http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress I put it here so I don't have to keep it in my brain... Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:30:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Ever have a disaster with one of your servers?  No?  You lucky bastard… Recently we had corruption of a number of our Virtual Machines (caused by a fault in the firmware of our “enterprise” storage system from a Nameless Mainstream Vendor, which was triggered by unexpected filesystem behavior from ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=228 After a semi-disaster with SharePoint earlier this week, I have been forced into the view that I really should have our SharePoint infrastructure hosted on more than one web server.  To that end, I am planning the deployment of a new, 2+ node Windows SharePoint Services farm.  Initial ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=227 I had a look at implementing MS IT Site Life Cycle Management as an alternative to AvePoint products, or the previously blogged-about MS IT Site Delete Capture utility: http://www.codeplex.com/governance/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4622 Unfortunately, this product just is not going to work for us.  It is possible that we could wrangle it into shape with enough ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=223 "Site Delete Capture LE" from Microsoft IT... cool idea, tricky to implement.  Here is the problem: Attempts to delete a site result in "Access Denied" error messages in the site delete log files.  No corresponding events found in the Security Event logs, nor are we able to detect any "ACCESS DENIED" ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=217 Hey look... Microsoft IT has released some cool tools for SharePoint management: http://governance.codeplex.com/ Possibly of most use would be: http://www.codeplex.com/governance/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=14351 A utility to automatically backup sites upon deletion actions. And: http://www.codeplex.com/governance/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4622 Site Lifecycle Management - a potential replacement for the hated "Site Expiration" process we have in place at present. http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=215 Previously I documented a rough outline of the AX 5.30 Infrastructure installation process: http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=71 With support for 5.30 expiring today, I think it high time we got our infrastructure up to date up to the most current version that is supported for use with SunGard Banner. Uninstall all previously existing AX components.  Purge ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=205 MDT looks to be gaining a lot of usage, which is good from my perspective as it means more brains with whom to share ideas. Here are a few ideas I have been considering for addition to our MDT Workbench: Use the MDT Wizard Editor to add a page for whole-system backup.  ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=197 Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, or MED-V... an really cool new technology.  And as with any right-out-of-the-stable product, documentation is a bit sparse.  Worse, there are currently no Microsoft-sponsored forums for the product.  Those of us wising to deploy right away are going to be figuring things out on our own... ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=166 After two days of troubleshooting some vexing problems with ECTS, I have arrived at a new recommendation concerning this product: Run Screaming Okay, that may be a bit damning... here is a qualifier.  If you have no SLA with your customers, don't mind lots of downtime, love C# programming, and otherwise find ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=162 I got a report from one of our power users that SharePoint search was not returning any results.  The default search service under WSS 3.0 is not very easy to troubleshoot.  Things will get better with Search Server 2008 (I hope).  Anyway, I did find the following in my Application ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=148 So, you have a site that needs to to run over SSL-only (shouldn't they all?)? You don't trust your clients to type that ever-important "s" after "http" (and why would they?)? You think they will get scared off by those "Secure connection required" error pages (they will!)? You are not ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=145 Our Microsoft Sales Rep for the Live@edu Cloud Computing offering ran a web conference for us a few days ago on the Wave 3 release of Live@edu.  After the presentation I was feeling a bit shocked and depressed.  I think I have moved into phase 4 of the "Denial to ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=143 After a semi-disaster with SharePoint earlier this week, I have been forced into the view that I really should have our SharePoint infrastructure hosted on more than one web server.  To that end, I am planning the deployment of a new, 2+ node Windows SharePoint Services farm. Initial architecture will be ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=130 Users of our ECTS implementation “PartnerPoint” are not an overly happy set.  Most of the problems that we have experienced are centered around login errors.  This application is particularly prone to login errors for the following reasons: Randomly generated initial password is too complex – data entry errors cause login denial Password ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=127 You may have noticed that that “welcome” email message lacks a certain freshness after awhile.  Further, it is entirely devoid of any information that might help users find help on your local instance of SharePoint.  How, then, to modify this rather stale bit of HTML? I found the answer though our ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=122 We are in the midst of deploying a WPA2-Enterprise wireless network here at UVM.  