markwilson.it

Author: Mark Wilson

  • Windows XP: Reloaded

    Contrary to much media confusion in recent months, Windows XP Reloaded is the codename for a marketing campaign that is running throughout the autumn of 2004, aimed at renewing consumer interest in Windows XP, now three years old and not due to be replaced until at least 2006. More information about the XP reloaded program is available on the SuperSite for Windows website.

    According to the Windows IT Pro magazine network WinInfo Daily Update, there will be no “Windows XP SE” and the next Windows releases will be:

    • Windows 2000 SP5 (although this will be minor and certainly won’t have the same attention to security detail as XP SP2 did).
    • Windows Server 2003 SP1.
    • Windows Server 2003 release 2 (R2) – the next interim Windows server release.
    • Windows 2006 (codenamed Longhorn) – the next client release.

    A more extensive list of upcoming Windows product releases is available on the SuperSite for Windows.

  • Microsoft TechNet UK events

    I used to go along to the Microsoft TechNet UK events but I stopped attending after the content and quality of the presentations dropped. Tonight, I went to my first TechNet event in years and was pleasantly surprised by the new format. Gone are the uncomfortable hotel venues (many of the events are now held at Microsoft’s UK headquarters in Reading); the time slot has switched to weekday evenings (easier for most of us to get out of work to attend, even if it did necessitate some spirited driving down the M40 after I fought my way out of Birmingham this afternoon); in come quality (if a touch arrogant) speakers; and finally a sure fire way to keep 200 techies happy – beer and pizza!

    Tonight’s event was presented by Fred Baumhardt, who spoke about ISA Server 2004 network design/troubleshooting and inside application layer firewalling and filtering. I must admit that I was a little disappointed to see him dump the slide deck part way through in favour of just demonstrating the features of ISA Server 2004 Enterprise Edition, but overall, the new TechNet event format seems to be a huge improvement.

    Details of future events may be found on the Microsoft UK TechNet website.

  • Application issues with Windows XP SP2

    In an earlier post, I defended Windows XP service pack 2 against the negative publicity it has gained and that opinion still stands – SP2 is a critical update with benefits far outweighing risks in today’s ever more security-conscious environment.

    I also stand by my comments that SP2 should be thought of as an operating system upgrade and tested accordingly but one of the key tools that would assist the testing process is still missing. I can see no defence for the time that it is taking to ship an updated application compatibility toolkit (including the Windows application verifier) and whilst the current version (3.0) is available for download, it does not take into account the major operating system changes made in XP SP2.

    In the meantime, Microsoft knowledge base article 884130 gives details of programs that are known to experience a loss of functionality when they run on a Windows XP Service Pack 2-based computer.

  • OWA and Windows XP SP2

    If, like me, you use Outlook Web Access (OWA) to access e-mail from a client site, you may experience some issues with the Internet Explorer popup blocker in Windows XP SP2. To be honest, I’ve not found it a major concern as I added all the key servers at my company’s domain name to the trusted sites zone, but if that is not an option (e.g. due to policy restrictions in place), you may have to find a workaround. A few weeks back, the Windows IT Pro magazine network Exchange and Outlook Update ran an article on OWA and XP SP2 and Microsoft knowledge base article 883575 gives further information.

  • Enhanced search capabilities for Outlook and the Desktop

    The fact that Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google are all looking to grow (or retain) their share of the search market and to extend this to the desktop is no secret. Unfortunately for Microsoft the the next Windows release (codenamed Longhorn) is constantly being delayed and as one of its primary aims is to improve the search capabilities available natively within the operating system, this gives Google and others an opportunity to take a hold on the desktop (although Google will need to be smart in order to maintain it’s lead in the Internet search engine market – whether the launch of the rumoured Mozilla-based Google browser will help with this is yet to be seen).

    Back in July 2004, Microsoft purchased an ISV called Lookout Software. Lookout is an add-on to Microsoft Outlook that allows users to bypass the search tools provided by Microsoft and sift through e-mail, contacts and other information with keywords. The latest version of Lookout is now available from the Microsoft website and my first impressions are that it is very good, and very fast (is it only me that thinks the Lookout branding looks a bit like Google’s?).

    On a related note, Copernic, another successful player in the search market, released their Desktop Search product this month – again, my first impressions using this are good.

    Links

    Lookout and Microsoft questions and answers
    Outlook is a platform
    Rumours surround Google browser
    Google browser may be reality

  • Visualizations for Windows Media Player

    I’ve just installed a really cool visualization for Windows Media Player 10 – Energy Bliss. A chilled-out graphic equaliser display with inline album artwork and track information.

    For anyone who is still using Windows Media 9 Series, check out the Rhythm and Waves visualization.

    These visualizations (and more) are available from the Microsoft website.

  • Happy birthday to the Internet

    Thirty-five years ago this month, computer scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) used a 15′ cable to link two computers, testing a new way to exchange data and ultimately playing a pivotal role in the development of the Internet (then called ARPANET). This link took place on September 2 1969.

    Further development throughout the 1970s expanded the network, added e-mail and TCP/IP. The 1980s saw the birth of the domain name system (DNS) and in 1990, the World Wide Web was born.

    I remember marvelling at the things I could find using FTP when I was at Uni’ in the early 90s, and a few years later experiencing online services like CompuServe and a very immature world-wide web. Without the Internet we would not have TCP/IP and Unix (arguably we would not have the Internet as it exists today without these technologies).

