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I recently attended a Longhorn Roadshow in Santa Clara and learned quite a bit about Microsoft's emphasis on virtualization in Longhorn. A lot of companies are going towards virutalizing servers, even those still running NT or Exchange 5.5. The main reasons seem to be saving rackspace and saving electricity (fewer machines, less A/C) which both translate to saving money. Fortunately, my employer now has the infrastructure setup and virtualization on a mass scale seems like a possiblity. After a quick evaluation, I don't have much faith in Microsoft's current Virtual Server product but an evaluation of ESX Server 3.0 has proven impressive. VMWare has it together and it is likely the solution I'll be recommending in '08 when we're ready to move forward.

That said, it's been tough installing Longhorn x64 on VMWare ESX server. It should be expected, though; the support for Longhorn x64 isn't even experimental yet -- it's non-existent. I had to select Vista 64-bit Experimental as my base VM and hope for the best. What I've experienced is almost as painful as installing Windows 2003 R2 on a Macbook  Most of the frustration revolves around the CD-ROM drivers. The initial install of Longhorn on ESX is so promising but then a message pops up that says: "A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing." At first, I thought this was because I was using an external USB DVD-R drive but that turned out not to be the case. I figured that gem out only after going through all these steps:

• I installed some dumb .flp that never loaded the CD-ROM drivers as promised
• I asked a friend to bring me an internal CDROM only to find out it's EIDE and my server doesn't support it
• I took my work workstation's IDE CD-ROM and hooked it half-up to my server (the IDE cable) and half-up to a workstation (the power cable because my server didn't have any free power cables left).
• Enabled IDE in the BIOS and finally had ESX recognize the drive
• Still had the same problem

So then I got creative and decided to create the Longhorn image on another workstation. Doh! The workstation's CPU was not 64-bit enabled. So then I tried it on my laptop.. doh! It's 64-bit enabled but doesn't have some special VT chip that's often times not found in laptops. This is why I hate hardware.

So I gave in and ..

• Wiped ESX and reinstalled Longhorn 64-bit.
• Installed the free VMware server, created a Longhorn Virtual Machine and installed Longhorn
• Once the install was complete, I backed up the vmdk to another machine
• I then wiped Longhorn on the server, resinstalled ESX and copied the vmdk to /vmfs/volumes/storage1/longhorn
• Next, I ran vmkfstools -i longhorn-64ws.vmdk longhorn-64esx.vmdk
• Once that was done, I created a new Virtual Machine within ESX and selected Custom then used the new image longhorn-64esx.vmdk

Ahhh, that worked! But now VMWare tools was giving me trouble. The CD-ROM still didn't work (the CD-ROM, listed as NECVMWar VMWare IDE CDR00 ATA Device, gives the status of "The Device Cannot Start" (Code 10)) so I had to figure out another way around the problem. I copied the windows.iso from /vmimages/tools-isoimages to my workstation using Veeam FastSCP, mounted the ISO, saved the files as a zip under my web root then used IE on the Longhorn server to fetch the zip. Installed and voila, it works!

After reading at bink.nu that the Longhorn April CTP was available, I logged in to my sweet MSDN account and searched for it. Strangely, I could only find "Longhorn Beta 3 Escrow" which became available on April 9th. I'm guessing that this version is newer than the April CTP but I'm not sure. Anyone know what escrow means in this sense?

Finally, I'l be able to put my awesome x64 servers to use, sorta Since Longhorn won't be final for awhile, I figure I will use these machines to beta test Longhorn and Exchange 2k7 until Longhorn is RTM'd.

The above photo was taken late one night as I installed the February CTP onto one of the servers. I used my 32 inch flat screen LCD HDTV as the monitor.. cuz I could. It was cool but ultimately, the install was worthless. The February CTP of Longhorn isn't compatible with Powershell and thus can't run Exchange 2007. Ahh well, now I've got Beta 3 Escrow. So now to decide which I'll do Friday night: go to NASA's World Space Party near Mountain View or install Longhorn & Exchange and play.

Last night, my computer fell asleep and I decided not to wake it. Experience taught me that Hibernate was much more reliable but I decided, eh, it's already Sleeping and I should be too.

This morning, after a public transit meltdown in San Francisco, I made it into work a mere 3 minutes before the managing partner was scheduled to call me for an important meeting. Still in a sweat from running, I arrived at my desk and attempted to wake my laptop from its sleep. I'm in IT after all, and I'll need it for this meeting. Well, my laptop didn't want to wake up. It sat there for a bit doing something.. not sure what, but it was powered on and the screen was blank. So I started poking around; I tried to eject the CD.. that's helped in the past to kick it into gear but it wasn't working this time. After about 30 seconds of waiting, I decided to it was time for a cold boot.

