. That didn’t want to co-operate with my 64-bit Windows Server 2008 installation (it may work on a 32-bit installation as I used it on my previous machine with Vista).
A few years back, I wrote about Alex Fienman’s CreateCD and the latest version is called ISO Recorder. Even though v3 works on 64-bit Windows (Vista and so presumably Server 2008) it didn’t recognise my drive.
Then I stumbled across a post from Aali, who had exactly the same issue burning discs in Windows Server 2008 – ImgBurn (v2.4.0.0) successfully burned the .ISO that I’d created with Nero to a blank disc and could even have done the whole job for me.
Last week I wrote about having scraped through the first of two exams needed to update my MCSE from 2000 to 2003 and this morning I passed the second by an equally narrow margin. Whilst I’m pleased to have passed the Planning, Implementing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment for an MCSE Certified on Windows 2000 exam (exam 70-296), and am similarly glad that I found it challenging (i.e. worthwhile), I did sail a little close to the wind – and that wasn’t for lack of preparation either. So what happened?
I’ve worked with Windows NT since 1995, been an MCP since 1998 (and MCSE since 1999) worked with Active Directory since NT 5.0 beta 2 and generally have a fair amount of Microsoft Windows Server design and implementation experience in a variety of organisations. Even though I’ve remained technical, it’s inevitable that as I progress in my career, I spend more time managing and less time doing – meaning that I do not have a huge amount of recent operational or administrative experience. So, in order to upgrade my MCSE I needed to refresh my knowledge of the key concepts without re-learning everything from scratch.
With that in mind, and the impending withdrawal of the MCSE 2000-2003 upgrade exams, last summer, I bought a Microsoft Press Training Kit entitled Upgrading your Certification to Microsoft Windows Server 2003. It’s a weighty tome and includes evaluation software, eBooks and a readiness review suite from MeasureUp. It’s actually a really good purchase but, at 1100 pages and almost 2.5kg, I found it too large (physically) to keep lugging it around with me and, despite the title, it seems to be targetted at people who are setting out on the MCSE path for the first time.
Then, a few months back, I used an practice test from pass4sure to help prepare for MCTS exam 70-624. I passed the exam, but the software was Java-based (and the installer failed to recognise that my system already had Java installed and tried to install it again), was full of bugs and, at $79.99 for just 53 questions, I felt that it was very poor value for money. So, when uCertify asked me to review their PrepKits I was interested to compare them with my previous experiences.
uCertify kindly provided review copies of the PrepKits for exams 70-292 and 70-296 and, from the moment I installed them, I could see that the quality was way above my previous experience. No buggy installer – these went straight onto my Vista system with no issues, and I was greeted with a professional interface. Unlike the pass4sure practice tests, there were a few hundred questions (albeit with a fair amount of repetition – I calculated about 15% appeared in multiple practice tests) and tests were available as pre-defined practice tests, adaptive tests, custom tests (for example, just the questions that have previously be answered incorrectly), or an interactive quiz. There was also a complete run-down of the exam objectives and other study aids including flash cards, study notes and articles. Finally, the software allows the ability to view test history and to evaluate readiness using the built-in reporting tools.
I set to work on the practice tests, and found that there were two possible modes – test mode (with feedback at the end) and learn mode, whereby a fairly detailed explanation was available on request after answering each question. For some of the questions, I did not (and still do not) agree with the answers provided but the tool also includes the ability to provide feedback to uCertify and on at least one question I could view the feedback that others had provided. I also spotted quite a few grammatical and spelling errors – one was even in the interface itself so occurred on multiple questions.
Even though the general quality of the PrepKit software is high, there are some very obvious bugs. On my Windows Vista system I found that if I paused a test and then cancelled the pause, the clock did not start counting again – but that was actually useful because in learn mode there is not a lot of time by default (58 questions in 60 minutes) to take in the information. I also had a problem whereby the software lost my exam history – a minor annoyance, but it did effectively prevent me from retesting using just the questions I had answered incorrectly.
So, the software generally is not bad – it has a few issues but no show-stoppers. But what about its effectiveness? Taking exam 70-292 as an example, I saw my scores increase but I do wonder if, due to the repetition of the questions, I was actually learning the answers to the PrepKit tests rather than applying the knowledge gained in order to answer the question correctly (the difference may be subtle – but it is significant). This was particularly evident when I moved on to the PrepKit for exam 70-296, where there was some repetition of questions from the PrepKit for exam 70-292 (unsurprising as the exam objectives also overlap) and I consistently scored above 80% (with most tests above 90%).
My theory about learning the answers rather than learning the key concepts that are required to answer the questions correctly appears to be born out in my results from the real exams. The Microsoft NDA prevents me from discussing their content but I do have to wonder if, when I can consistently score above 90% in a practice test – even with the final test – which is intended to be more difficult than the vendor exam – how come I barely scraped a pass score in the real thing?
So, to summarise – do I think the uCertify PrepKits are worth the money? Probably. Will they prepare you to pass the exam? Possibly. Microsoft/Prometric are currently offering free exam insurance (Second Shot) and, in any case, uCertify offer their own money-back guarantee but, based on my experience, the PrepKits form just one part of an overall preparation strategy – and my usual method of re-reading course materials and writing my own notes seems to work better for me.
You can try the uCertify PrepKits for yourself – and I’d be interested to hear how people get on. Demonstration versions can be downloaded for free and access to the full PrepKit is unlocked with a license key costing around $59.99 with discounts for multiple purchases. It’s worth noting that the uCertify PrepKits are not just for Microsoft certifications either – there are PrepKits available for a variety of vendors with further details available at www.ucertify.com.
[Update 20 February 2008: You can get 10% off the uCertify PrepKit of your choice using the discount code MARWIL]
Garry Martin dropped me a line to let me know that (finally), the Sysinternals troubleshooting utilities have been rolled into a suite for download from the Microsoft TechNet website. Furthermore, this 8MB download is free of charge.
For the last few days, I’ve been writing a migration process for an Active Directory and Exchange migration that I’m working on.
It shouldn’t be necessary to cram documents for technical people full of screenshots but experience tells me that:
Unfortunately, experience also tells me that:
Anyway, getting back to the point, I’ve just written a document with a lot of screen shots in it. It makes very dull reading (and it wasn’t much fun to write either) but the process of taking the screenshots was greatly improved using the SnagIt screen capture software from TechSmith.
Why not just stick with Alt+PrtScr? Because that needs me to paste the screen grab into something afterwards (and before someone leaves a comment – yes, I do know that Linux and Mac users can just save a .PNG file to the desktop). SnagIt will let me select the region of the active window that I want to grab (e.g. just a particular menu), control output of the screenshot, name it for me, put it in a folder, etc. and generally save me a load of time.