During the testing process we have discovered that although domain-joined computers have no trouble using the network (out-of-box settings don’t work very well, but we are pushing profiles using Group Policy to make easy for our ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=121 I was having some trouble today sifting though some SharePoint diagnostic logs.  There is way too much noise in the logs, and the TSV format makes finding information less than simple.  Luckily, I decided to give MS Log Parser a go... it has been sitting in an install directory waiting ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=117 The motherboard on my trusty Dell Latitude D820 went sour this Sunday, requiring a full replacement.  No one was ever killed by losing access to their laptop for a few days, but I was somewhat annoyed to have lost access to my iTunes installation (thus making backup and sync of ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=114 Decision Points: Need to decide... Where to host ADAM - We want it replicated for additional fault tolerance: The best option may be to run it on each SharePoint server in your farm... ADAM supports clustering via network load balancing.  If you have setup up NLB for SharePoint, it then should not be ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=112 When working with OpsMgr overrides, I am always forgetting the mappings between alert severities and their corresponding numeric values in the database.  It is important to keep this straight, because if you set your overrides incorrectly, you risk either suppressing all notification for an alert, or even worse... increasing the ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=111 They pulled me out of my dungeon to do some public speaking this week.  FWIW, here is the slide stack that I used for the presentation... PowerPoint 2007 version: http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/seminars/MM2008-CollaboratingWithSharePoint.pptx PDF Version: http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/seminars/MM2008-CollaboratingWithSharePoint.pdf I am going to assume that the use of any copyrighted content in this presentation falls under ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=110 Configuring IPv4 on the Local network interface: http://www.petri.co.il/configure_tcp_ip_from_cmd.htm -and- http://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2005/10/using-netsh-to-set-multiple-dns-server.htm To set your IP address: netsh interface ip set address name="Local Area Connection" static <ip address> <netmask> <default gateway> (Note:  If you are using netsh on a platform earlier than Server 2008 (i.e. Server 2003) you may nned to provide more explicit parameters such as: netsh interface ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=109 Vista Service Pack 1 is here, and with it a few new tricks that need to be learned.  The first shocker for me is that you cannot apply Vista SP1 to an offline image... bummer!  I had understood from earlier MS brags about Vista that the "componentized" (sic) OS could ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=108 While trying to use stsadm to export/import a site (part of my usual site repair process), I encountered an error in exporting "field" objects. The error stated "FatalError: Guid should contain 32 digits with 4 dashes (xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx).". Some digging revealed this forum post: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2003817&SiteID=1 It is suggeted here that the file "Fields.xml" ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=107 The people in the computer depot clinic reported a vexing problem with Windows DS deployment today... one of the techs reported a 0x80070020 error in a WDS deployment session.  The text was "Windows cannot install required files".  There is no mention of which files, which is quite irritating.  The error ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=106 Microsoft has provided a handy tool for adding additional drivers into Windows Vista and WinPE 2.0 WIM files.  This tool is called "PEIMG", and it is included in the Windows AIK, available from www.microsoft.com/downloads.  Unfortunately, PEIMG does not have a recursive function, so if you want to add all of ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=105 For the second time since going live with our CAMPUS Active Directory Services, the Subordinate Certificate Authority that is bound to our production domain has come very close to expiring.  What gives with the default two year validity period for Microsoft CAs?  Verisign's certificates are not any less secure than ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=104 If you have a NetApp, and you ever need a plan for migrating your iSCSI block devices from one filer head to another, here is a step by step: Stop services on your iSCSI initiator host that may be writing to your lun to be migrated. Refresh your target ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=102 We are preparing to migrate from our FAS270c NetApp filer to a new FAS3050c.  Migration/Upgrade procedure documentation is a bit sketchy on the NetApp site, so I thought I should put together my own step-by-step.  Here it is, a work in progress... Pre-migration: Verify destination filer settings: ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=101 As part of our firewall reimplementation, I have been struggling with understanding the exact port needs of the services on our hosts. Previously, I discussed a procedure for discovering all network shares being served by the servers you manage: http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=96 Today, I used this procedure as a jumping off point for ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=100 I have been working on implementing the new "Terminal Services Gateway" service that will be released with Server 2008.  In order to cluster TS Gateways, we need to have a network load balancing solution in place.  