Comments and feedback welcome.

Introduction

Standardising on an Environment Manager configuration across various organisations or implementations is a difficult challenge; however there are many components of a Windows desktop that are common across all deployments.

An Environment Manager Baseline Configuration

The Environment Manager Baseline configuration is an example configuration that can be used as a starting point for implementing Environment Manager to replace roaming profiles. In addition it includes some examples of what you can achieve with Environment Manager policy actions.

The Configuration in Detail

The configuration intended as a starting point for your own environment, whether you are using Personalization Server or not. The idea being that you can configure roaming with nothing more than the EM agent, the config and a file share.

Once you start moving management of personalization from EM policy to Personalization Server, some nodes (or conditions and actions) may not be suitable and should be removed or disabled where Personalization Server is managing the same applications.

The configuration includes examples for roaming user personalization by explicitly choosing specific portions of the user profile to roam. It also includes examples of managing applications by using the Process Started and Network Connected triggers.

Downloads

Each download is a ZIP file containing the configuration and documentation to help explain the config in more detail.

Current version

New! December 2011, updated configuration version 3.1.

EM Baseline Configuration 3.1 for AppSense Environment Manager 8.1+

Change log:

• Added create folder actions on application and Desktop Settings export as a workaround for when the export fails to complete. Child actions of the delete folder action don’t fire if the delete folder action fails
• Added Pin/Unpin to Taskbar/Start Menu on first logon. See reusable node ‘Desktop Settings policy actions’
• Added create %LOCALAPPDATA% variable if user logs onto Windows XP / Windows Server 2003
• Swapped User Process actions using RegEx queries back to individual processes – Office 2010 etc. RegEx queries don’t appear to be working in every scenario
• Added roaming for Lync 2010
• Added Office 2007 and Office 2003 examples for App-V delivery
• Disabled example nodes (except above)
• Added create folder action: %PROFILE_CACHE% before copy of %PROFILE_SOURCE%\COMPUTER.TXT
• Disabled Reusable Condition ‘If Laptop (WMI)’ because it’s not currently used in the config
• Updated Notes on various action and conditions

Previous versions

EM Baseline Configuration 3.0 for AppSense Environment Manager 8.1+

Note: Version 3.0 or 3.1 are not compatible with EM 8.0, use version 2.1 below:

EM Baseline Configuration 2.1 for AppSense Environment Manager 8.0

AppSense Environment Manager 8 Baseline Configuration is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Microsoft delivered a webcast recently, entitled Product Activation in Development Environments, which discusses Windows Product Activation for development and test environments. Although aimed at developers using an MSDN subscription (IT Pros don’t have to worry about licensing and product activation?) the concepts discussed apply to TechNet subscriptions as well.

A companion white paper, Windows Activation in Development and Test Environments, can be viewed on TechNet or downloaded as a Word document. The webcast and white paper go into plenty of detail about production activation, different product key types and how to manage product activation, but they are focused on corporate development and test environments. If you have a personal TechNet subscription for your own testing, your options are limited in comparison.

What do you get with a TechNet subscription?

Quite a lot actually. If you don’t already have a TechNet Plus subscription you should read about it here (read about MSDN subscriptions here – MSDN gives you much more than TechNet, but with a price to match).

However it is interesting to discuss what you don’t get with a TechNet or MSDN subscription, and that is the activation feature that would make activation simplest – Key Management Service (KMS) keys. You do get retail and MAK (Multiple Activation Key) keys. This means that the number of activations that you are entitled to are finite. What I wasn’t aware of is what the number of activations is for each product.

Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 products must all be activated using Volume Activation (VA) 2.0 product keys. TechNet provides MAK keys for Windows Server and Enterprise editions of Windows 7. Retail keys are provided for all other editions and other VA 2.0 products.