So now, I'm spending my last two minutes before 9:00 AM hoping that the managing partner won't decide to call a few minutes early. Microsoft, I'm sorry but resuming from sleep still doesn't work. And when it does, it tends to sit there for awhile, making me wonder what it will decide to do.

A few days before installing Vista, I came upon a PowerPoint created by one of the Microsoft Program Managers for the WinHEC (hardware) conference. In the presentation titled "Power Management in Windows Vista", Pat Stemen wrote the following::

Reliable Sleep Transitions

• Windows Vista promotes the use of sleep as the default off state
  • Requires reliable, fast and deterministic sleep transitions
• Failed transitions were the primary sleep adoption blocker in previous versions of Windows
  • Lead to great user frustration and distrust of power management
  • Investigations inlicate component vetoes are the primary cause
    • Appcication, service or driver willingly prevents the sleep transition
• Sleep transitions will succeed
  • Vista will not query user mode components when entering sleep
  • Drivers may not veto sleep transitions
  • User-mode notification (PBT_APMSUSPEND) will continue to be sent
    • Timeout to process event has been reduced from 20 seconds to 2 seconds
• Applications, services, and drivers must be prepared for this change
  • Proper design and test is imperative

I don't know where the development in Vista's Sleep went wrong but, it's still not reliable for me. Same goes for my friend Zach..he's the one that actually clued me into using Hibernate instead of Sleep. Even with writing up to 2gb of data to the hard drive, going into Hibernation is just as fast as sleep and coming back is much more dependable. Now there's a 9 in 10 chance that resuming will work instead of a 5 in 10 chance (if that.) 99.999% reliability would be best of course but I'll take what I can get for now. I really hope Sleep's issues are finally resolved in Vista SP1.

Update: They finally released this patch publicly (without you having to call/email). It's helped me a great deal. Note that VPN is also considered "PPP" so this patch isn't only for dial-up users. Also, visitor "wchp" said that this patch helped him with sleep issues. So far, about 250 people have found my blog while searching for a fix. Ya'll holler and let me know if you have an nVidia card too.

Just as I was heading off to bed, I decided to check the TrueCrypt website to see if they added Vista support. I've checked it a few times since March 19th, so I don't know why I didn't notice but version 4.3 now supports Vista. For a moment there, I thought Vista support was going to be vaporwear - they've been promising it since February, 2006.

I donated to the TrueCrypt Foundation back in January because it's some of the greatest software I've used in a long time. The software provides a sense of security -- knowing that my documents/pictures/music are protected in the event that my laptop were to be stolen. To me, knowing someone could be looking at my documents or pictures is an even scarier thought than even having my laptop stolen. So after installing Vista, I was really bummed when I read that the current version would not work.

If you are looking to encrypt an entire disk or portions of a disk, you just may love TrueCrypt too. It works on both Windows and Linux, it's free and it has a ton of functions. ScriptingLife.com has some great suggestions on running a drive with Pstart and mobile versions of applications. DailyCupOfTech.com has good info and quick tutorials on getting started.

Aw yaille! I just wrote up a whole explanatory blog post then lost it so this one will likely be brief... or not.

Recently, we found that one of our DNS servers was resolving external hostnames unacceptably slow -- about 5 seconds, give or take. The resolution was so slow, in fact, that all of the clients hopped on to the secondary DNS server thinking that the primary had gone down. After logging on to the server to troubleshoot, I could see that:

1. Pinging external hostnames worked well after the hostname resolved. So did traceroute.
2. Caching wasn't working at all
2. Other AD DNS servers on the network were resolving external hostnames quickly
3. The root servers were all there but I deleted and reloaded them anyway
    - Note: you can actually load root servers from a root server which is cool
4. Internal hostname resolution was extremely fast
5. A reboot didn't help (you may laugh but this has solved severe AD problems for me)

Because the other AD Servers were picking up the slack, I decided to come back to it later. I went out and had dinner with a friend then returned after a few hours. Upon logging back on to the Internets, an old network admin friend messaged me. I told him what I was seeing and he said he had the exact same issue a few months back. After a few minutes of trying to recall the solution, he asked "Have you checked your forwarders?" I'd glanced at them but went back to check again. And there it was.. an entry to a machine we'd recently taken down (long story..). I knew the moment I saw the IP that it was the problem. I removed the entry and noticed the forwarded query timeout was equal to *drumroll* 5 seconds.

