I just took delivery of my new work/personal laptop this past week and spent a few days getting it setup just right.  For some background and for those of you who think I am crazy here were my requirements:

1. Must be a laptop, need to travel and for school
2. I like to develop, needs to be fast
3. I like to be creative, needs some graphics and CPU power
4. I like to play with new software and server stuff, needs a Hypervisor
5. I like docking stations too!

So with all of that said I bought a Dell M6500, you can take a look at the base specs at the Dell site, but trust me, don’t buy this monster without working with a Business Sales Rep!

I ended up getting the following:

1. Intel i7 890xm CPU
2. 12GB 1333 GHz RAM
3. nVidia 3800m (1GB Ded)
4. Dual 500GB HDD in RAID0
5. Docking Station of course!
6. The others goodies Dell has to offer

I had a copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 laying around and that is how this post starts…

If you read the comments about the 6500 many people complain about attempting to convert the laptop into a server and run into problems when running Hyper-V on the laptop.  Dell obviously does not support running a server OS on a laptop but there are lots of resources out there.

When I first went away to college I did run Windows Server 2003 on my desktop because I wanted to learn more about IIS6 at the time as well as beginning my foray into ASP development at the time.  Back then getting a server OS running as a workstation was HARD to say the least.  It never worked quite right and programs always picked up on it being a server and not a client so needless to say I eventually moved back to XP at the time.

I had faith in Microsoft and thought I would give 2008 R2 a chance, surely they had made some improvements.

I was right! I was able to setup 2008 R2 and so far everything has worked great.  I have the desktop experience features installed which makes working with the OS a little nicer.  There are a few gotchas but I managed to find a great website complete with automated installers to help out with a lot of the problems.  You can find it here.

So far the experience has been great and I have been lucky enough not to run into the problem many users have talked about where the laptop will lock up when the Hypervisor is running.  No BSODs here!

Feel free to post questions or comments, I’ll try to answer back as quickly as possible.

-Brent

Just published out version 1.2 of uManage.  It now includes a little more automated setup process as well as the new Admin Portal which as of right now only allows the system administrator to view and change some system settings.  The next release (~ 1.5) will really have a lot of the new functionality that will start to make the product really usable in an organization for managing users.  I got a request from one of the previous releases for some screenshots.  I added more to CodePlex and will include them here as well.  If you have an Active Directory test environment the app takes less than 10 minutes to have up and running, so just give it a shot, worst comes to worse and you remove it.

Check it out now: http://umanage.codeplex.com

Check back here for more in the future!

-Brent

I ran into this problem recently with a Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 machine hosted in a Hyper-V environment where repeated 1054 errors are logged on the client machine.  At first in my research I found that this is an old problem originally reported with AMD Opteron CPUs with multiple cores. (http://blogs.technet.com/perfguru/archive/2008/02/18/explanation-for-the-usepmtimer-switch-in-the-boot-ini.aspx).  It all stems from a problem where Windows was not properly counting CPU cycles on dual or multi-core systems.  Many times this problem is found with Negative Ping times where the initial time for a ping request may come from CPU Core A and after the request is made the time stamp may come from CPU Core B.  The problem though is that the time from CPU Core B was less than the original time returned from CPU Core A thus the negative ping time and in the end the request would fail as Windows could not handle the negative ping time return.

Theoretically this problem was fixed with a patch from AMD and SP2 of Windows Server 2003 however I am not sure why this problem has resurfaced.  The apparent problem arises in the Hyper-V environment because Hyper-V provides a pool of CPUs to the virtual machines to use.  So it is possible that even though the server uses a single CPU core it still is load balanced among the entire pool of CPUs by the Hyper-V Hypervisor and therefore the CPU clock can still return a bad time stamp.

The problem only appears from what I can see to reproduce itself in Windows Server 2003 and R2.  With that being said it is a very easy fix, there is even a Microsoft KB article for a step by step procedure.  However you can simply do the following:

1. Edit the Boot.ini file
2. Add the Load Operator “/usepmtimer”
3. Verify the edit by running “cmd bootcfg”
4. Restart the machine
5. All is well!

If you want more info from Microsoft see the KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895980

Additional References:

http://blogs.msdn.com/tvoellm/archive/2008/06/05/negative-ping-times-in-windows-vm-s-whats-up.aspx

http://forums.citrix.com/thread.jspa?forumID=75&threadID=93813&tstart=60

-Brent

For those who are not aware Internet Explorer has a security feature that by default does NOT allow non-secure content (i.e. loaded on HTTP rather than HTTPS) to be displayed on a page that is loaded securely via HTTPS.  It is a good feature because after all any website that is running securely should all be secure with not just bits and pieces that are not secure.  However I ran into a problem with our SharePoint site where someone had linked a non-HTTPS RSS feed to be displayed on a site and caused the below error message to appear every time:

I finally looked into how it can be disabled and found a couple of solutions but it is important that you judge the value of each method versus the security you may be giving up.

1. Disable this error message all together (Least Secure)
2. Utilize IE’s Security Settings to disable the warning for sites you trust or sites on your intranet. (My Choice)

So here’s how to make the changes:

Regardless of Option:

1. In Internet Explorer click “Tools”.
2. Click “Internet Options”.
3. Click the tab titled “Security”.

For Option 1:

1. Ensure the icon titled “Internet” is selected.
2. Click the “Custom Level” button.
3. Scroll about half way down to the section titled “Miscellaneous”.
4. Find the setting titled “Display mixed content”.
5. Set the setting to “Enable” (It should be set to “prompt”).
6. Click “OK” twice and restart IE, problem should be resolved.