Hardware solutions are supported, but getting access to those would be a pain.  Thus, ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=99 If your network is like ours (and I hope that it is not), your DNS server is happily accepting IPv6 address registrations, but your routers can't makes heads or tails of all those packets with those long addresses on them.  Is this a problem?  You betcha'. If a client (Windows Server ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=98 Recently we changed the name of an application server (groan).  This application has a web front end that requires SSL.  See the problem yet?  New name=certificate mismatch.  To limit this issue, I plan to maintain both the new and old names in DNS, but how to prevent SSL from "breaking"?  ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=97 Here was a fun little exercise... in attempting to impose more restrictive firewall rules on our central Windows server subnets, I wanted to enumerate all of the servers which require "public" CIFS protocol access.  Naturally we want to take a programmatic approach to save time. Here is what I came ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=96 Ever have a guest you wish you could throw out of your house?  The unresponsive lump of flesh that sits in your favorite chair, eating your food, using up your soap, smelling up the facilities, while contributing nothing to the household economy?  I know I have, but unfortunately social decorum ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=95 Have you even been trying to configure an MS Operations Manager 2007 agent on a system and had it report no errors, but still have its status listed as "not monitored" in the OpsMgr console?  Have you wasted countless hours doing packet captures and advanced system debugging for weeks under ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=94 Here is about the most useful bit of script magic I have seen for Windows in quite awhile: http://blogs.msdn.com/adioltean/archive/2005/01/20/357836.aspx The script shown here allows you to create a persistent snapshot of a Windows Server 2003 volume, and then expose it as a drive letter. This opens up all sorts of other ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=93 Ever need to modify all of the sites in a SharePoint web application?  I never had to do this until we decided to roll out the powerful Telerik radEditor to all of our sites.  In the past, radEditor was scoped "globally", meaning that once installed to the Web App, all ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=92 Ever since we migrated from WSS 2.0 to 3.0, I have been stymied by site collection permissions issues.  Under 2.0, SharePoint server administrators had access to everything, but under 3.0 they get nothing.  I was getting pretty sick of not being able to manage SharePoint site collections from the command ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=91  Thank you thank you thank you! Weyland.be » Disable System Beep in Windows Vista http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=89 [This article is an updated version of the "What's new in the Campus domain?" article, previously published in the Spring 2007 IT-News] In Spring 2007 we introduced you to two new tools in the Windows Deployment arsenal at UVM.  Further work on and refinement of these tools continues.  If you ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=88 There are several changes in the after-market software provided on the Back-to-School systems sold by the Microcomputer Computer Depot this year.  All of these new programs are available for download at the UVM Software Archive.  Here is a quick run-down on the most significant changes: New Software: WinSCP / ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=87 So, the RadEditor solution is not scoped globally, meaning that after you install it, it is not used on users sites unless they activate it in their site settings. What is the way around this? The answer (big surprise) is STSADM. We again use: STSADM -o enumsites to collect ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=86 After using the Telerik "RadEditor for SharePoint 2007 Lite" for a few months, I decided that we should purchase the full version of the product. A piddly $350 gets you the right to run the full version of this most incredibly useful tool on all of your SharePoint sites. ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=85 In working on implementing the MS BDD 2007 "LiteTouch" deployment system, I have needed to generate a ton of documentation. Rather than blog it all here, I have created a new Sharepoint team site. This allows for better organization of structured data, and for distributed editing of content. Read ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=83 I have been getting intermittant errors on Server 2003 systems that we have deployed on our ESX servers: "The Virtual BootRun Service failed to start". Apparently this service is called during deployment of a VM Guest from a template, and is not needed after deployment: http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=6007&messageID=39465 Ass I had to do was run: c:\WINDOWS\vmware_imc\bootrun -unregserver http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=82 Expect a lot of posts about silent/unattended installation of various Windows applications. We are ramping up for BDD 2007 "LiteTouch" OS deployments, and I need to get the UVM-sanctioned application ready to go. Oracle doc on installing OCal: http://download-east.oracle.com/docs/cd/B25553_01/install.1012/b25463/clientinstallation.htm#CHDEJIIB Here is how I did it: run "cal_win_1012.exe /A" to extract the contents of ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=81 Oliver: I want to grow be a grown up now. Mom: But Oliver, being a kid is great, too. You should enjoying being a kid while you still can. Why do you want to be all grown up? Oliver: So that I can have