Windows Live Messenger Beta goes public

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Windows Live Messenger

I’ve been using the Windows Live Messenger Beta for a few months now and since I originally wrote about my first impressions of the product, it’s changed quite a bit (although doesn’t seem to have overcome any of the issues which Alex criticised it for at the time).

Windows Live Messenger Beta - new interface

I still like the new user interface although I haven’t used any of the telephony or video-chat functions. The Windows Live Messenger beta was recently expanded and is well worth investigating for those who are currently using MSN Messenger. Alternatively for cross-network instant messaging without any telephony frills, switch to GAIM.

Meanwhile, corporate users should move away from using public IM services and switch to something like Live Communications Server 2005 and the Office Communicator client.

How not to image servers

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about using Microsoft’s system preparation tool (SysPrep) to prepare virtual machine images for duplication. It doesn’t really matter whether the machine is virtual or physical, the principle is still the same (my point was that cloning virtual machines using a file copy is easy but needs to be prepared in a specific way – i.e. using SysPrep).

A few days ago I was completely amazed to hear how one of my clients had duplicated some of their servers – they had simply broken a mirror, placed the second disk in a new server, then added another disk in each server to recreate the mirror (repeat until all servers are successfully duplicated). It may be ingenious, but it’s also extremely bad practice.

The client in question is in the process of preparing for a migration from Windows NT to Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory. Although NT doesn’t get too upset if servers are cloned, including their security identifier (SID), Active Directory does. They now have three choices:

  • Rebuild the problem servers.
  • Remove the servers from the domain.
  • Use a tool like Sysinternals NewSID to change the SIDs (both officially unsupported by Microsoft).

Whatever the decision, it’s all extra (and unnecessary) work – completely avoidable.

Inane IT conversations

Posted on By Mark Wilson

This morning, the office has been full of much hilarity and mirth – as well as extreme geekiness.

It all started off when discussing the appropriate colour patch leads to use for a new network (really – network administrators will understand that this is important) and Nick suggested that the colour of the cable is related to the speed (it’s certainly true that the light blue cables which are our corporate connections have significantly slower Internet access than the yellow ADSL in the corner!). Allan had his own theory that whatever is planned, in reality cable colour is directly related to the proximity of the cable – it doesn’t matter what colour should be used, the answer is whatever is closest to hand.

Next comes in the Project Manager, looking for a “jealousy” of architects (she claimed that was the correct collective noun), which got me googling…

According to Chris Sells’ blog post on collective nouns for geeks, it’s a “glass house” of architects and a “slack” of project managers. There are some other funny ones in Chris’ post that I won’t repeat here but I’m returning to my glass house now. Really, I like to think of myself as just one element of a RAIG (Redundant Array of Intelligent Geeks), although based on our conversations today the use of the word intelligent is questionable…