Microsoft virtualisation news

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Some time back, there was talk of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (then called SCVMM vNext) shipping within 90 days of Hyper-V. This link was later denied, or at least downplayed (depending upon who you spoke to at Microsoft) but it seems that SCVMM 2008 is expected to ship in September… that’s ooh… about 90 days after Hyper-V. Of course, speculating on product release dates is always a risky business, but Rakesh Malhotra should know (he runs the SCVMM program management team).

On a related note, he also explains why SCVMM requires virtual center in order to integrate with VMware ESX (a question I asked a few days back after the release of the VMware Infrastructure Toolkit for Windows v1.0 (PowerShell cmdlets for VI).

Last, but not least, a Microsoft Virtualization User Group has been formed and have an inaugural meeting planned at Microsoft’s London (Victoria) offices on 24 September.

Using BITS to manage file distribution

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Microsoft’s Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) has been around since Windows 2000 SP3 and provides a “firewall-friendly” means of transferring files across the network which also allows for restarts. It’s also the file transfer mechanism used for Windows updates (but is not exclusively used for Microsoft products) and is now at version 3.0 (included with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008).

A few weeks back, I was discussing the problem of rebuilding remote servers with some colleagues. We considered that it may be advantageous to keep a copy of the build image locally (e.g. on a branch office server) but image management (making sure that the locally cached image is the latest version) is an important concern. One of my colleagues asked if BITS could be used to control the distribution of the image files (which could be expected to be around 2GB) so I decided to dig a little further. The short answer is “yes”, but there are some things to be aware of:

Microsoft provides a command line tool called BITSAdmin (bitsadmin.exe) for monitoring the progress of BITS jobs. BITSAdmin is available as a support tool for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 but is included with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. James Finnigan has a good post introducing the concept of transferring files using BITS; Aaron Czechowski has another BITSAdmin script; Frank-Peter Schultze has a good post on scripting downloads with BITS; or refer to the full BITSAdmin syntax and examples for further details.

Various third party wrappers also exist, including:

I haven’t seen a PowerShell wrapper for BITS yet but I have used Alexander Sukhovey’s BGet command (batch) file to initiate and manage BITS file transfers.

If BITS is not appropriate, those with plenty of bandwidth might consider RoboCopy (I have used it in the past to synchronise folders across the network) but, for me, Mads Klinkby’s BITSync looks perfect – unfortunately the download link was unavailable at the time of writing this post.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 from a photographer’s perspective

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Photography has been one of my hobbies for almost 30 years now and for the last four years I’ve been exclusively shooting in digital format but I’m still struggling to work out a decent workflow. Adobe Photoshop CS3 box shotSo, last Friday I took the day off work to attend a short course introducing key features of Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom (provided by my local Adult Education service and presented by David Tunnicliffe) and, at £36 for 6 hours of tuition, it was a bargain. I learnt a lot – and some people might find what follows to be a little obvious – but I’m hopething that for others it might be as useful as it was for me.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is just one product from the Adobe Creative Suite, providing many more features than most photographers will need as it is designed for the graphics art industry in general. Even so, Photoshop CS3 includes some additional components that may be very useful for a photographer:

  • Introduced with CS2, Adobe Bridge literally bridges the gap between a file browser and the various applications in the Creative Suite, providing digital asset management functionality for organising, previewing and editing images.
  • Frequently updated for new proprietary raw formats, Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) provides the tools to open and edit raw image data from a digital camera. In addition to this, it can also work with JPEG and TIFF files to provide basic editing functionality without Photoshop.

In addition to the CS3 components above, there are two more products that may be of interest:

  • DNG is Adobe’s non-proprietary and royalty-free Digital Negative format which is intended to provide a solution for archival of digital images and has now been embraced by many camera manufacturers – the notable exceptions being Canon and Nikon. I don’t fancy my chances of being able to open .NEF images from my Nikon D70 in 30 years time but I’ll stand a better chance if I convert them to .DNG and Adobe provides a free DNG converter for Windows and Macintosh users.
  • Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 125x125Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a product designed by photographers, for photographers using separate library, develop, slideshow, print and web views and including the ability to import (including creating folders), catalogue (with keywords) and backup in one action.

For me, Bridge was a revelation – I use my Mac for photography (so Windows utilities were no good to me) but I’ve always found Apple iPhoto a little too simplistic. It turns out that Bridge (together with ACR) is exactly what I needed to organise my images, open them in ACR (and optionally Photoshop) to perform non-destructive edits, with the changes (and associated metadata) stored in Sidecar (.XMP) files alongside the original image (avoiding the need to maintain multiple copies of images). In addition, now that I’m using Bridge I can drop a couple of utilities that I had previously relied on:

Previously, I’d struggled to get to grips with ACR (in fact, episode 40 of This Week in Photography featured a question from me asking for some guidance) but, armed with the knowledge I gained on the course and Adobe’s understanding Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw 4 white paper, I now understand that ACR is more than just a converter and it’s often all that’s required to make many adjustments to images (the exposure control in ACR let me recover an image that had been three stops underexposed) – and that it can handle JPEG and TIFF files too.