In the case of Windows Server 2008 R2 (Standard and Enterprise) and Windows 7 Enterprise, the number of activations is 500 for each. Windows Server 2008 MAK keys also provide for 500 activations, but Windows Vista Enterprise gets only 10. At this stage, I only have access to Retail keys for Office Professional Plus 2010, but I do get 10 activations for each version (totalling 30) of Visio and Project 2010 (Standard, Professional and Premium). Perhaps more keys for Office 2010 are forthcoming.

Strategies for managing production activations

TechNet and MSDN subscriptions are not entitled to KMS keys, so you will have to use at least some of those MAK activations. In my own test environment, I have activated my Hyper-V host, a domain controller and a server used for hosting databases and a couple of other services. I am now going to activate almost all of my virtual machines that I intend on keeping for any extended period of time.

To enable reuse of activations in the event of redeploying Windows to a virtual machine, there are a couple of steps you should follow:

1. Assign virtual machines by operating system, i.e. virtual machines should run Windows Server or Windows client operating systems
2. Don’t delete your virtual machines (VHDs or VMDKs are OK to delete), instead reuse them

Reinstalling the same version and edition of Windows using the same product key on a machine should not count against your total activation account.

Update: OK, my information in regards to MAK keys wasn’t exactly correct. The TechNet site doesn’t make it exactly clear as to what happens specifically with keys provided to subscribers; however it’s worth reading this page: Frequently Asked Questions About Volume License Keys for lot’s of good information about activation. I was able to speak with TechNet technical support to get some answers on product activation, so I’ll summarise here:

• MAK keys provide a set number of activations (in the case of the newer products, TechNet subscribers get 500 activations). This number is not directly related to what you are licensed to install – it’s just a limit on the number of activations per key.
• Activations of MAK keys will count against the total activations whether you are reinstalling on the same hardware or not. The TechNet representative alluded to a current (as at May 2010) issue with activations in virtual environments. I couldn’t get more information on that but I don’t believe that this impacts MAK activations anyway.
• However: if you the VAMT to proxy activate your machines, those machines will use the same activation if you reload and proxy reactivate on the same hardware. When proxy activating you will must store the proxy activation information – if you loose that, you will lose the activations that you have completed.
• MAK keys provided in TechNet (and MSDN subscriptions) are the same as MAK keys provided to Volume License customers. So the same thing applied to where-ever you are using MAK keys.
• Retail keys (like those provided for Office 2010) should reactivate on the same hardware and not count against your total number of activations.
• The good news is that if you run out of activations for a particular MAK key or set of MAK keys, you can contact Microsoft to increase the number of activations as long as you are using those keys for installing products for testing purposes and not production. If you need to increase your activation counts just contact your TechNet Regional Service Centre and they’ll be happy to help.

If you would prefer not to activate Windows, you can do the following:

• Rearm Windows every 30 days, up to 3 times, to extend the pre-activation period to 120 days with the SLMGR –rearm command.
• Create unattended deployments using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (or even SCCM) so that you can redeploy Windows to those test machines once the pre-activation period is up. If you can separate the data from the machine, then reinstalling Windows shouldn’t be that much of an issue.

Knowing that I have 500 activations for most of the products that are important to me, then perhaps activation isn’t that much of an issue. I am also fairly certain that when my current subscription expires on Wednesday and my new subscription kicks in, I will get a new set of keys – far more machines than I could get running on a single hypervisor with 12 GB of RAM.

Using the VAMT to track activations and product keys

The Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) 2.0 is provided to manage keys and you can use this with TechNet, MSDN or Volume License keys to keep track of machine and key status.

The tool itself is very simple. In the example screenshot below, I have imported a list of machines from Active Directory and this shows the status of machines that I have scanned:

Once machines are imported, I can select a machine or a group of machines and update their status to view the installed products (Windows and Office 2010 will be reported). Remote machines must be powered up to gather their status, unfortunately this information isn’t stored in AD and I can’t scan powered down virtual machines. Product keys can be installed and activated on remote machines directly from the VAMT console.

