March is Prostate Cancer Awareness Month

Posted on By Mark Wilson

The Prostate Cancer CharitySometimes, on the occasions that I wear a suit, I wear a lapel badge with a little blue man on it.  It does its job well as people often ask me what it represents – pink ribbons (in fact, pink in general) are well known in association with the Breast Cancer Campaign but The Prostate Cancer Charity‘s “blue man” logo is less well known.

March 2010 marks Prostate Cancer Awareness Month.  Sadly, for my family, May will be the month when we’re most aware of this illness as it will be the anniversary of my Father’s death, after a mercifully short but nevertheless agonising battle with multiple secondary cancers when we all thought his prostate cancer was under control.  But, aside from my personal connections, why do we need to be aware of prostate cancer?  Well:

  • Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men.
  • One man dies every hour in the UK.

‘Don’t let prostate cancer hide’ is this year’s campaign to help get prostate cancer out in the open. It’s a hidden cancer because not enough people talk about it. We can’t see the prostate, and many people don’t even know what it is or what it does.

Prostate cancer awareness month is all about changing that. The more we talk openly about prostate cancer, the more lives can be saved.

Find out more at hiddencancer.org.uk

(markwilson.it is not affiliated with The Prostate Cancer Charity; however I do support its activities and invite readers of this blog to do so too)

Windows support lifecycle reminders

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last week, I wrote about the forthcoming service pack for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  At the other end of its support lifecycle, is Windows 2000, which finally reaches end of life (i.e. the end of extended support) on 13 July 2010.

Windows XP remains on extended support for a while longer (until 8 April 2014) but service pack 2 (SP2) also goes out of support on 13 July 2010 and, from that date onwards, Microsoft will no longer support or provide free security updates for Windows XP systems running SP2 or earlier.  Service pack 3 is available free of charge; however Windows XP users should really be planning on migration to a later version of Windows.  For details of how to obtain the latest service pack for Windows XP, see Microsoft knowledge base article 322389.

Also, on 13 July, Windows Server 2003 moves out of mainstream support and into its extended support phase.   Service pack 1 for Windows Server 2003 was retired on 14 April 2009, so service pack 2 is required in order to remain supported.  For details of how to obtain the latest service pack for Windows Server 2003 (and Windows Server 2003 R2), see Microsoft knowledge base article 889100.  Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 are subject to the same support lifecycle milestones as each other.

Windows Vista with no Service Packs installed will also lose support on 13 April 2010.  Customers are advised to install service pack 2 for Windows Vista in order to remain secure and supported (although service pack 1 is still supported until 12 July 2011).  For details of how to obtain the latest service pack for Windows Vista, see Microsoft knowledge base article 935791.

Customers running Windows Server 2008 have plenty of time left in their operating system investment, although Windows Server 2008 service pack 1 will be retired on 12 July 2011.  For details of how to obtain the latest service pack for Windows Server 2008, see Microsoft knowledge base article 968849.  The same service pack is applicable to both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Three phases of Microsoft support

Posted on By Mark Wilson

The Microsoft support lifecycle policy has been around since October 2002 but still seems to be a source of confusion for many.  In effect, there are three phases of support:

  • Mainstream support provides full product support, including security updates, hotfixes and the ability to raise product enhancement requests.
  • Extended support means that a product is on its way towards retirement and, in order to open a support case on a products in its extended support phase, a Premier Support contract with Microsoft is required. There is a higher risk involved in relying on products in their extended support phase (when compared with mainstream support products) as extended support is only available for business and developer products – and it does not allow product enhancement requests, or non-security updates (unless an Extended Hotfix Support Agreement is available – more on that in a moment…).
  • Self-help means “Google it!” as Microsoft will not accept support requests for products in this phase.  The Microsoft knowledge base is available, as are all the resources of the Internet, but the risks involved with of running out-of-support products is high.

For business and developer products, there is normally 5 years of mainstream support, followed by 5 years of extended support.  Self-help via the Microsoft online support site will be available for at least 10 years.  There are some exceptions (e.g. Windows XP) as these products predate the support lifecycle policy.  For consumer products there is no extended support, just 5 years of mainstream support, and the commitment to self-help from Microsoft is 8 years.

