VNC Viewer: You'll probably have used VNC viewer at some point, but if not, let me explain. You can use this to take control of a remote PC. Couple this with PuTTY (in my previous list) and you can access pretty much any system you choose

Symbian DivX Player: Does exactly what it says - a full implimentation of the DivX codec for Symbian S60 v3 phones...

Navimote: Free SatNav! It's never going to be a TomTom beater, but it'll get you out of a spot, and it's free...

Locr: Automatically Geotag your photos - if that's your sort of thing, knock yourself out!

Nokia Step Counter: I'm sure a lot of people are still desperately trying to lose weight as part of their New Years resolution to get fit. Well, with the step counter, you can see exactly how fit (or how lazy) you really are...

SymTorrent: Tie an unrestricted data plan (thank you Vodafone!) with a desire to download stuff on the move, and what do you get? SymTorrent - the only Symbian S60 v3 bit torrent client.

As part of our ongoing Sharepoint project, I've decided to go all modern - the base OS is 64 bit Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise and the database engine is 64 bit SQL Server 2008. However, as soon as you try installing Sharepoint Server 2007 with a vanilla disk, you'll run in to problems - 2008 R2 expects Sharepoint to be service packed up, and at the moment there's no media available with SP1 or SP2 embedded (in fact there's no media avaliable at all on the Volume Licensing site at all, just a note telling you that for the moment they'll ship you the physical media for free - WTF is going on at Redmond at the moment?)

Luckily, there is a pretty easy way to get around the problem.

• Copy your install disk to a hard drive
• Download Sharepoint Server 2007 SP2 here
• Run the following command from the command prompt (cd to the directory where your download is stored first): officeserver2007sp2-kb953334-x64-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract: [Location of files copied from installation disk]\Updates
• Run setup.exe from the copied installation media root

Job done

As part of a Sharepoint deployment project, this week I've been building up one of the blades in our blade centre (an HP C-Class with an MSA1500 sitting on the back). A couple of things have struck me as I've been going through the build process - firstly, the insanely huge recommended partition size for Windows Server 2008 R2. The minimum recommended is 64GB. Take a while and let that sink in. 64 GB. The blade I'm using comes equipped with a pair of 137GB SAS drives, so once we mirror them, nearly half of the available space is taken! Not funny Microsoft! I'm sure that the chaps at Redmond will justify this by saying that it means that the OS has the optimum amount of space to spread in to, but compare this with a CentOS installation on the same hardware. 1.5GB. There is no way anyone can justify more than 40 times space for an equivalent installation - our CentOS box runs mySQL, Apache with 4 virtual sites and 2 instances of our VLE (Moodle - more of that in later posts). It's just not on, and it's no wonder that a lot of the admins I speak to are looking more and more seriously at an Open Source back end...
Secondly, the lack of 64 bit driver support is a major pain. Building the blade with a SmartStart v7.9 disk was an absolute no-no, even though it's only around a year old. Had to download v8.3 to get driver support for R2 x64. It's no wonder that lacklustre support from vendors leads to the same from developers - on my 64 bit desktop, probably half of the apps are still installed in the x86 Program Files root. 64 bit computing is not a new idea, and until either Microsoft or Intel make a stand and push 64 bit then we'll be stuck in a situation where 64 bit chips are running 32 bit code, hosting virtual machines to run 16 bit code designed by 2 bit companies...

As part of the MCDST course material, we look at accessibility options for end users. The material available is fine for the exam, but doesn't go in to nearly enough detail for the real world. Microsoft have therefore produced a number of factsheets for the various main desktop products which will give you, in great detail, all of the information you need to configure the OS of your choice for end users with any type of impairment.

Visit the site Here

When you work in support, people often ask why your default reaction is to assume that users are idiots. If you have a look at the pictures below, you'll have an idea why...

This is how Amazon takes my payment, right? Note there are 2 cards...

If at first you don't succeed, try installing it loads of times...

So close, yet so far...

I'm getting the most of my £200 by installing Office 9 times...

Attached are the slides, notes and testbanks for Chapter 4. If there is anything missing, please let me know and I'll add it in
Accessibility_Options.doc

Interesting_KB.doc

MOAC271_Ins_Chap04.ppt

TESTBANK 4 NO ANS.doc

TESTBANK 4.doc

As always, I promise to start getting my teaching resources in order in time for the start of the course, yet somehow it never happens...