By importing product keys into the VAMT, you can track the number of activations for MAK and KMS keys (it doesn’t report on Retail keys). This will help you discover the total number of activations you have for each product and keep track of the number of actual activations.

For more information on VAMT and how to use it to management production activation in your environment, see the following links:

• Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) 2.0
• Product Activation Using VAMT 2.0
• Manage Activation Using VAMT 2.0
• Manage Product Keys Using VAMT 2.0
• Activation in Disconnected Environments Using VAMT 2.0
• Reporting Activation Information Using VAMT 2.0

It is important to note that even if your TechNet or MSDN subscription expires you should still have access to your keys, and can activate those that you might have saved. It is worth obtaining all of the keys that you are entitled to and exporting them from TechNet well before your subscription expires.

For complete information on Volume Activation, your first port of call should be the Windows Volume Activation site on TechNet.

Managing product activation with a TechNet subscription (and MSDN too) is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I find subscribing to feeds at the Citrix Blogs site just a little vexing. I could just be doing it all wrong, however there is essentially what amounts to a single RSS feed delivered by the site. The concept of a feed for each Citrite or product blog doesn’t appear to exist.

You do have the opportunity to subscribe feeds such as the XenDesktop feed and the XenApp feed, but these aren’t really separate feeds, they are feeds for each tag (i.e. the XenDesktop and the XenApp tags). Because many posts are tagged with multiple tags (and quite often a tag unrelated to the topic), you’ll end up many repeated entries in your feed reader. Like this:

As you can see it can get a little over the top at times.

Thankfully, FeedDemon 3.1 has come to my rescue with Content Filters. Now I can subscribe to the single Citrix Blogs feed and just filter out the posts that don’t interest me. Here you can see that I’m filtering out posts about Branch Repeater and NetScaler which I don’t do anything with.

Although at this time, this feature isn’t supported in Google Reader or NetNewsWire, applied to the Citrix feed I end up with something much more manageable. Thank-you Mr Bradbury you’ve made my day. .

Right, so now I’m off to do that same with the Ars Technica and Engadget feeds – maybe I can filter out some of the iPad hype for a couple of days.

How I’m using FeedDemon 3.1 to make sense of the Citrix Community Blog feed is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

That’s 5.99 petabytes – I’m probably not going to see that much storage space in a desktop machine for a few years. Although I’m not sure why there is a ‘Try Again’ button on this dialog box, maybe it’s expecting me to wait for Western Digital’s new line of  10PB VelociRaptors.

Borrowing from the late Roy Scheider – “We’re gonna need a bigger hard drive.”

We’re gonna need a bigger hard drive is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Here’s a few articles that I’ve been reading recently and I thought it might be worthwhile sharing them:

Kevin Reeuwijk has an article on integrating App-V 4.5 with SCCM 2007 R2, but shows us how to get the best of both worlds - How to integrate App-V with SCCM without losing the features you care about.

Mark Wilson takes aim at those who didn’t patch and were hit by Conficker (hopefully that wasn’t you) - It’s time to take patch management seriously. However, I’m certain history will repeat itself in a few years.

One of my favourite sites, Ars Technica, is always able to take a level-headed approach when others stoop to senstionalism. This first article, Paradigms lost: The Windows 7 Taskbar versus the OS X Dock, shoots the Microsoft copies Apple argument in the foot. Whilst this article, Oh, the humanity: Windows 7′s draconian DRM?, shows why Slashdot is a waste of time.

Were I German, I would want to be working for sepago.  These two articles are great - Mandatory Profiles – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Preserving Windows Explorer Folder Views in Roaming Profiles.

And finally there’s this article by Mr. LUA – Aaron Magosis:  FAQ: Why can’t I bypass the UAC prompt?.

Sunday Link Love is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

• Windows Clippings
• Paint.NET
• PNGOUT

Now I can’t claim that I discovered these tools myself and they’ve been covered elsewhere probably more eloquently, but I think they’re worth pointing out again. Of course, what works for me might not work for you, but I use these tools daily and would have a hard time getting by without them.