Microsoft does have support solutions for individual customers that are forced to stray outside mainstream support.  Extended Hotfix Support agreements allow customers to request non-security hotfixes for products in their extended support phase and these agreements involve substantial fees (for the agreement, and for every non-security hotfix requested). Furthermore, there is no contractual commitment from Microsoft to agree to a hotfix request. Custom Support agreements are prohibitively expensive and designed to provide limited support during the self-help
support phase. These agreements are product- and customer-specific.

Finally, be aware that the support lifecycle does not just apply to product versions, but service pack and cumulative update versions too.

First service pack for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

Posted on By Mark Wilson

It’s not news that there will be a service pack for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.  We don’t know when it will come (and I’ve been asked not to speculate…) – and we don’t know if there will be a public beta but there will be a service pack.

Here’s what Microsoft has announced so far:

  • The same service pack will be applicable for Windows server and client – i.e. for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 (just as with Vista/Server 2008 service packs).
  • SP1 will enable two key new features for Windows Server 2008 R2: Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V, allowing for dynamically adjusting RAM allocation between virtual machines; and RemoteFX, which is an enhancement for RDP for rich media and 3D.
  • For Windows 7, there are no significant changes in SP1 – it’s effectively an update rollup – there is no need to wait for service pack 1 before deploying!

Desktop virtualisation shake-up at Microsoft

Posted on By Mark Wilson

What an afternoon… for a few days now, I’ve been trying to find out what’s the big announcement from Microsoft and Citrix in the desktop virtualisation hour webcast later today. I was keeping quiet until after the webcast but now the embargo has lifted, Microsoft has issued a press release, and the news is all over the web:

  • Coming in Windows Server 2008 R2 service pack 1 (for which there is no date announced, yet) will be the dynamic memory functionality that was in early releases of Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008 R2 but was later pulled from the product.  Also in SP1 will be a new graphics acceleration platform, known as RemoteFX, that is based on desktop-remoting technology that Microsoft obtained in 2008 when it acquired Calista Technologies, allowing for rich media content to be accessed over the remote desktop protocol, enabling users of virtual desktops and applications to receive a rich 3-D, multimedia experience while accessing information remotely..
  • Microsoft and Citrix are offering a “Rescue for VMware VDI” promotion, which allows VMware View customers to trade in up to 500 licenses at no additional cost, and the “VDI Kick Start” promotion, which offers new customers a more than 50 percent discount off the estimated retail price.
  • There are virtualisation licensing changes too: from July, Windows Client Software Assurance customers will no longer have to buy a separate license to access their Windows operating system in a VDI environment, as virtual desktop access rights now will be a Software Assurance (SA) benefit – effectively, if you have SA, you get Windows on screen, no matter what processor it is running on!  There will also be new roaming usage rights and Windows Client Software Assurance and new Virtual Desktop Access (the new name for VECD) customers will have the right to access their virtual Windows desktop and their Microsoft Office applications hosted on VDI technology on secondary, non-corporate network devices, such as home PCs and kiosks.
  • Citrix will ensure that XenDesktop HDX technology will be interoperable with and will extend RemoteFX within 6 months.
  • Oh yes, and Windows XP Mode (i.e. Windows Virtual PC) will no longer requires hardware virtualisation technology (although, frankly, I find that piece of news a little less exciting as I’d really like to see Virtual PC replaced by a client-side hypervisor).

Activating an iPhone: some gotchas along the way

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Yesterday, I wrote about my problems with an offically-unlocked iPhone that suddenly detected it had a new SIM and needed activation.  Today, I downloaded and installed iTunes on my Windows 7 notebook PC and borrowed a sync cable to connect the phone and activate it.  Here are a couple of things I found on the way:

Now, I’ll make sure that I have a bent paperclip (iPhone SIM removal tool) and sync cable in my bag when I go to work… just in case my iPhone falls out with its SIM again.

iPhone – SIM = iBrick

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Now that I’m out of contract with my iPhone, I’ve switched my account to something more reasonably priced whilst I wait for a new handset/phone operating system combination to grab my attention.  At the same time, my work e-mail was switched over to an ActiveSync service and I wanted a 3G handset for that so I’ve “donated” my iPhone to business use for a few months.