For Option 2:

1. I would select either the “Intranet” or “Trusted Sites” icons.
   1. For more information regarding the different zones check out: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/174360
2. For our example we used the Intranet zone so only our internal systems would ignore non secure calls
   1. NOTE: If you call an outside source like RSS you may end up making these changes for both the Intranet and Trusted Sites zones so that you can add your “trusted” RSS feed to your intranet sites.  Then all you have to do is add sites to your trusted sites zone one at a time when you find a new one that is not currently in the list
3. Click the “Custom Level” button.
4. Scroll about half way down to the section titled “Miscellaneous”.
5. Find the setting titled “Display mixed content”.
6. Set the setting to “Enable” (It should be set to “prompt”).
7. Click “OK” twice and restart IE, problem should be resolved.

So the only other problem this causes, specifically in a business environment where there may be hundreds of computers to make this change.  Luckily Group Policy even in Server 2003 supports setting the intranet zones, and the sites for each.

Good Luck!

-Brent

I recently was tasked with a simple project to export the contents of an SVN repository on a off-site server so we could backup a repository in the event the SVN Server died.  The off-site server runs Windows and I figured I could easily do this using the svn export command that you can research in the SVN Book.  The problem was finding a svn command line tool that could be run as a scheduled task.  Finding this tool was not an easy feat.  You can utilize the SVN components and executables that come with TortoiseSVN however this is not very clean for just a command line tool.  I eventually found a free download from SlikSvn that has both 32 and 64 bit components.  That fit the bill it offered a good command line interface as well as helpful help docs as well.  It offers not just the typical svn commands but can handle the more administrative commands even svnsync between two different SVN servers.  Either way a good find for anyone who needs command line access only for Windows machines.  Link is below:

SlikSvn Downloads

Enjoy!

-Brent

There is nothing more “fun” than system or data recovery.  The only hard drive I currently have in my server is slowing down and appears to be dying so I went ahead and purchased three new Western Digital Caviars from NewEgg and loaded them into the Chassis.  The box happens to have an NVIDIA (Evga) mainboard which also has a RAID controller unit built in, so I decided to use it for RAID5 purposes, which according to Microsoft is the best RAID configuration for Hyper-V support and speed.  However, once I realized that some of my important Virtual Machines were not exported it quickly became a struggle because I have never had to perform a Hyper-V data recovery procedure with less than optimal conditions.  I luckily found this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/robertvi/archive/2008/08/26/howto-recover-snapshots.aspx that explained how you can merge the Hyper-V differencing disks back together to create a single VHD file that Hyper-V can load up.  It was very helpful and probably saved me hours of internet scouring.

To Add Some More Info:

My single server at home is actual just a VM Host that then runs multiple other machines for DNS, DC, TS Gateway, etc.  It also serves up files to users as well.  The problem is that Hyper-V allows you to create “snapshots” so you can easily revert changes back as long as your Hyper-V machine is functioning correctly.  You can have multiple layers of snapshots in different trees as well.  I had taken a few snapshots during my installation process of each machine in the event something went wrong I could just revert it back.  However when you create a new VM in Hyper-V it requires that you have a single VHD file or that you create a new VHD file.  So my problem arose when I no longer was able to login to the old Hyper-V machine and either export or merge all of my Snapshots down to a single set of files or file.  Using the article above along with the first comment/response it is very easy to use Hyper-V’s Virtual Disk Management tools to merge the snapshots down even without the virtual machine currently being loaded by the system.

-Brent

This “How To” is based on my research and simple testing and is meant to assist in the process of changing the URL of a MOSS 07 installation.  I don’t have a complex setup so it may not work for all of you but it should help:

My Scenario:

1. We have a single Front-End Web Server and a single Back-End Database Server, each is a separate physical box
2. We have two Web Applications, one for the SharePoint Central Admin Site, the other for our SharePoint Installation
3. Our Shared Services Provider resides inside our primary SharePoint installation (A small installation didn’t require separate applications)

The Dilemma:

1. We used an internal DNS (Host Header) value to setup the Web Application
2. We now want to expose the web application to the internet and utilize SSL

The Fix (Adapted from Faraz Khan’s Post):

1. Open the Central Administration Site
2. Click on the “Operations” tab
3. Under “Global Configuration” click “Alternate Access Mappings”
4. Select “Edit Public URLs”
5. Make sure to select the correct web application from the “Alternate Access Mapping Collection” drop down
6. Change the “Default” URL to point to the new domain name
7. Click Save
8. SharePoint will now do some work to update links and everything else to point to the new location, however it does not seem to update the IIS Host Headers.
9. Open the IIS Manager
10. Edit the Bindings for the Web Application to use the new Host Header
11. If it makes you feel better restart IIS

I found that this solution will correct the primary web application but has no effect on the shared services provider, when you access a My Site in MOSS it will still use the old URL.  Once I have completed testing on that portion of the change I will post an update here.

-Brent

So many times the mention of a Google datacenter is met with secrecy.  If you search the web you may find some possible locations of the data centers, however finding them is not easy, and knowing anything about them is an even deeper secret.  However maybe with the whole new notion of transparency Google is jumping on board.  Google has released a video tour of one of their datacenters.  What makes this more interesting than others is that servers are inside of racks, however racks are contained in movable shipping containers.  Take a look:

-Brent