Taking Screen Shots with Window Clippings

If you’re still using the Print Screen button or the Snipping tool in Windows Vista, I recommend taking a look at Window Clippings instead. There’s a lot to like about Window Clippings:

• It comes as a single executable (32-bit and 64-bit), no installation required
• It captures the window shadow in Windows Vista for better looking screen shots
• It has a simple intuitive interface
• It’s integrated nicely with Windows Vista (uses the correct fonts, UI paradigms etc)
• It works well with OneNote and Paint.NET
• It’s licensed to you, not for each machine you want to run it on

Window Clippings gives me great screen shots like this:

I could also capture multiple windows, parent windows, or even menus. I loved it so much I even bought a license, which I think brings the number of software products I own licenses for to three.

Editing Screen Shots with Paint.NET

I use Paint.NET to make edits to any of my images. Since Windows Clippings can output directly to Paint.NET, I can take a screen shot and immediately start editing it in Paint.NET. I also use this tool for creating the icons I place in some posts. So whilst it’s not the most full featured graphic editing tool, it does everything I need.

There’s a lot to like about Paint.NET too:

• It’s completely free, although you are encouraged to donate to help development
• It’s actively developed and has a small footprint
• It’s integrated nicely with Windows Vista (uses the correct fonts, dialog boxes, UI paradigms etc)
• It has all the features required for editing screen shots (and more) without resorting to pirating Photoshop
• It has an active forum with many people writing plug-ins for it

Here’s Paint.NET editing the previous screen shot:

Given that Paint.NET is maintained by a bunch of Microsoft devs, it would be great to see this or a derivative in Windows 7.

Optimising Screen Shots with PNGOUT

PNG is my file type of choice for screen shots because it looks great and still manages to keep files sizes small. But as Jeff Atwood points out, you can use PNGOUT to squeeze the file sizes down further. In the screen shot below you can see the size difference between the before and after optimisation on the Computer screen shot above.

The file has been reduce to 77% of the original size. Great for reducing my bandwidth requirements, but also excellent for keep my documents smaller too. You can read more about using PNGOUT here.

Although PNGOUT is a command line tool, you can make life easier by adding a shortcut to your Send To menu or using a GUI wrapper like PNGGauntlet.

Wrapping Up

So that’s what I use and you can’t argue with great results – don’t settle for second rate screen shots. I’ll leave you with a few more pointers:

• Please spare us (or maybe just me) from that awful shadow Windows Live Writer adds to images. It’s just plain ugly.
• Always use the default Windows themes when creating screen shots for documentation. There’s a good chance your audience may not recognise that custom theme as anything close to what they’re seeing on their own machine.
• Apparently you should disable ClearType when taking screen shots for documentation. I haven’t found this to be an issue yet, but then I don’t write for a magazine.

Better Screen Shots For Documentation And Blogging is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

In this manual, they still talk about “Windows Server virtualization (wsv)” even though wsv was already renamed to Hyper-V in November. It seems as if even Microsoft’s own employees can’t keep up with the pace by which their marketing renames their products. Even worse is that this paper doesn’t mention that Hyper-V is still in beta. I wonder if the author of this paper was aware of this fact. Of course, the reader is also kept in the dark that there meanwhile is an update of Hyper-V which has to be downloaded separately.

I subscribe to Michael’s blog and enjoy reading what he’s got to say, but I think in this case he’s missing the big picture. The Step-by-Step “library” contains a list of 24 documents, with the earliest document dated May 2007. Windows Server 2008 was feature complete by Beta 3 in April 2007. This means that, for the most part, these documents will applicable to the final release of Windows 2008.

The list has been updated regularly too. I haven’t been keeping an exact count, but the guides have been through at least 6 updates so far this year, with the latest being yesterday. 7 days since the previous update. I presume that documentation like this takes considerable man hours to create and review and they can’t possible be considered complete until the product is final. If the current release pace keeps up we should see these documents finalised soon.