babies, too. Mom: ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=80 Sometimes I get tired of trying to find pristine systems in our Computer Depot to test out system imaging scenarios. The main reason I need clean, un-touched systems is that no one wants to subject their production computer to experimental re-deployment. However, another frequent need for fresh systems ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=79 We had a rather awful public relations fiasco with a Sharepoint site over the past three weeks. Users replying to existing posts in discussion board web parts always receive "User not found" errors (their replies get posted, but they get no notification of this). I was almost incapable ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=78 I am most pelased today to have done something positive for our Terminal Server environment. By using the fine freeware product "Threadmaster" I have been able to throttle back those rogue Approach.exe applications on the Terminal Servers to use no more than their fair share of the CPU. Threadmaster can ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=77 A tribute to the Vermont gubernatorial race of 2000 in that title, for those who chare. Anyway, what this really is about is gaining access to top-level Sharepoint sites when you have been locked out. This never was a problem for us in the past as our "Farm Administrators" had ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=76 Mom: Could you please stop taking off my shoes, Oliver? Oliver: No. Mom: And why not, pray tell? Oliver: Don't call me praytell. http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=75 I have made some additonal changes to our Terminal Services farm based on MS best practices, and on advice from net forums (mostly Brian Madden, again). Implemented Mandatory Profiles on the Terminal Servers, using GPO. Installed ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=73 Ben, Harjit, Peter, Jonathan, Greg, Dean, Andy G, Phil, E. Mike attending Imaging: No real progress on imaging since the last meeting. We need to look at: Offline image servicing Unattended setup in "Factory Mode" of supplemental software following initial deployment Segregation of WDS servers for Faculty/Staff vs. Student Security: Bitlocker Capability to perform key escrow of ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=72 It seems that I did not take good notes on how to install and configure ApplicationXtender server components. Bah… this made for some fun when rebuilding the test environment. Here goes… Install Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition, with IIS.  Bring up to current patch level Install Oracle Client software… we used 9.2.0.4 with all ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=71 Installing the PDF iFilter on WSS 3.0: http://geekswithblogs.net/sspotts/archive/2006/11/03/96045.aspx Associating an icon with PDF files in a Sharepoint library: http://www.sharepointblogs.com/ssa/archive/2006/10/13/13812.aspx http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=70 The following steps may be accomplished before production service outage begins: Install OS Services in support of Sharepoint  Install .NET 3.0 framework ensure that ASP.NET is installed on IIS server, make sure that ASP.NET 2.0 is activated:(run C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -i Install WSSv3 (but cancel the configuration wizard) Perform admin site config: Configure to use ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=67 Vista – The Road to Production at UVM As everyone now knows, Vista has officially launched. We don't expect to see Vista shipping on new Dell systems until sometime in January, but that is really just around the corner. Vista has dozens of significant new features and hundreds of ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=66 Brian Madden runs an awesome Blog on Terminal Services, both from MS and Citrix. I found this exceptional article which ennumerates free tools for TS management:http://www.brianmadden.com/content/content.asp?ID=466 With these most useful links:http://www.brainsys.be/default.asp?pg=15A kernel-level lockdown tool for Terminal Servershttp://threadmaster.tripod.com/A tool for throttling application threads on a TS.http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=2606126Microsoft Print Driver redirection tool. Too COOL! The ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=65 In preparing to cut-over our dying Citrix Terminal Server to modern Server 2003 R2 Terminal Servers, I have discovered an interesting application that was developed in-house called "Casey". The app has many external dependencies which I am trying to get functioning on the new TS boxes. First challenge - MIT Kerberos for ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=64 So this should be fun... wehave a SQL Server, now to add databases... MOM 2003 http://support.microsoft.com/?id=917615 Dell IT Assistant http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/solutions/remote_sql_server_ita7.pdf http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=62 Well, it has been a fun week of migrating our Symantec AntiVirus servers from old, dying Dell 5th-gen PowerEdge servers onto bleeding-edge ESX virtual machines. Here are some of the highlights: Firewall changes: In moving the servers, we had to assign new IP addresses in our protected 102.0 subnet. Thus, ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=63 Here are a few notes from my initial setup of SQL Server 2005, Standard Edition on our new IBM LS20 blades. Our blades are equiped with 2x dual core AMD Opteron processors, two Qlogic FC HBAs, two Broadcom 57xx Ethernet ports, and 8Gb of RAM. We thusly are using Server ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=61 Here are some links and notes regarding configuring VI 3 for use with IBM Director 5.10: Good IBM Redbook on VI 3 and Director 5.10: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/SG247190/wwhelp/wwhimpl/java/html/wwhelp.htm More official guide to using ESX 2.5 with Director: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/pc_servers_pdf/managingvmware.pdf Several management methods are available for ESX hosts. The Redbook focuses on using the Director Agent for Linux. ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=60 Someone has to do it, and no one is, so I will be someone today rather than nobody... I am developing a Vista compatability matrix for UVM-supported applications. Hopefully others will pitch in on this effort in the not too distant future: Vista - The Road to Production Software Matrix http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=59 Booting to WDS can be a bit pokey over lower-bandwidth connections. Even over GbE, WDS boot images take significantly longer to load than the original RIS menu system. Bummer! I expedite loading of the "WDS Discover" boot image (this is the image that allows loading of WDS server images) ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=58 Performance counters on SYSIMG1 became corrupted recently. The MS KB is full of strange and dated advice on the subject. Here is the most recent article I could find: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300956/en-us It is full of tedious and laborious steps to manually repair the performance counter object mappings. Towards the bottom ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=56 We had some fun adding Intel SATA drivers for the new Intel chipsets onto our RIS server. These drivers are required in order to deploy RIPrep-generated images onto the new Gateway M285 Tablet PCs. Here were the key steps, as outlined in this TechNet Article: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/96969653-bd0f-44d7-af4f-f95c3016d2be1033.mspx?mfr=true" In the "flat" image for the ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=55 I have installed an instance of WDS on our current production RIS server. No worries, RIS functionality is still present, fully unadulterated. However, I seem to be having problems getting a PXE boot client in my office to load. PXE boot works, and the WIM image gets loaded onto ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=54 "How long do we need to wait to be confident that software that isn't installed won't crash?" -Geoff Duke, in written communication to a Dell support "engineer" http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=53 I am attempting to model the upgrade of our existing WSS 2.0 site to 3.0 using the current "beta 2" release. Fun so far: The installer for WSS 3 refuses to run claiming that I need Workflow Foundation v2.2 installed and ASP.NET 2.0 enabled on my site. Workflow foundation ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=52 MS has released new builds of the Vista deployment tools with the "Business Desktop Deployment Solutions Accelerator 3.0 Beta" (AKA BDD 3.0 beta. This pack includes the "Windows AIK" that we have looked at previously. Good! The last version needed a lot of improvement. Here are ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=51 "Moira is into dolls. I am into money." The boy would do his grandfather proud. http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=50 Dad: "No Oliver, you need to have some real food for dinner." Oliver: "Not plastic food?" http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=49 Ha! Anyway, here we are at the TechEd conference 2006... my first major geek convention. Free backpacks, giveaways, freebies, and MS TechEd 2006 water bottles. Actually, I am pretty excited. I am waiting for the "Scripting for IT Pros who can't write code" class to begin. Speaker ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=48 Here is another weenie script that I put together to clean up expired computer objects in our AD domain.  Afer some experimantiation, I settled on using the "oldcmp.exe" tool from the excellent www.joeware.com site, rather than a combination of "dequery" "dsrm" and "dsmod" commands.  The reason for going third-party here ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=47 W00t!  Installing SPS as part of project server was more than a bit messy.  www.microsoft.com/office/preview now has STSv3 available as an independent download.  I am installing it right now (I feel like a kid in a candy shop...) http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=46 In addition to looking at Project Server 2007 (which looks overly complicated... and still required IE for full-featured web access... bleagh!), I have been eyeballing STS3, the next version of Sharepoint.Very Cool!Here are some first impressions/highlights: Default template for Blogs and Wikis ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=42 WDS has a native utility for converting legacy RIS images to WIMs. I am trying it using the Spring 2006 CAP image.  Oh look... it does not work!  I have submitted a bug using the Beta reporting tool.  Hopefully someone will pick it up. http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=32 I have brought up a new test server to give Project Server 2007 a whirl. Here are some of the gotchas in the install process: Install required "Windows Workflow Foundation, Beta2". I downloaded v2.2 from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5C080096-F3A0-4CE4-8830-1489D0215877&displaylang=en Also required is ASP.NET 2.0, which is installed with the ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=40 I finally was able to generate an image of my Win2k3 VMWare reference system using Ximage (soon to be renamed "ImageX"). In the past I had many problems, although not strictly related to the utility itself: Networking in VMWare workstation for the WinPE 2.0 beta in the Vista AIK will not ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=39 The Catalyst team asked me to evaluate and install an SSH/SFTP/SCP service for them on all of the CATXXX Windows servers. After some evaluation and testing, we settled on bitvise WinSSHD. To "save time" I