Absoblogginlutely!

Hyper-V has been released.

By Andy on Thursday, June 26, 2008

If you can’t wait 12 days for it to be released on Windows update, and lets face it, if you are running Windows 2008 you are likely to be an early adopter and keen to get your hands on the final product – you can download it from the Microsoft’s Hyper-v download page. I’d also recommend reading the description of Hyper-V release version- kb950050

When I installed it I shut down all my virtual machines and then ran the install program. You will need to reboot your host windows2008 server. Upon reboot your saved states will have been removed (this is in the readme). When the virtual machines are fired up they will be running the RTM version. Windows will detect new hardware, and as before you just cancel this routine and then go to Action, Insert Integration Services Setup Disk, let the installation proceed and then reboot the virtual machine (again). After this reboot the screen gets reset to 640*480 so this needs to be reset again.

One of the nice things for me is the support of XPsp2 as a guest OS. Previously this worked but there wasn’t an integration service disk available which meant that the keyboard/mouse integration wasn’t as good and I had to keep pressing ctrl alt and the left arrow to release the mouse which gets a pain as it didn’t work on my synergy kvm (I had to use the real keyboard).

The xp upgrade was a bit harder for me. I’d recommend copying the Integration disk to the desktop and then capturing your xpcd – I didn’t and had several disk swaps required – I had to unblock add/remove programs (I’m not sure why it was blocked – but delete HKLM \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \Policies \Uninstall \NoAddRemovePrograms fixed that. I was then able to remove the virtual machine additions and reboot.Then I had to upgrade the HAL which meant putting the xp disk in the drive and rebooting, then inserting the Integration Services disk (switching back to xp disk mid way for hidusb.sys for the mouse) and then a final reboot.

Phew – after all that I’m up and running with Hyper-V RTM, 1 client XPsp2, 1 W2k3 DC and 1 w2k3 SSE server. My next project is probably going to be Windows Deployment Services

MovableType

Temper rebuilds.

By Andy on Saturday, June 21, 2008

Well Temper seems to help look at which files are getting rebuilt and has cut my rebuild time in half (still a long way to go). Looking at the activity log I have gone from 197 seconds and 34 entries in the activity log down to 108 seconds and 22 entries in the log – each rebuild was for an edit of the previous post.
I took out the rebuild of my style sheets, mt.js and the monthly by author and monthly by category archives as the first two are basically static, I only have one author on this blog – me, and the monthly by category is not really important as I don’t have that many entries per category.
What I still don’t understand is why I have 7 entry listings and 5 category archives for the previous post as it was only posted under 1 category (although it did have a couple of keywords in it – I can’t remember how many though). This entry has no keywords and only one category.

MovableType

MT security patch and rebuild times.

By Andy on Saturday, June 21, 2008

This entry mainly serves as a test for the Temper plugin that should hopefully tell me why it takes about 3 minutes to post an entry on this blog when the save button is pressed. I’ve been playing around with WordPress and it is *so* much faster and efficient than this version of MT. Speaking of which there is a security patch that is available to fix a XSS flaw. Hopefully all the MT users have already seen this in a news feed or in the management console.

Ghost Hyper-V Microsoft Virtual PC

Teched hands on lab – behind the scenes.

By Andy on Tuesday, June 17, 2008

A 3 or 4 minute video on the infrastructure behind the 900 machines used to build the hands on labs at TechEd. It was interesting to see that most of the main servers were all virtual servers and that the virtual images stored on the lab pc’s themselves were deployed using Ghost but the actual OS of the desktop was deployed using Windows Deployment Services (WDS). I’ve never been to TechEd but hope to go one day but it makes me wonder what they used to do before virtual machines existed?

Blogging

I’m going to PodCamp Ohio.

By Andy on Saturday, June 14, 2008

Mike Mcbride tipped me off about PodCamp Ohio – a free meet up in two weeks (6/28/08) for bloggers and podcasters. This is just down the road from me so I’m going to go. They are still in the planning stages but it sounds like it will be pretty good. Registration is requested so if you are planning to go then register and drop me a line. I’m going to try and get a tshirt made up pimping the blog, hopefully I’ll get a design done today and it’ll arrive by then.