I like these document because they focus on a particular feature or scenario and help you get a test environment up and running a quickly as possible. When Windows Server 2003 was launched, we didn’t have anything quite like this. I encourage you to check them out as they should assist in fast tracking your understanding of Windows Server 2008. This is the current list of guides:

• Creating and Deploying Active Directory Rights Management Services Templates Step-by-Step Guide
• Deploying Active Directory Rights Management Services in an Extranet Step-by-Step Guide
• Deploying Active Directory Rights Management Services with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Step-By-Step Guide
• Deploying SSTP Remote Access Step by Step Guide
• Server Manager Scenarios Step-by-Step Guide
• Server Core Installation Option of Windows Server 2008 Step-By-Step Guide
• Step by Step Guide to Customizing TS Web Access by Using Windows SharePoint Services
• Step-by-Step Guide for Configuring a Two-Node File Server Failover Cluster in Windows Server 2008
• Step-by-Step Guide for Configuring a Two-Node Print Server Failover Cluster in Windows Server 2008
• Step-by-Step Guide for File Server Resource Manager in Windows Server 2008
• Step-by-Step Guide for Storage Manager for SANs in Windows Server 2008
• Step-by-Step Guide to Deploying Policies for Windows Firewall with Advanced Security
• Step-by-Step Guide for Configuring Network Load Balancing with Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008
• Step-by-Step Guide for Windows Deployment Services in Windows Server 2008
• Using Identity Federation with Active Directory Rights Management Services Step-by-Step Guide
• Windows Firewall with Advanced Security Design Guide
• Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Certificate Services Step-By-Step Guide
• Windows Server 2008 Foundation Network Guide
• Windows Server 2008 Step-by-Step Guide for DNS in Small Networks
• Windows Server 2008 TS Gateway Server Step-By-Step Setup Guide
• Windows  Server Active Directory Rights Management Services Step-by-Step Guide
• Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services RemoteApp Step-by-Step Guide
• Windows Server 2008 TS Licensing Step-By-Step Setup Guide
• Windows Server 2008 TS Session Broker Load Balancing Step-By-Step Guide

If you can’t get enough of Step-by-Step guides, there’s even more:

• Step-by-Step Guide: Demonstrate NAP 802.1X Enforcement in a Test Lab
• Step-by-Step Guide: Demonstrate NAP VPN Enforcement in a Test Lab
• Step-by-Step Guide: Demonstrate NAP IPsec Enforcement in a Test Lab
• Step-by-Step Guide: Demonstrate NAP DHCP Enforcement in a Test Lab
• Windows Vista Step-by-Step Guides for IT Professionals

In Defence Of The Windows Server 2008 Step-by-Step Guides is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I have been an IT consultant to the federal government for the past 13 years. I am a generalist who has done some application development and a lot of scripting, AD design, network management and systems implementation.

Here are some of my favourite posts:

• UAC: Local Admin vs. Domain Admin
• Vista’s support for multiple languages
• Folder Redirection: Duplicate User Files Folders
• User Files Folders: What’s with all these extra folders?
• Folder Redirection: Not to the user’s home directory
• Folder Redirection: Amateur Magician

So, in the words of Molly Meldrum – “do ya’self a favour” and check this one out.

Blog Plug: Vista Vitals is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

My subscription expired last Friday so I’ve immediately lost access to my products keys. I was a bit disappointed to not receive notification of the impending expiration, but I was chuffed to see that the product keys would still activate. So now while I wait for my renewal to come through, it would have been great to have access to those keys offline to continue setting up my test environment.

My advice is then, if you have TechNet Plus export those product keys to a local file and keep an eye on when your subscription ends. Don’t get caught out.

Export Your Product Keys Before Your TechNet Subscription Expires is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The page cannot be displayed

The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings…

Internet Explorer 6.0 does not enable TLS support by default, so if you are seeing this you’ll need to enable TLS in Internet Options. It might then be time to upgrade your browser too.

