To be honest, I got a bit confused with the various 64-bit CPUs (like why didn’t Intel and HP’s Itanium take off, but AMD’s AMD64 did and Itanium 2 looks like it will too), but whatever the hardware issues, it seems that x64 software has finally come of age. Paul Thurrott reports in his Windows IT Pro magazine network WinInfo Daily Update that, at the IT Forum this week, Microsoft announced that the Longhorn Server wave of products will be 64-bit only (except Longhorn Server itself, which will be available in both 32- and 64-bit flavours). That means that, for example, the next version of Exchange Server (codenamed Exchange 12) will only run on a 64-bit platform. There’s no news yet as to what is happening on the desktop (except that it seems, like Windows XP, Windows Vista will be available in both 32- and 64-bit editions) but it looks like I’d better get saving for a new PC…
Virtual Server 2005 R2 has gone RTM – and it’s not expensive either
This week is Microsoft’s IT infrastructure conference for EMEA – the IT Forum. Last year I missed it because my wife was heavily pregnant (and my son was born that week). This year, of course, it was his first birthday, so I’m missing it again. Not to worry, because Paul Thurrott is covering the major stories in the Windows IT Pro magazine network WinInfo Daily Update and John Howard’s blog has much more information.
One of the IT Forum news stories concerns Virtual Server 2005 R2 (formerly SP1). A few weeks back I wrote about Microsoft’s virtualisation roadmap and several news sources are reporting that in his keynote speech, Microsoft’s Bob Muglia announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 has been released to manufacturing. Furthermore, the new pricing model is just $99 for Standard Edition and $199 for Enterprise Edition – it seems that Microsoft really is serious about competing with VMware. At that price for Virtual Server, and with the VMware Player attacking the low end market (although I’ve heard mixed reports about how good it really is at handling Microsoft VMs), it’s hard to see where Virtual PC fits in all of this.
Watch out for long path names on an NTFS volume
I came across an interesting issue earlier today. Somehow, on my NTFS-formatted external hard disk I had managed to create a file system structure which was too deep.
Whenever I tried to delete a particular folder tree, I received strange errors about files which couldn’t be deleted:
Error Deleting File or Folder
Cannot delete foldername: The file name you specified is not valid or too long. Specify a different file name.
I thought that was strange – after all, I’d managed to create the files in the first place, then I found that if I drilled down to the files that would not delete, there was no right-click option to delete the file. Finally, I found that some folders displayed the following error when I tried to access them:
Can’t access this folder.
Path is too long.
It turned out that the problem folders/files had path names in excess of 255 characters. By renaming some of the top level folders to single character folder names (thus reducing the length of the path), I was able to access the problem files and folders, including deleting the files that I wanted to remove.