I soon got fed up of activating the phone (via iTunes) every time I switched SIMs between home and work (I don’t use my work number at weekends and when I’m on holiday), so I redirected my personal number to my work number.  Everything was good - I listened to a few podcasts on the drive to work, made some calls, connected to my e-mail service, got back in the car (listened to some more podcasts) and drove to meet a partner at their offices – but then my iPhone decided that it had a new SIM (it didn’t) and that it needed to be connected to iTunes.  That caused a few problems:

  1. I don’t have iTunes on my work PC (and nor should I have).
  2. I don’t have an iPhone/iPod sync cable with me.
  3. I’m working away from home… and I’m not going to drive for up to 2 hours in either direction just to get my smartphone working.

It doesn’t take took much imagination to work out that an iPhone that doesn’t make calls is not a very good phone.  And it turns out that it’s not really a very good “anything” because, as I drove to the hotel this evening, I found a number of other things that an iPhone without a SIM is useless for:

  • It couldn’t work as a camera to take pictures in the late-afternoon winter sunshine.
  • It couldn’t work as a GPS/sat-nav device for helping me from the office to the hotel… resulting in a 30 minute drive around Reading using my sense of direction and the setting sun as a compass whilst avoiding the city centre and the motorway…
  • It couldn’t work as a music player to provide entertainment on the drive.
  • It couldn’t let me access my e-mail (not even over Wi-Fi) when the hotel had failed to read my reservation details correctly.

In short: an iPhone minus its SIM might as well be an iBrick – far from the device Apple described back in 2007 (a mobile phone, iPod and Internet device), it’s a useless piece of electronic hardware.  And, just to be clear, this is an offocially unlocked iPhone (i.e. unlocked by my carrier) that has not been “jailbroken”.

The madness of this situation is that it doesn’t have to be this way - Apple’s stranglehold on iPhone activation is just part of the way in which they control the iPhone ecosystem but they seem to miss the point of having a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) – i.e. that it’s the SIM that is supposed to control my identity and make it transferable between devices.  No other phone that I’ve used has needed to be activated using software once it has a SIM installed – it checks with the network if my details are valid and, if they are, I can make calls.  Simple!

A phone that doesn’t work is pretty useless as a business tool – even if it’s a phone as remarkable as the iPhone was when it launched a couple of years ago (in my opinion, Apple has squandered the lead it had over everything else in the market). The fact that it’s not possible to simply insert a valid SIM and boot up the device is just one reason why the iPhone is not an enterprise product, although plenty of companies will be forced to support them by VIPs wielding enough power to override IT policies (just as we saw with Blackberry devices a few years ago).  Thankfully a colleague is going to bring a sync cable with him tomorrow so I can (hopefully) get the thing working again in the morning – but I won’t be trusting my iPhone next time I travel long distance.

How UK iPhone users can save money…

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I bought my most recent iPhone (a white 3G) back in August 2008.  On an 18 month contract, that means I’ve fulfilled my commitment but O2 is quite happy to keep on taking the £35 a month which partially subsidises the handset cost!

I’ve been thinking about switching back to Vodafone and an HTC HD2 on Windows Mobile but, in the absense of a clear statement that says I’ll be able to upgrade that device for Windows Mobile 7 (in fact, I’ve seen an APC article that suggests I won’t be able to as well as a plea from Engadget for Microsoft to get off the fence), I’ll be staying put for a while.

In the meantime, @jonhoneyball mentioned some Simplicity deals from O2 for iPhone users.  There is an IT Pro article which suggests that O2 are pushing these deals to out-of-contract iPhone users but I’ve seen nothing to indicate this – although when I called O2 they knew about the tariffs and were happy to help me switch (although I did have to tell the upgrades department to stop trying to upsell me and to just do as I asked).

I’ve elected to reduce my £35 monthly payment to £20 on a rolling 30-day contract, halving my minutes from 600 to 300 but keeping unlimited texts, data, and Wi-Fi.  Alternatively I could have had a 12-month contract on the same terms for £15, or 600 minutes a month for £25 (900 for £30, etc.).  There are some gotchas though (O2 did let me know about these): the account defaults to online billing (no problem); picture messages are 20p (not 4 texts from normal allowance); SMS from abroad is also chargable; and voicemail is now taken from the inclusive minutes.  Even so, I should still be well within my limits.  After the initial 30-day period I can switch to another O2 tariff at any time, or give 30-days notice if I decide to terminate the contract.