“Page Cannot Be Displayed” in McAfee ePO? is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Update [November 2011]: Adobe has released Flash Player 11 in both 32-bit and 64-bit packages. The links below will only  provide you with Flash Player 10. To obtain the installers for Flash Player 11, see the following articles:

• Flash Player enterprise deployment
• Distribute Adobe Flash Player

——————

Listed here are the links for the latest installers for the Adobe Flash and Shockwave Players. Each link will always result in the latest version of each player.

Adobe Flash Player

• Flash Player 10 for Internet Explorer MSI Installer
• Flash Player 10 for Internet Explorer EXE Installer
• Flash Player 10 for Firefox/Mozilla MSI Installer
• Flash Player 10 for Firefox/Mozilla EXE Installer

Adobe Shockwave Player

• Shockwave Player 11 for EXE Installer
• Shockwave Player 11 for MSI Installer

To deploy Shockwave Player silently, follow this guide: Silent installation and configurations of Shockwave player

If you’re unsure which installer to download, grab the MSI installers. If you are downloading the players to distribute them in your corporate network you must obtain a license from Adobe before doing so.

Here’s a link to the original unattend install script for these players that started this and here’s how to uninstall Flash Player if you’re having issues updating to the lastest version.

Adobe Flash and Shockware Players direct download links is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Malware Removal Starter Kit

Every day, adversaries attempt to invade your networks and infect your systems with viruses, spyware and other malware. All too often, these attacks succeed, and frequently without you knowing about it. In other cases, employees can open the door to malware by visiting infected Web sites, opening e-mail attachments, or running macros that contain viruses.

Once inside a computer, a malware outbreak can spread with alarming speed via company networks to compromise or destroy mission-critical data or personal information, and leave vital infrastructure open to new attacks. Some of the stealthiest malware even allows intruders to secretly conduct their nefarious business over long periods—using your computers!

After you have been exposed to malware, and have not been able to restore infected computers, what should you do? Is there a way to fix the problem without completely rebuilding the computers from scratch?

The Malware Removal Starter Kit, a Solution Accelerator from Microsoft, provides tested guidance to help IT Generalists combat malware attacks against small- and medium-sized organizations. Using the Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) in combination with free anti-malware programs, the kit provides you with a low-cost, effective strategy and tool recommendations that you can use to vanquish malware attacks.

It’s a guide to creating a custom Windows PE boot CD and including a number of malware removal tools such as those from avast!, McAfee and even Spybot – Search and Destroy. Now this is probably nothing new to anyone using something like Bart PE but it’s interesting to see guidance like this from Microsoft. You can also find more information up on TechNet on this too.

Malware Removal Starter Kit is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The last week in London has been hectic: finding a place to live, looking for a job, attending a wedding in Shropshire and just getting used to the place has been taking up all of my non-sleeping time. I have been keeping an eye on comments and hope to answer those when I get a chance.

Off topic – the weather here has been pretty nice when compared with Brisbane – there’s so much rain. Now, I might be saying something completely different in six months but right now the rain is really, really nice.

An Update from London is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

In the meantime check out this video which made me smile:

It’s Time for Intermission is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Looks like someone in marketing decided on the edition changes and forgot to tell someone in engineering. Hopefully some poor soul is not going to install Standard Edition and then find out they’ve got no way to license it. 

Citrix: Marketing’s One Step Ahead of Engineering is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Thanks to implementing FeedBurner a few months back the feed location won’t change, so if you’re a subscriber you won’t have to change a thing. Now I’m just kicking myself for not using WordPress from the beginning.

Moving Hosting Providers Revisited is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

So now I have to consider my options which might be starting a new blog on WordPress, especially after seeing how easy it is to migrate to a blog to a new one in WordPress. Once I do move, this site will stay as up until I find a way to move the content.

*Sigh* Why does it have to be so hard?