decided to try scripting the install. Here is the process that I came up ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=37 It always helps to know what you are doing... After much head bashing and tooth gnashing, I discovered that the real reason that most people recommending a solution to this problem present a client-side redirect is pretty simple: When browsers swith from a http:// rooted URI to a https:// rooted URI, they ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=36 Upon reviewing my earlier notes on building installers, it appears that I left out some useful info on how to build the darned administrative installation point that I am using to wrap up the patched installer. Since I had the "opportunity" to work on a v10.1.0.400 installer today, I ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=35 What a pain... I shore up security in IIS I reallly will need to redirect all traffic on sharepoint to HTTPS connections. It is easy to turn on SSL, but harder to automatically redirect traffic. There are many approaches to this problem, which take the form of two ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=34 I have come across the need image sevaral servers in preparation for migrating them to new "hardware". (The actual situation is that I have several systems running on VMWare Server Beta (formerly GSX Server), and I want to migrate them to ESX server. Since the two virtual servers ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=33 So, workstation image capture is now performed using "XImage.exe" (soon to be renamed ImageX.exe). Although multiple capture methods are supported, use of Windows PE 2.0 is encouraged. I obtained the February CTP of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK). This contains several utilities for working with and creating Windows ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=31 Got my hands on the WDS beta from Microsoft. Looks like a huge improvement on RIS, although the documentation really leaves something to be desitred at this point. Key features: - Image-file based service. Uses the new "WIM" image format. - Tools provided to edit WIM ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=30 I am attempting to set up a test sharepoint server environment to deploy the current production environment. This will contain a copy of the prod sharepoint Content DB, and will reflect the same general conrfiguration: -Kerberos authentication -separate service account for Sharepoint content managment and Sharepoint configuration -SQL DB server and Sharepoint ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=29 It seems that some of our constituients have not been paying overly much attention to the settings on their scanners. We have over 40Gb of black-and-white, text-only documents scanned at 24 BPP, uncompressed, consuming 10 Mb each! This happened once before. My colleague Warren licensed a product called "2TIFF" ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=28 Our server "SYSIMG1" just does not seem to want to take on its new role of replacement RIS server. I guess it just liked being a NetWare box and resents its lot in life. Robocopy of the image library from \\risprime\reminst is consistently a failure. I run out of ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=27 I made some more changes to the script and installer package: - Decided to converge on the "Administative Install" method for wrapping the patches into the installer. This prevents the installed SAV instance from interfering with the patch portion of the install script. Features like "autoprotect" were preventing "msiexec ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=26 It would be nice if we had the option to deploy RIS-based images as either domain-joined or free-standing systems. As it stands, default configuration forces all imaged systems to have a pre-staged computer account. Since most imaging jobs are scheduled for eventual deletion, we run into a real ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=25 What a pain! Our testers still report problems with SAV 10.0.1 installers. High CPU, disk thrashing, scheduled scans kicking off without permission... Several fixes. First off, I generated a fancy new install script: :begin @ECHO OFF ECHO - Symantec Antivirus installation script for the University of Vermont ECHO - version 2.1, by ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=24 I had some fun setting up RIS on the newly repurposed server "SYSIMG1". One issue is that copying all of the RIS Images from the current production "RISPRIME" would not complete... I ran out of space on the target volume which is the same size as the source volume. ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=23 Catalyst needs us to install eight new servers for them this week. Although it will probably take longer, I have decided to take a stab at using Microsoft ADS (automated deployment services) to roll out the systems. Steps: Install ADS on server "sysimg1" (reusing the host "castor" from the NetWare days). ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=22 Since we are now on Campus Agreement, we have access to "Windows PE", the Microsoft bootable 32-bit OS for system installation and maintenance. Lots of work to get everything going. Let us start with a 2k3-ee WinPE install: note: turns out my 2k3ee sources are corrupted... bummer! Switched to SE, ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=21 LiveUpdate complaints from the end-users... cannot run LiveUpdate, LiveUpdate logs indicate a specific file was "unavailable on the server". FTP into Norton1.uvm.edu does reveal that the file is not actually there. The quick fix here is to resynch the LiveUpdate directory from SYmantec. To do this: On Norton1, Launch "LiveUpdate ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=20 Men die earlier than women because they want to. http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=19 WebXtender has two modes: Interactive (IRC), or "Thin