Adobe Camera Raw 4.0

As for Lightroom, David Tunnicliffe was very keen on the product (not surprising as he took part in its development) but, whilst I can see that its potentially useful for a professional photographer and that the ability to import, catalogue and backup images in one go would make a huge improvement to my workflow, I’m still not totally convinced by the interface. Maybe I’ll change my mind at version 3!

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 125x125For those who don’t want to spend the money on Photoshop CS3 (it is very expensive if you’re not going to use it to it’s full potential) and who can manage without Bridge (which is only sold as part of Photoshop), Photoshop Elements (for Windows or Macintosh) includes enough functionality for many photographers, although some elements are hidden from the interface (find out more about the hidden elements at Richard Lynch’s site). Also, expect to see Photoshop Express become more and more useful over time. Meanwhile, ACR and the DNG converter are free downloads so they are available to Elements users too.

For me, I’m pretty sure that my new digital photography workflow will be built around Bridge and ACR and I expect to be writing some more photography-related posts as that workflow starts to come together.

Upgrading Hyper-V (pre-release to RTM)

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A few nights ago, I finally got around to upgrading my own Hyper-V installation from release candidate 1 to the RTM version. I’d already updated the notebook PC that I use for work but I’d forgotten about the server at home – it was working well (and if it ain’t broke…). What follows explains the process for upgrading a server that is already running a pre-release version of Hyper-V to the RTM code:

  1. On the parent partition, run the 64-bit version of Microsoft update 950050. This will update the Hyper-V components and will require a restart. After the restart, the version of Hyper-V Manager should be 6.0.6001.18016.
    About dialog from RTM Version of Hyper-V Manager
  2. On each virtual machine, upgrade the integration components ICs – also known as integration services). To do this:
    • Connect to a VM using the Virtual Machine Connection (VMC) tool and log on.
    • Cancel the Found New Hardware Wizard and select Insert Integration Services Setup Disk from the Action menu in the VMC tool.
    • A previous version of the Hyper-V integration services should be detected. Click OK to upgrade.
      Upgrade prompt for Hyper-V integration services
    • When the integration services have been upgraded, restart the virtual machine.
    • Following the restart, there should be no new hardware detected and all synthetic devices (e.g. the Microsoft Virtual Machine Bus Network Adapter) should be at version 6.0.6001.18016.
      Device driver dialog for RTM Version of a Hyper-V synthetic device

The process is time consuming and it does involve restarting every computer in the virtualised infrastructure, which should not be surprising as it also involves some pretty deep changes in the operating system (this upgrade is also from a pre-release version of Hyper-V, which implies it’s not running a production workload).

Customising a Cisco 79xx IP Phone: Ringtones

Posted on By Mark Wilson

In my recent post on configuring a Cisco IP phone for VoIP using SIP, the RINGLIST.DAT file pointed to a file called CTU.raw – a custom ringtone for my phone. I hadn’t realised at the time but CTU is something to do with the TV series “24” and had been passed over to me with the rest of the configuration files that I used for reference. If you want to generate your own ringtones it’s quite simple but beware – there is not room for anything more than a few seconds.

I followed Jozef Janitor’s advice to create a custom ringtone, using the SoX Wrap to generate a .RAW file from an .MP3 on my Mac (I can handle the command line but SoX Wrap is also an easy way to get sox into Mac OS X). If you don’t use a Mac then Leigh Harrison offers some alternatives in his blog post on the subject and Josef’s advice suggests some others. Unfortunately though, even after truncated the file to 16KB using dd it was too long and when I tried to select it the phone displayed Custom Ring Unavailable!. Chopping it down to 15 bytes seemed to work but that left a very short clip indeed (about 2 seconds).

If you’re after a good source of pre-recorded tones, then try The Caretakers’ Website or here. I found that, including the two built-in tones, my 7940 only offered a choice of 50 tones.

Incidentally, RINGLIST.DAT is one supported file format but you can also use an XML file (as described in the Cisco Call Manager documentation for custom phone rings).

If your IP phone is in a work environment, the chances are that the administrators won’t let you add your ring tones to the system. Logan Ingalls found a workaround by using his own TFTP server but I have to warn you that they probably won’t like that either!

Useful links: July 2008

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Not all of the stuff I stumble across on the Internet makes it into my blog posts so, here’s a list of items I’ve come across this month that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

This Modern Life (original artist unknown)

Account lockouts and disconnected remote connections

Posted on By Mark Wilson

For the last week or so, my colleagues have suffered an increasing amount of profanity as I’ve struggled with account lockouts on our Active Directory. I honestly nearly threw my notebook PC across the room last Wednesday.

I’d had my password reset twice and the account lockout flag removed about 7 or 8 times but I didn’t really get the answer that I needed when I asked our (offshored) IT helpdesk what might be causing the problem (for example, were there any AD synchronisation issues that they were aware of). After giving up on the helpdesk, I circumvented the proper support channels and dropped an e-mail to one of the administrators, who helpfully pointed me in the direction of another support team with the tools to diagnose the source of my lockouts and said it tends to be a disconnected terminal session or a software update program (e.g.from Adobe) using old credentials (e.g. to access the Internet via our proxy servers) that causes the lockout.