Blogging

I’m going to PodCamp Ohio.

By Andy on Saturday, June 14, 2008

Hyper-V Microsoft SystemCenterEssentials Windows 2008

System Center Essentials finally installed.

By Andy on Tuesday, June 10, 2008

I finally managed to get the System Center Essentials VHD working on my windows2008 server this evening. I tried to install it two nights ago but after the installation process got to the Reporting services, it would then remove everything again. Looking through the log files (%temp%\scesetup0.log) I found the error “current security context is not associated with an active directory domain or forest” which didn’t help one iota. The server was part of the domain, I was successfully logged in and therefore this shouldn’t have been a problem. There was very little information about this in google searches, most of them pointing to .net programming issues.
Trying to reinstall the software would give me different results – one time telling me that I needed to install the xml6 software and another time telling me that the installation had completed successfully but the log files disagreed!
In the end I deleted the vhd file, extracted it again and did the following.
Created a new machine in Hyper-V. Pointing to the extracted vhd, 1gb memory, nic on the external network, everything else was defaults (apart from the file locations).
Start the virtual machine. Log in and remove the virtual machine additions. Reboot.
Cancel the new hardware has been detected, approve the new Hal detection, reboot.
Log in, install Integration services, reboot.
Run Windows Updates (until no more updates found) and update everything (apart from remote desktop 6 client, silverlight) reboot. Make sure that all the service packs for the .net frameworks are installed.
Change the ip address of the dns server to be my existing domain controller, join the domain, reboot.
Take a snapshot of the virtual machine so I can roll back if required.
Run setup program, wait, wait and wait some more – success!
I’m prettty sure that the issue was due to not updating the .net frameworks and then trying to install the software. The first installation left remnants behind that then confused subsequent installation attempts.
Update Now I find that there is a System Center Essentials 2007 sp1 eval software that would probably have been better (although this is just SCE not a vhd). There is also a upgrade to SSCsp1 but I think this only works on retail or licenced versions – not eval ones (I’ll find out tomorrow as it’s too late to start on this now).
Update2 The upgrade to SSCsp1 does work and is a smaller download.

AntiVirus Symantec Virus Work

Symantec have a time machine!

By Andy on Tuesday, June 3, 2008

I logged a ticket with Symantec today as I needed to download Maintenance Release 7 for their corporate edition 10.1 yet their fileconnect website only gave me version 11 (which is so unstable we refuse to install it). 2 hours later I got an email from their support site that started “We have been trying to reach you in the last few days to assist you with the issue regarding Symantec Antivirus but unfortunately we have not been able to do so.”
I guess they’ve invented a time machine in order to try and beat their really long wait times on hold for support…..either that or I forgot that I logged a ticket several days ago and they’ve finally got round to dealing with it!
Anyway, they’ve given me a new serial number to log into the website with so I can download the older version. I’m not sure if it’s an inplace upgrade (I hope so) rather than a removal and reinstall again – if its the removal and reinstall that means *another* 3 or 4 hours to remove, reboot, install and then fix the issues of the client software breaking other software again.
I guess I *really* need to get some time to investigate nod32 network deployments – anyone had any experience with this?

Exams Microsoft Work

70-297 complete and I’m an MCSE!

By Andy on Friday, May 30, 2008

I took the 70-297 test this afternoon. It’s a lot different and a lot harder than the other tests due to the amount of information that you need to digest and analyze (and in some cases assume). I passed with a score of 781. It could have been higher, but the main thing is that I passed and I now obtain my MCSE accreditation. This month has been very busy trying to study most nights for these tests – this was my third one this month and so for the next week or so I’m not going to be doing any overtime – I’m looking forward to being able to relax, watch some films and play rockband. Hopefully I’ll also be able to post some more stuff to the blogs now too.

Exams Microsoft Work

70-297 complete and I’m an MCSE!

By Andy on Friday, May 30, 2008