Anyway, from now on, all of the weeks information will be uploaded here. Starting with Chapter 4, everything will be available here...

As I wrote a long time ago, before our current Active Directory problems, I'm currently running a virtualisation project. Well, the results are in - ESXi is probably the greatest piece of freeware I've ever used. Many would have thought that VMWare's decision to give away one of the jewlels in their crown for free would be commercial suicide. Well, their freeware has just led to a sale of tens of thousands of pounds, as we've bought all of the nice twiddly stuff that comes as an extra.

I'll say now that, in a small environment, it is perfectly possible to run ESXi as a freeware solution and pay nothing for the add-ons. If you've collected images of your servers, you can deploy them with ease on your ESXi box - simply import the image and away you go. And the free version is not crippled in any way - we're running 64bit guests at 99.9% native speed. It's a superb product. There are a few caveats - the approved hardware list is about 5 lines long (not a problem for us, as we have an HP Blade Centre and an MSA1500 SAN) so make sure you can actually run the thing! It'll only support 2 physical processors, but it runs quite happily on four cores on each, and the word is that Intel's i7 will be just fine too. We've taken our entire server estate and collapsed it to 6 blades, which astonished us! Our server room looks like a ghost town!

The big advantage is the flexibility that you get - I can honestly say that I've never been able to play with configurations as much as I can now. I've just created a log-ship populated SQL reporting server from scratch and deployed it in an hour. There's no way I would have gotten the budget for that normally, but ESXi allows me to use the spare capacity, and if it doesn't work, you delete the VM with no harm done.

There are loads of add-ons available, and we've bought a few to streamline a number of our processes. This seems to be where VMWare are positioning themselves, and I think they've got it spot on - give the product away for free and charge for the extras. We've gone from being pretty much a VMWare free house to basing our next 2 years on it, so in our instance it's a net gain for them...

All I'll say is this - have a play. It's a breeze to deploy, and it might transform your whole way of thinking...

Sometime last week, I wrote that I'd be testing some virtualisation options for our new deployment and reporting back to you with the results... Well, in the interim, we've had an Active Directory death. This is not just a failed server, it's a full on meltdown. We noticed something was wrong when clients started dropping off of the domain. After taking some Wireshark traces, we noticed that there were a lot of DHCP requests floating about. Immediately alarm bells started flashing, as our DHCP box also runs DNS, as well as being the Global Catalog server, the PDC emulator and the FMSO master.

The server was dead - properly FUBAR'd. We're still not 100% sure what caused the failure, but I'm pretty sure it's a person rather than technology - this is what happens when you're forced to give 8000 students admin rights. Take note. If the dead server hadn't been the Global Catalog server then we could have cleared the remnants out of AD and removed it. However, as always happens, it was, which meant that Exchange went screwy too. Cue a restore from tape, which seems to have fixed most of the problems, although the first restore left the server with no Netlogon or Sysvol share! Apart from losing the DHCP reservations database, we appear to be OK, for the moment. Now I just need to prove who did it!

Since the restore, we've had problems with one of our finance apps - the clients keep reporting a SQL Connection Reset and then hundreds of VB Runtime errors occur. Long story short, it's network... If you're a DBA and you see this in your apps, get on to your server and network guys and shout at them - the only way a SQL app should generate this is if something kills the SPID, and of course that wouldn't happen on your server, would it!

I'll be back blogging again regularly soon - the virtualisation project is still live, and I have a review of the lovely Advent One 10" laptop to give you...

TTFN!

How bloody difficult is it to get a patch to install via Windows Update? The latest failure is KB955428, an update that closes a security hole in Works 8. It's one that you want to have... Luckily, the MS support site contains the solution.

Go to the KB955428 support page

Download the patch that corresponds to your version - the language code is on the end of the file name, so mine is EN-US

Extract the installer from the cabinet file using your extractor of choice (gotta be 7-Zip!)

Double click the installer, then think about why, after ten years of trying, Microsoft still can't get this bloody technology working right. Surely installing a security patch correctly is not too much to ask for!