Sure enough, the problem was traced to a terminal server – and I did have a disconnected session there. Since resetting that session, the account lockouts have gone away and my access to e-mail, intranet, internal websites, Internet proxy servers, etc. has been restored.

My first inclination was to blame the infrastructure – and in this case it turned out to be a user error (or “a layer 8 problem”, as I like to refer to such things)… even so, I thought the experience might be useful for someone else who is getting frustrated by near-continuous account lockouts.

Microsoft Update failure

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve been building a Windows XP virtual machine for test purposes and needed to apply the latest updates (even with Windows XP service pack 3 it required over 20 updates to be applied). Unfortunately, Microsoft Update hit a problem and refused to install some of the updates, telling me that “a problem on your computer is preventing updates from being downloaded or installed“. I tried disabling my anti-virus software (AVG Free) but that made no difference.

Microsoft Update: Failed Updates

Microsoft’s advice is to re-register a number of DLLs using the following commands:

regsvr32 wuapi.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 wups2.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll

For each successful registration, Windows should return “DllRegisterServer in filename.dll succeeded” but wucltui.dll didn’t seem to exist on my system. Even so, after re-registering the remaining DLLs, Microsoft Update successfully installed the problem updates.

Useful things to know about Cisco IP Phone software

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Whilst configuring my Cisco 7940 IP phone it’s been necessary to reset it a few times to load new configuration details. I started out by removing the power (pretty brutal, but effective), until I reached a point where I could telnet into the phone and issue a reset command.

Then I learned the reset codes for Cisco IP phones:

  • For SIP firmware, press *+6+settings
  • For SCCP firmware, key in **#**.

Note that these are soft resets (like Ctrl+Alt+Del on a PC) – they do not return the phone to factory settings.

Finally, it may be useful to know that the default password for the phones is cisco.

Windows Mojave… the great new version of Windows [Vista]

Posted on By Mark Wilson

For a while now, Apple has been poking fun at [Windows] PCs in it’s Mac vs. PC ads. The ads are usually funny – just not very accurate. I really wanted Microsoft to come back with something and they have. Not as humourous – frankly a bit “corporate” – but, nevertheless, the first phase in a $300m campaign is “The Mojave Experiment”.

You see, Windows Vista is doing fine. It’s sold 180 million copies and, comparing percentage market share, Vista is up on where XP was at the same point in its lifecycle but it has suffered from some very bad press. Ironically, it’s harshest critics are the same journalists that think Windows Server 2008 (basically the same core OS with a different feature set) “excels in just about every area […] in contrast to Vista” [Jon Honeyball, PC Pro, February 2008].

The trouble is, that perception is reality. The word got out that Vista was a heap of junk and it spread. Sure, there were some problems when it first released – and that’s one of the reasons it shipped to corporates (who generally run a well-tested desktop image on a limited set of hardware) before it was released to consumers. Lack of device driver support is hardly Microsoft’s fault – they spent 5 years getting Vista ready (and talking to hardware vendors about the device driver model all the way through) – sadly though, the lack of driver support became Microsoft’s problem.

After more than 18 months of bad press, Microsoft figured that if people saw Vista first-hand they might actually like it. They took a bunch of people – average PC users – and asked them what they thought of Windows Vista. They hated it. Most of them had never seen it, but they’d heard it was bad. Next, in an attempt to challenge their preconceived opinions, Microsoft showed the same PC users the latest version of Windows – “Windows Mojave” – and they loved it. Then they were told that Windows Mojave was Windows Vista.

The “Mojave Experiment” website was launched yesterday (although it had been previously reported by CNET and others) and it’s worth a look, although I’m sure true sceptics will still regale stories of obscure things that didn’t work for them on their home-brew PC [or perhaps they’ll just resort to calling me a Microsoft fanboy…].

So, what went wrong with Vista? Well, two years ago, I said that the marketing message wasn’t good enough – and, on the whole, I still don’t think that Microsoft has done a great job of articulating the benefits of Vista. Hopefully this latest campaign will help. Sadly, I have heard many customers say “we’re skipping Vista and moving straight to Windows 7”, like they think that’s going to make the job of dealing with their legacy application compatibility issues any easier. In fact, I believe that the answer for corporates is not a wholesale move to the next (or the next, next) operating system release, but a system of managed diversity.

I’m tired of hearing certain sections of the IT press refer to Windows Vista as Microsoft’s latest Windows ME. ME was awful (and anyway, business users should have been running NT-based operating systems, not Windows 95/98/ME) but Windows Vista is a good operating system. Really. I can honestly say that, running on modern hardware (not necessarily a new PC), I have had no significant issues with Windows Vista. It may not be a necessary upgrade for everyone (if you’re happy with your existing XP installation, then sticking with XP might be the right thing to do) but there really is no need to avoid Vista entirely, or to deliberately downgrade.

As I said last month:

“For the majority of Microsoft’s […] customers, there are very few reasons why Windows XP should be deployed on new PCs in preference to Windows Vista.”

Don’t just take my word for it: see for yourself; decide for yourself.