(Not) Moving Hosting Provider is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

• Install MyFireFox to get the Internet Explorer 7 skin
• Install Hide MenuBar to hide the menu bar and display it when you press the Alt key

Firefox on Vista doesn’t have to be so ugly is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

• 12.1″ Screen. 1280 x 800 resolution
• Core 2 Duo T7200 2Ghz with 4MB cache
• 2 GB RAM (2 x 1GB SIMMS) at 667 MHz
• 100GB 7200RPM SATA HDD
• NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 with 256Mb RAM
• DVD±RW drive
• 4 USB ports plus 1 Firewire port
• 5 in 1 Card reader
• Broadcom LAN, Intel WLAN, Bluetooth plus a WWAN slot
• 5.1 surround sound with digital out
• ExpressCard slot
• Inbuilt Logitech web cam – no taping a web cam to my head for me
• Creative in-ear sound isolating head phones
• Razer Diamondback gaming mouse
• Dell printer
• Dell carry bag
• 3 year international warranty
• Windows Vista Home Premium

When I ran it up I was surprised at the amount of applications installed out of the box. There was Google desktop, McAfee Internet Security, Microsoft Works, Roxio MyDVD plus a couple of others – in all about 73 processes running at boot. Compare that with about 43 with a clean Windows Vista install and you’ve got a lot of crap there. The hard drive was also partitioned into two drives – the D: drive, which was about 6GB, had a copy of a Windows PE recovery environment. Probably useful for most normal consumers but not so for me.

So the first thing I did after saving a copy of the drivers was to wipe the drive and install the 64 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be 64 bit drivers for the card reader or the sound card and as I don’t really see the point in going 64 bit yet I went back to the 32 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate. Now I’ve got a far better install I think

When I installed Virtual PC 2007 I was surprised to see no hardware virtualisation support, so I had to go into the BIOS and enable it which I thought was a little odd. I would have thought that hardware virtualisation would be enabled by default; surely Intel would want OEMs to enable this feature? I presume that if you are working with virtualisation at this stage you’ll know your way around the BIOS.

The Creative sound isolating headphones are pretty good. I’ve got them on while I write this and I had expected them to sound pretty cheap, but the bass is good and even the high end is quite sharp. If you don’t like things pushed right into your ears you might be passing these one on.

There are plenty of in depth reviews of this laptop around the place, but given that hardware changes so quickly and you can customise your order a direct comparison is hard, so here’s a short break down of the good and bad points after less than a week with this laptop:

The Good

• It’s fast, really fast. I haven’t done any performance testing yet, but it feels really snappy. I had a Windows XP virtual machine on it running in Virtual PC 2007 which felt like it was running directly on the hardware.
• Its light, at just less than 2 kilos and being a small package its nice an easy to carry around.
• The build quality is really good. I can pick it up from a corner and I don’t feel any flex. The keyboard feels quite nice and the lid closes without using a latch which is a nice touch.
• It’s got a slot for a WWAN card plus a SIM card under the battery, so I don’t know if the ExpressCard slot will ever get used.

The Bad

• The hard drive makes a high pitched whine when set to performance mode. I’ve set the hard drive to quiet mode and this has made a bit of an improvement. This might not be an issue for some people those types of noises get to me perhaps a little too easily.
• The speakers are tinny, but with not a lot of room for any reasonable speakers it’s a bit of a trade off.
• Sound Blaster Audigy support is software only. Disappoint with this is my fault really; I didn’t read the web site correctly and thought that I was getting it with a Sound Blaster Audigy card. It’s actually provided by software which unfortunately does require a Creative licensing service running. Sound quality is actually pretty good but it would be nice if Dell offered the XPS line with an actual Sound Blaster Audigy card.

One thing I regret not ordering is the 9 cell battery (it comes with a 6 cell by default). I had thought that the 9 cell would have increased the size and weight too much but now that I’ve got the laptop I think that the larger battery would not have an inconvenience at all.