Client". Interactive requires IE 6 with ActiveX controls, wheras "Thin" does not, but has fewer features. To set the mode for users, you must enter the "User Profile Administrator" program that installs with XS Admin. You can change the global ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=18 To simplify installation of the OC, I wrapped the files into a MSI using "Advanced Installer" v2.6.4 from Caphyon Software. To accomplish this, I just needed to follow the previously documented manual installation routine, and take note of what changed on the system (specifically, I had a look at the REG ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=17 After some fine head-banging, I have figured out how to package the ApplicationXtender 5.25 .MSP (patch) file into the original 5.20 installer. We just need to follow the standard "administrative installation point" routine: At the command line, go to the AX 5.20 installation directory. Run msiexec /a AxSetup.msi TARGETDIR=[working directory] Assuming the ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=16 Symantec just extended us the honor of downloading SAV v10.0.1 (Maintenance Release 1 for SAV 10). This build is supposed to fix a bunch of performance complaints. Now that we have it, I suppose we should think in earnest about getting clients to install the new version. I have ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=15 Doug asked me to let him know how many Lotus Approach DBF and APR files are present on our file servers at present. He was hoping that the report might be something that he could "save to file". After a lot of mucking around with gnuwin32 tools, I decided that ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=14 Starting the SAV10 server infrastructure process... Download and install LU Admin v1.5.4, required to fetch SAV10 updates for our internal LiveUpdate FTP server. Installed over existing version, purged and re-downloaded alll current SAV/NAV related files, and also updates for Symantec products commonly used at UVM. note: needed to set the ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=13 Norton1 shut itself off late last week. Stefanie had a look at it and managed to get it back on it's feet: SYSTEM volume was almot full on Norton1. Stef found scads of MSFTPSVC log files and deleted them. SAV service would not restart... apparently due to corrupt virus definitions. ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=12 I wonder if port of the problem I have been having connecting to the AX applications on IMGX owing to some sort of Firewall problem. The only service that has been installed on any of the imaging servers that appears to be of any potential relevance is the "Legato Licensing Server" ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=11 Geoff wants to configure Unattended to allow for scripted installed of 2k3 servers. Our thoughts are to provide a script that will: Create regular fixed system partition sizes Install standard system components: Backup, Power, Management, SNMP What else? Std. local admin password? ??? What about the Dell partition, with Utils??? Is it ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=10 Did some work on AX client installation today. I wanted to see how hard it will be to do a Oracle 10g Instant client install... looks pretty easy, although I don't see why those $%#$%$# at Oracle can't be bothered to make a light-weight MSI installer for the 10g ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=9 I do believe the "A" in "Type A Personality" should stand for "asshole". These also should be a "Type J Personality" for "jerk". (Throught attributed to Steve Cavrak) http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=8 Somedays, your arteries just need hardening. http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=7 Some discovered information on how Citrix prints (that is, when it actually prints at all...) Citrix performs "automatic printer creation" for ICA client sessions. When a client uses ICA to connect, the Citrix server creates a "local" printer that points back down the ICA pipe to the client's locally defined ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=6 Well, we finally got DiskXtender from the IKON folks. Unfortunately, we do not yet have a license code for the product, which we will need soon if we expect the service to run for more than 30 days... regardless... I uploaded the installer .zip to d:\install, then extracted. There ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=5 Despite having gotten my orthodonture off last week, despite the beautiful loving wife, despite being the pround parent of a devastatingly cute 2 year old boy and a beautiful 2 month old girl, despite making a livable wage, despite owning my own home, despite not being hungry, at war, in danger... I am feeling ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=4 Microsoft RIS and "Unattened" both have support for network-boot installation. With RIS, this is the only supported configuration. With Unattended, this is one of several supported configurations. A little work needs to be done to get the two system to co-habitate on the same server. Initially, I had throught to ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=3 I have been working on expanding the features on our Desktop system distribution servers. Currently, CIT uses a Microsoft RIS on three servers to deploy MS operating systems to computers purchased through the Depot. One system, "RISPrime", is installed permanently in the Depot. This system is located at IP ... http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=2 This is a test.   http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=45  James_S_Davis@dell.com Dell Professional Services www.learndell.com                           do Adding packages to software repositories  1390° to support dell. cm ideate" vi sure "so is 4.4 _  1>2400 series and higher can auto-run update all firmware   http://www.uvm.edu/~jgm/wordpress/?p=43