Vodafone has similar SIM-only deals but there are caps on data usage – I don’t use much iPhone data but others might be concerned by them (My iPhone was unlocked a few months ago when other UK carriers started stocking iPhones – iPhone unlocking is free of charge for O2’s pay-monthly customers and £15 for pay as you go (PAYG) customers).

So, that should allow me to sit tight until either the next iPhone or a tasty Windows Mobile 7 device becomes available. And the £15/month saving will go some way towards the cost of my next partially-subsidised handset…

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V crash turns out to be an Intel driver issue

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A few weeks ago, I rebuilt a recently decommissioned server to run as an infrastructure test and development rig at home.  I installed Windows Server 2008 R2, enabled the Hyper-V role and all was good until I started to configure my networks, during which I experienced a “blue screen of death” (BSOD) – never a good thing on your virtualisation host, especially when it does the same thing again on reboot:

“Oh dear, my freshly built Windows Server 2008 R2 machine has just thrown 3 BSODs in a row… after running normally for an hour or so :-(“

The server is a Dell PowerEdge 840 (a small, workgroup server that I bought a couple of years ago) with 8GB RAM and a quad core Xeon CPU.  The hardware is nothing special – but fine for my infrastructure testing – and it had been running with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V since new (with no issues) but this was the first time I’d tried R2. 

I have 3 network adapters in the server: a built in Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit card (which I’ve reserved for remote access); and 2 Intel PRO/100s (for VM workloads).  Ideally I’d use Gigabit Ethernet cards for the VM workload too, but this is only my home network and they were what I had available!

Trying to find out the cause of the problem, I ran WhoCrashed, which gave me the following information:

This was likely caused by the following module: efe5b32e.sys
Bugcheck code: 0xD1 (0x0, 0x2, 0x0, 0xFFFFF88002C4A3F1)
Error: DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
Dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\020410-15397-01.dmp
file path: C:\Windows\system32\drivers\efe5b32e.sys
product: Intel(R) PRO/100 Adapter
company: Intel Corporation
description: Intel(R) PRO/100 Adapter NDIS 5.1 driver

That confirmed that the issue was with the Intel NIC driver, which sounded right as, after enabling the Hyper-V role, I connected an Ethernet cable to one of the Intel NICs and got a BSOD each time the server came up. If I disconnected the cable, no BSOD.  Back to the twitters:

“Does anyone know of any problems with Intel NICs and Hyper-V R2 (that might cause a BSOD)?”

I switched the in-box (Microsoft) drivers for some (older) Intel ones.  That didn’t fix things, so I switched back to the latest drivers.  Eventually I found that the issue was caused by the checkbox for “Allow management operating system to share this network adapter” and that,  if the NIC is live and I selected this, I could reproduce the error:

“Found the source of yesterday’s WS08R2 Hyper-V crash… any idea why enabling this option http://twitpic.com/11b64y would trip a BSOD?”

Even though I could work around the issue (because I don’t want to share a NIC between the parent partition and the children anyway – I have the Broadcom NIC for remote access) it seemed strange that this behaviour should occur.  There was no NIC teaming involved and the server was still a straightforward UK installation (aside from enabling Hyper-V and setting up virtual networks). 

Based on suggestions from other Virtual Machine MVPs I also:

  • Flashed the NICs to the latest release of the Intel Boot Agent (these cards don’t have a BIOS).
  • Updated the Broadcom NIC to the latest drivers too.
  • Attempted to turn off Jumbo frames but the the option was not available in the properties so I could rule that out.

Thankfully, @stufox (from Microsoft in New Zealand) saw my tweets and was kind enough to step in to offer assistance.  It took us a few days, thanks to timezone differences and my work schedule, but we got there in the end.

