I’ve been wanting to use the group policy preferences at a couple of sites but been unable to due to the fact that you need to have a Vista or Windows 2008 server in the domain. I knew that one or the other was required, but I was kind of hoping that you could get away with using a Vista machine not on the domain to edit the group policy settings. Much like you can use “connect to” in eventvwr and other mmc consoles I was hoping this feature would be available so I could take my consultants laptop and edit various group policy preferences at some of my sites without needing a domain joined pc. Alas, this is not to be – in fact gpmc is not even available unless you are joined to the domain.
Here’s hoping that some enterprising company will come up with an application that will enable you to deploy group policy preferences without Vista or Windows 2008.
My Mark all as read button was missing on the laptop in google reader this morning, and some other things didn’t look quite right (the google reader logo at the top left was missing for example). I tried messing around with greasemonkey and disabling the better greader extension and narrowed it down to something within greader. I then checked the skins option and noticed that it was setup to use the optimized theme. I switched the skin to none, pressed F5 to refresh and all my buttons reappeared and the other sections of the screen didn’t disappear either. Now I can mark my folders as read again and get my count back down to a reasonable number.
Took the exam this morning – I would say this is probably one of the easier exams, especially if you are familiar with the product (well duh!) A lot of the questions have keywords in them which means that instantly you know the answer has to be this particular one. Hard to explain, but in some exams you narrow down to two possibles and then you have to reread to get the correct one – in this case, keywords in the question instantly narrowed down to 1.
The annoying/scary bit is that it’s really 3 short exams in one and your worst score counts – if you fail one section you fail the lot. Fortunately I got 100% in the first two and 970 in the last one – I think I got one question wrong. Out of all the questions there were only 3 questions I wasn’t sure about – the others I knew were correct.
I booked my 70-649 exam last night for next Monday which gives me the weekend to do any last minute prep work and testing. I finished my 973 pages of reading the Syngress book – The Real MCTS/MCITP Exam 70-649 Prep Kit: by Brian Posey
Anyway, the exam is booked with the second chance offer .and if I pass I’ll be able to give the book a glowing review 😉
This exam is pretty good in that it is needed to upgrade my MCSE qualification to the 2008 equivalent but also gives me 3 MCTS qualifications,
In my newly installed exchange2007 site I also had an exchange2003 server that handles all the incoming/outgoing mail apart from the test user that I had moved to the 2007 server. Unfortunately I could not send mail to the 2007 user but I could receive mail from this user. T here was a lot of postings on the internet and various forums for solutions for a similar problem but normally in the opposite direction.
After a post at petri (2nd posting down) I deleted my smarthost setting on the virtual server on the 2003 machine and mail started flowing. Now I can progress in my mail migration. Many thanks to Andy at Petri for the answer on this one.
Annoyingly this did come up in the best practise analyzer, but only as a warning. As the smarthost had been working I left it alone – I really should have known better.
In my newly installed exchange2007 site I also had an exchange2003 server that handles all the incoming/outgoing mail apart from the test user that I had moved to the 2007 server. Unfortunately I could not send mail to the 2007 user but I could receive mail from this user. T here was a lot of postings on the internet and various forums for solutions for a similar problem but normally in the opposite direction.
After a post at petri (2nd posting down) I deleted my smarthost setting on the virtual server on the 2003 machine and mail started flowing. Now I can progress in my mail migration. Many thanks to Andy at Petri for the answer on this one.
Annoyingly this did come up in the best practise analyzer, but only as a warning. As the smarthost had been working I left it alone – I really should have known better.
Skitch is a great screenshot capturing program for the mac that also has integration with flickr (and skitch.com) to upload the images after they have been taken. Extra features such as watermarking, highlighting of areas of the screen, writing and drawing on the picture with the edits being individual items or layers and therefore movable, make this a very feature rich capturing program. I’m very impressed with it so far in my limited mac experience. My skitch site is at skitch.com/absoblogginlutely. The one photo I have uploaded (and to flickr too) is a picture of some very bad redacting by the army
Kristen finally blogged something last night and I went to put a comment on it this morning only to find her comments don’t work anymore. I did a quick comparison between this blog and hers only to find that her templates are completely different. I tried to copy the entry template for this blog over to hers and publish but it uses includes so failed. I think this is because I had to drop the old MovableType templates to get this blog to work and her blog has the old MT templates still.
I know it is going to be quicker moving her to WordPress than trying to fix the template so I may end up doing this – especially as this blog will also move to WordPress soon – I started the migration Wednesday night and it worked fairly well – some entries were lost in the move but they were fairly old so I’m not too bothered. It will take time to test and theme the site so don’t expect a drastic change too soon – especially as I have work revision to do!!
There are some really good (technical) webcasts from TechEd Europe online and I’ve just watched The case of the Unexplained – a very interesting and useful presentation by Mark Russinovich of Microsoft/Sysinternals on analyzing dump files, processes and hanging systems. I’m sure this will come in very handy. One of the tips I learnt was that you can actually use process explorer as a taskmgr replacement by going to options/replace task manager (or restore if you want to put it back again)
A highly recommended presentation if you do any troubleshooting of user desktops (or servers). Note it is pretty long – 74 minutes, and as it is in silverlight I don’t think it’s possible to download for offline viewing and the navigation to skip to a certain part of the clip sucks big time. There is no slider so you have to click randomly in a grey bar (that obscures part of the screen) to guess where you will end up.
There are some really good (technical) webcasts from TechEd Europe online and I’ve just watched The case of the Unexplained – a very interestng and useful presentation by Mark Russinovich of Microsoft/Sysinternals on analyzing dump files, processes and hanging systems. I’m sure this will come in very handy. One of the tips I learnt was that you can actually use process explorer as a taskmgr replacement by going to options/replace task manager (or restore if you want to put it back again)
A highly recommended presentation if you do any troubleshooting of user desktops (or servers). Note it is pretty long – 74 minutes, and as it is in silverlight I don’t think it’s possible to download for offline viewing and the navigation to skip to a certain part of the clip sucks big time. There is no slider so you have to click randomly in a grey bar (that obscures part of the screen) to guess where you will end up.