    Since then, the Internet has become ever more pervasive. E-mail has become a globally accepted method of communication, supplemented by new technologies such as instant messaging (IM) and voice over IP (VoIP); breaking news is available globally in an instant; the web is the first port of call for researching information; and the growth in web services in recent years has been immense.

    For more information on the development of the Internet, see the Internet Society (ISOC) website.

  • Active Directory system volume placement

    I came across a useful tip on the Microsoft website today, entitled “Why is placing the Sysvol directory on a separate partition a good practice?” As links like this have a habit of disappearing from the Microsoft website, I’ve reproduced the content below:

    “The System Volume (Sysvol) shared directory is replicated to every domain controller in a domain by means of the File Replication Service (FRS). Here are a couple of good reasons for placing Sysvol on a separate partition:

    • Sysvol’s contents and its staging files might increase in size. Placing Sysvol on a separate partition contains the growth of the directory’s contents and prevents them from consuming space on the boot partition, thereby preventing problems with other components and performance degradation.
    • Placing Sysvol on its own NTFS partition minimizes disk I/O, thereby reducing the chances of receiving journal wrap errors. FRS uses the NTFS journal to monitor changes in the file system. The journal contains the update sequence number (USN) of the NTFS changes that are stored on each NTFS partition. If FRS can’t keep up with the pace of disk I/O or if FRS is turned off for a period of time, the USN that’s referenced in the FRS log might no longer exist in the NTFS volume journal. To help reduce the chance of the NTFS journal wrapping before FRS has replicated content, Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 increased the size of the NTFS journal from 32Mb 512Mb by default (with a maximum configurable limit of 10Gb).”

  • My leap into digital imaging

    This is primarily a technology blog, and it just happens that most of what I work with is IT-related; however one of my hobbies is photography, something which is getting ever closer to IT with the rise in quality and lowering of the costs associated with digital imaging technologies.

    Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 EDLast year I switched my film stock to transparency (mostly for it’s colour reproduction qualities) and bought myself a Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 ED film scanner. The problem has been that I’ve not found a lot of time to use it, and I have hundreds of slides to scan, edit, and print so I’ve been using a Sony DSC P8 digital camera to take quick snaps for the family album and getting postcard prints produced in a high-street store.

    I found the Sony DSC P8 to be okay for slipping into my pocket when out and about, but to be honest I find it a bit small and light (prone to camera shake), and I miss the features of my film SLR (a Nikon F90x).

    Until recently Nikon’s digital SLRs were unaffordable for most people other than professional photographers and my investment in Nikon lenses and accessories left me unwilling to switch to another manufacturer; however Nikon has recently taken a huge step forward with the release of the D70. It lacks some of the features I have on my F90x (in an ideal world I’d have an F5 for film and a D2X for digital), but it still offers a good price for me to make the switch to a digital SLR for the bulk of my photography and I’ll still hang on to the film camera.

    Nikon D70The D70 is available as a body only, or in various kits with a lens included. I did consider the body only option, but as the smaller image sensor size effectively extends the length of all my lenses by 1.5, I would need a new wide-angle lens. Besides being a G-series lens, the AF-S DX 18-70mm f3.5-4.5G IF-ED largely duplicates my excellent AF 24-85mm f2.8-4 so I decided on the 18-35mm f3.5-4.5D IF-ED, and found an excellent deal (and customer service) at Calumet in Birmingham. First impressions are that the 18mm end of the lens seems more like 35mm on my film body (it should be 28mm), but by buying the lens as part of the D70 kit, I saved quite a lot of money and finding a dealer with a D70 in stock at the moment seems to be quite difficult (they also gave me a free Lexar Pro 512Mb 80x CF card).

    Anyone considering investing in a Nikon D70 may find the following websites useful:

  • The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA)

    The Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer tool (ExBPA) is designed for administrators who want to determine the overall health of their Exchange servers and topology.

    The tool scans Exchange servers, identifying items that do not conform to Microsoft best practices, programmatically collecting settings and values from data repositories such as Active Directory, the registry, metabase and performance monitor. Once collected, a set of comprehensive best practice rules are applied to the topology using an XML schema and a detailed report produced listing the recommendations that can be made to the environment to achieve greater performance, scalability and uptime.

    According to the Exchange Security website:

    “ExBPA’s purpose is to automate some of the basic health-and-sanity checks that an experienced Exchange administrator, consultant, or PSS engineer might do when evaluating an unfamiliar environment. It’s not designed to find every possible mistake you can make (heaven knows there are plenty); instead, it’s intended to help you quickly find well-known misconfigurations and administrator errors. It checks the protocol configurations for SMTP, POP, IMAP, LDAP, and HTTP; GC/DC accessibility; hop counts and routing latency for message routing; the packet size and contents of the link state table; and basic DNS configuration stuff.

    You can tweak the rules to control which specific areas ExBPA checks for, which is handy. ExBPA generates XML report files that you can parse yourself, or import into another instance of ExBPA on another machine. One output is a list of issues that the tool found – this is similar in concept to the problem report you get from MBSA, and it serves the same purpose of allowing you to quickly pinpoint and fix whatever needs fixing.”

    Further details are available at the Microsoft Exchange team blog (you had me at EHLO…) and known issues are discussed on the Microsoft website.