First up, I sent Stu a minidump from the crash, which he worked on with one of the Windows Server kernel developers. They suggested running the driver verifier (verifier.exe) against the various physical network adapters (and against vmswitch.sys).  More details of this tool can be found in Microsoft knowledge base article 244617 but the response to the verifier /query command was as follows:

09/02/2010, 23:19:33
Level: 000009BB
RaiseIrqls: 0
AcquireSpinLocks: 44317
SynchronizeExecutions: 2
AllocationsAttempted: 152850
AllocationsSucceeded: 152850
AllocationsSucceededSpecialPool: 152850
AllocationsWithNoTag: 0
AllocationsFailed: 0
AllocationsFailedDeliberately: 0
Trims: 41047
UnTrackedPool: 141544
 
Verified drivers:
 
Name: efe5b32e.sys, loads: 1, unloads: 0
CurrentPagedPoolAllocations: 0
CurrentNonPagedPoolAllocations: 0
PeakPagedPoolAllocations: 0
PeakNonPagedPoolAllocations: 0
PagedPoolUsageInBytes: 0
NonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 0
PeakPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 0
PeakNonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 0
 
Name: ndis.sys, loads: 1, unloads: 0
CurrentPagedPoolAllocations: 6
CurrentNonPagedPoolAllocations: 1926
PeakPagedPoolAllocations: 8
PeakNonPagedPoolAllocations: 1928
PagedPoolUsageInBytes: 984
NonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 1381456
PeakPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 1296
PeakNonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 1381968
 
Name: b57nd60a.sys, loads: 1, unloads: 0
CurrentPagedPoolAllocations: 0
CurrentNonPagedPoolAllocations: 3
PeakPagedPoolAllocations: 0
PeakNonPagedPoolAllocations: 3
PagedPoolUsageInBytes: 0
NonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 188448
PeakPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 0
PeakNonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 188448
 
Name: vmswitch.sys, loads: 1, unloads: 0
CurrentPagedPoolAllocations: 1
CurrentNonPagedPoolAllocations: 18
PeakPagedPoolAllocations: 2
PeakNonPagedPoolAllocations: 24
PagedPoolUsageInBytes: 108
NonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 50352
PeakPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 632
PeakNonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 54464

To be honest, I haven’t a clue what half of that means but the guys at Microsoft did – and they also asked me for a kernel dump (Dirk A D Smith has written an article at Network World that gives a good description of the various types of memory dump: minidump; kernel; and full). Transmitting this file caused some issues (it was 256MB in size – too big for e-mail) but it compressed well, and 7-zip allowed me to split it into chunks to get under the 50GB file size limit on Windows Live SkyDrive.  Using this, Stu and his kernel developer colleagues were able to see that there is a bug in the Intel driver I’m using but it turns out there is another workaround too – turning off Large Send Offload in the network adapter properties.  Since I did this, the server has run without a hiccup (as I would have expected).

“Thanks to @stufox for helping me fix the BSOD on my Hyper-V R2 server. Turned out to be an Intel device driver issue – I will blog details”

It’s good to know that Hyper-V was not at fault here: sure, it shows that a rogue device driver can bring down a Windows system but that’s hardly breaking news – the good thing about the Hyper-V architecture is that I can easily update network device drivers.  And, let’s face it, I was running enterprise-class software on a workgroup server with some old, unsupported, hardware – you could say that I was asking for trouble…

Why Windows Server User Group meetings are a bit like London buses

Posted on By Mark Wilson

There’s a saying in the UK when multiples of something come along at the same time… “like London buses… nothing and then three at once” (based on the principle of bunching, for high frequency services – incidentally, that’s an alien concept where I live – we’re lucky if the bus shows up at all…).

Anyway, back to the point – hot on the heels of the Windows Server User Group (WSUG) meeting with Joey Snow, Mark Parris has arranged a second meeting to co-incide with the Microsoft UK TechDays – this time it’s on 13 April 2010 at Microsoft’s Offices in London (map and directions) and the speaker will be Dan Pearson, from David Solomon’s Expert Seminars.

Dan was formerly a Senior Escalation Lead at Microsoft, where he worked in the Windows Base OS team supporting Microsoft customers. Dan will be talking about Windows crash dump analysis as well as Windows performance troubleshooting and analysis.

Check out the event registration site for more details.