Finding that solution was impossible on the Internet because of the super general terms: Slow DNS Resolution External Active Directory. Nothing really worked for me so hopefully this post will help others in the future.

I've loved my laptop since the day we met. If you are in the market for a fast, lightweight, decent looking computer, you too may be happy with a Dell XPS M1210. As I mentioned in some previous posts, my machine has the following specs: Core 2 Duo 2Ghz with 4MB onboard cache, 2GB RAM, 7200 RPM 80GB HDD, 256MB nVdia card and no webcam (It was too unattractive). The mailing scale at work tells me that this all comes in at 4.5 pounds, give or take some quarter ounces.

I'm currently using Vista Enterprise and the Windows Experience Base Score is a 3.3. The average score, however, is 4.2.

The performance is incredible (SuperPI calculates 1 million digits in 26s) and it's quiet, sturdy and the cooling system is awesome. My employer called a few weeks after I bought it to tell me I could pick up a Dell 420 but I passed with no regrets. I haven't been this happy about a laptop since I got a SuperSlim PCG-N505VX back in 1999.

Anyone have these results from a Macbook Pro or Regular? I'd be interested to see what they report.

UPDATE: danboe.net released his scores. The regular seems to be about the same speed as mine. The Macbook Pro's score kicked ass all around though.

TweakVista.com is one of my favorite Vista sites. Yesterday, they posted something that I had in mind for posting on this blog but now they've saved me the trouble "Extend Activation Period past 180 days" has step-by-step instructions for using Task Scheduler to legally and permanently delay the Activation requirement. This should work for awhile.. at least until Microsoft decides to release a patch to stop the workaround.

My friend Brandon messaged me this morning telling me that he ran into the same issues with Office 2007 Professional (which he won & subsequently downloaded from Microsoft's website). The Office 2007 file extraction locked up even though memory & cpu usage was next-to-nothing so, eventually, he cancelled out and his system became unstable and thus required a reboot. After the reboot, Brandon found the extracted files in %temp% and then ran it from there. He's is running Windows XP Professional with Office 2003 installed. A very common scenario, no? Then how come Microsoft never caught these lock-up problems before releasing the final version of Office 2k7? I know we're not the only ones -- ever since my previous post about my impossibly slow Office 2007 install, Googlers who are running into the same issues are finding my site while searching for a solution.

This reminds me of the crappy SQL Server 2005 SP1 install issues I ran into. Out of about five SQL Server machines, SQL2k5 SP1 installed successfully on only one. I spent a good two days trying to get the installs to work but they never did. Other people in newsgroups ran into the same problems and they were told by MVP's that the only thing the could do is wait until SQL2k5 SP2. It's not clear exactly what caused the problem but many of us seemed to have the "wrong" .Net framework installed or the wrong SQL Server Support tools versions. Two of my machines are production and I don't install frivolous versions of anything on there. Arrrg.. this reminds me of the old days when I'd spend a good week installing dependency after dependency for just one Linux package. Speaking of.. this popped into my mailbox this morning and gave me a good chuckle

For years I've used Windows Server 2003 and for years, I've been missing some of my favorite features from Windows Powertoys. The Image Resizer Powertoy is definitely one that came in really handy when I used XP. Unfortunately, anytime I tried to run it under 2k3, I would receive the message

The powertoys require Windows XP or a service pack. They will not function on a version of WIndows ealrier or later than Windows XP

Recently, when trying to extract MacBook drivers, I learned about InstallShield's "/V /a" switch and I decided to try it on ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe. I downloaded the file from the Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP webpage and saved it to my D: drive. I then ran D:\ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe /V /a and extracted the contents to D:\temp. I saw that a folder called "system32" was created. I then moved the file phototoys.dll to C:\windows\system32 then went to Start -> Run -> regsvr32 phototoys.dll. Voila! "Resize Pictures" appeared in my right-click menu.

I assume that this technique will work for all or most other XP PowerToys.

Update: You can now download Windows Server 2003 R2 here: microsoft.com.

Today I attempted to install Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack (adminpak.msi) but the installer instantly quit with the message "Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack can only be installed on Windows XP Professional with QFE Q329357 applied, or on Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1 or later, or on computers running Windows Server 2003 operating systems."

When researching if R2 needed a different version, I came upon the page "Windows Server 2003 R2 Administration Tools Pack (x86)." Judging from the title, I'd assume this was the file I was looking for but these files are actually for other OSes that want to manage the new services which come with R2. The only place I have found the adminpak.msi for 2k3 R2 has been on the CD itself. You can find the file within your i386 folder on your R2 CD.