If you are in the market for a Dell it pays to check the web site regularly for deals they may have. I actually spec’d up about three different laptops over a period of close to three months and each time the features got better and price dropped. This final configuration was almost $300 cheaper than the first one and I think I’ve got a far better deal.

The Joy of a New Laptop is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

As our hosting is graciously provided for free by the company we work for, we thought that perhaps we should do something about it. Dugie pointed me to this article at the Coding Horror, Reducing our Website’s Bandwidth Usage, which has some useful tips.

Dugie has recently moved his feed over to FeedBurner, which I did a few months back, which will help. I’ve enabled compression on ISA Server which has resulted in a 3.5 time improvement page size and I’ve used PNGOUT to compress the images on my site. I’ve reduced the total size of all pictures from 7 ½ MB to 6 Mb. The next step for me is to investigate hosting images on Flickr or Amazon S3. I’ve also optimised the custom CSS I’m using to squeeze in a little more compression.

So this should reduce our bandwidth consumption and hopefully also improve the speed of the site too. We’re also moving to new hardware soon, so that should result in improved speed as well (we’re completely virtualising our infrastructure – the only Windows server running directly on hardware will be the firewall).

How Much Bandwidth? is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Here’s the new feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/travellingwithoutmoving, otherwise the syndication links on the left connect to the same place.

Feeds Are Burning is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Sorry for the rant, but I’ve just been speaking to a distributor of an application where the vendor has just certified their application for Presentation Server 4.0 Advanced Edition. Aarrggh..

Applications, Vendors and Citrix Presentation Server is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

1. SQL Server Configuration Manager. This tool enables you to configure SQL Server services and network configuration as well the SQL client. I noticed that all network protocols for SQL Server 2005 are disabled by default too. Top stuff.
2. SQL Server Surface Area Configuration. This tool helps to secure the SQL Server instance/s.
3. SQL Server Management Studio Express. This is the administration tool for SQL Server 2005. The best part I thought though, was that you can connect to earlier versions of SQL, as well as MSDE. Finally, a simple way to install the management tools for MSDE without having to grab the SQL Server CD.

SQL Server 2005 is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

“To perform an advanced search, enter one or more of the following parameters: Event Id, event source, message text, file name. These values can be found in the Event Viewer logs.”

Now all they need to add is the same type of community-based input where users can add where they’ve seen this error message and links to knowledgebase articles. Far more fruitful at times than http://support.microsoft.com

Event Search is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Another recommendation: run your domain controllers as dedicated machines, whether they be physical or virtual machines. Unless you’re a small shop, only place services such as the GC, DHCP, DNS, WINS and IAS on the DCs. These services require little CPU power and RAM and dedicated DCs are much easier to recover or replace.

Lessons from the field: Backup Active Directory is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

1. Standards support;
2. Tabs;
3. Adblock.

Adblock makes using the Internet usable again by blocking unwanted elements in web pages and it does this very well. Unfortunately there is no version for Internet Explorer, and I’m painfully reminded of that everytime I go back to IE. You can utilise the HOSTS file but this is a little cumbersome. However I found HostsMan via MVPS.org yesterday. This is a very well designed tool that works extremely well and allows for automatically downloading HOSTS lists from MVPS.org and hpHosts, integrating this into your local HOSTS file and for quickly editing the hosts file. It even includes a HTTP server for serving a page for the blocked host (It listens on 127.0.0.x only).

This then got me thinking about blocking hosts in an ISA Server rule. At the moment I import the list via a custom VBScript into a domain set and create a rule to redirect access to those hosts to an internal web server that returns a simple white page. However, managment of the domain list is cumbersome when that list is very large. By using HostsMan, I could import the list into the local HOSTS file, create a rule that redirects all requests for some IP address, e.g. 172.16.100.200, configure the HOSTs file appropriately and voila! A nice easy method for blocking access to and maintaining a list of ad sites and even spyware/nasty sites. Would this be faster? ISA Server doesn’t have to check the domain set. Hmm.. need to test.

Didn’t we just have an ad? is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is © 2005-2012 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.