How about this for a test system…

Posted on By Mark Wilson

In one of the SQL Server sessions at last week’s Microsoft Technical Roadshow, Michael Platt showed the first three minutes or so from an MSDN Channel 9 video. In it, we saw one of the systems at Microsoft’s labs in Redmond where ISVs and OEMs assist the SQL Server team with their performance testing and benchmarking – an HP Integrity Superdome system with 64 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 CPUs, 1Tb of RAM and a couple of thousand 18.2Gb disks. Why so many small disks? Apparently it’s about providing provide parallel reading capacity to increase the overall system throughput and hence run the CPUs at their limits.

The whole system cost in the region of $5.1m and the full details of the benchmark tests may be found on the transaction processing performance council website.

Interestingly, one of the problems encountered during the benchmarking was running out of power to spin up all of the disks and having to install a new power distribution unit at a cost of $250,000!

How Microsoft does IT

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Microsoft IT ShowcaseI was at a presentation last week where some interesting statistics were given about Microsoft’s own IT operations:

  • 300,000 devices for 92,000 users in 89 countries.
  • 7,000,000 remote connections per month.
  • 3,000,000 internal e-mails per day.
  • 100,000 e-mail accounts with 99.99% mailbox availability.
  • 1.7Tb SAP database (running on Microsoft SQL Server).

Now who says that Microsoft software doesn’t scale to enterprise levels? For anyone who has ever wondered how Microsoft runs its own IT, check out the Microsoft IT Showcase.

Crazy ringtones – could skins for smartphones be the next big thing?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

It had to happen – with music single sales falling and downloads incorporated into the official UK music charts (since 17 April 2005) one day a ringtone-derived music single (the inevitable evolution of a music single-derived ringtone) would outsell a major music act. Keni was outraged to hear the crazy frog ringtone on my phone today (and no, I didn’t buy it – my brother sent it to me via Bluetooth) but I’m amazed at just how much attention the crazy frog has generated, seeing as it all started off as a Swedish student imitating his mate’s two-stroke scooter (hmm… I do something like that with my son in the shopping trolley as we whizz ’round Tesco…).

What seems particularly strange is how people are petitioning to get this off our airwaves (even complaining to the UK advertising standards agency) – surely if a company has enough money to pay for this level of advertising (and if you’re going to make £10m from selling a single ringtone, that should be plenty), then let them do it – even the “no advertising here” BBC runs ads on its World Service and in the RHS Chelsea Flower Show coverage Alan Titchmarsh regularly mentions that the event is “supported by Merrill Lynch” (there goes the last of my street cred’).

The ringtone download market is growing at a phenomenal rate and according to The Independent, the typical £3 cost of a realtone is divided up as follows:

  • Music publishers 32p.
  • Content aggregators and distributors 64p.
  • Mobile operators 75p.
  • Record labels £1.29.

I was interested to hear Keni comment today that with the launch of the Windows Mobile 5.0 platform (formerly codenamed Magneto), the market for skins to customise smartphones could potentially be as large as the ringtone market (especially with the convergence of consumer-focused mobile phones and digital music players). We’ll have to see if that prediction comes true, but in the meantime I have to confess that I quite like the crazy frog… and the Nokia tune has been driving me mad for the last ten years.

How to take part in some time travel

Posted on By Mark Wilson

So you thought that old version of your website was gone forever? It may have been a little naive of me, but I figured that once I put up a new version of my website, then that was it, the old one was overwritten.

Not so, it seems – today I stumbled across the Internet archive wayback machine, which is a service that allows people to enter a URL, select a date range, and then surf on an archived version of the website. Scarily, I was able to search on old versions of my website going back several years. Not everything is in there, it takes a while to load, many graphics are missing, and if a site wasn’t picked up by the Internet archive crawler then it just won’t appear, but how about seeing old versions of www.microsoft.com?

I guess this can be useful. For example, I used to work for a company called ICL. That name is long since consigned to the history books (they are now trading as Fujitsu Services), but it is still available on the wayback machine. I managed to find a press release from back when the BBC and ICL jointly announced BBC Online in September 1996; as well as what ICL was saying about millennium date compliance in the middle of 1997.

Most web administrators will know that they can control web crawlers (like the one behind the Internet archive) using a robots.txt file in the root of the site (there is even an online robots.txt generator). After the robots.txt file is loaded in the root of the webserver, the wayback machine can be forced to crawl the site, pick up the new file, and remove all documents.

Now it seems I need to go and update the robots.txt files on my websites…

Anyone worried about running Microsoft ISA Server as a firewall?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Over the last few years just about every network administrator I’ve worked with has laughed at the idea of a Microsoft firewall in an enterprise environment (at least as a front line of defence – many organisations use Microsoft ISA Server behind another firewall). When forced by the American parent company to run Check Point FireWall-1 on a Windows platform instead of a Nokia appliance server, one of my ex-colleagues in the European subsidiary of a major fashion design, marketing and retail company was disgusted; but in all honesty, a well-patched and well-managed Windows system can just as secure as a well-patched Linux one (and conversely badly patched systems are badly patched, whoever the operating system vendor).

The Common Criteria Evaluation and Certification Scheme (CCS) is an independent third party evaluation and certification service for measuring the trustworthiness of IT security products, recognised by governments in Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany and France.

Windows 2000 Professional, Server, and Advanced Server with service pack 3 and the hotfix described in Microsoft knowledge base article 326886 has been certified for common criteria evaluation assurance level (EAL) 4+; and ISA Server 2000 with service pack 1 and feature pack 1 (in firewall mode) has EAL 2 certification. According to Microsoft, Windows XP with service pack 2, Windows Server 2003 with service pack 1 and ISA Server 2004 are all undergoing EAL 4+ certification at present.

In addition, ICSA Labs tests firewall products against a standard yet evolving set of criteria and Microsoft ISA Server 2000 with service pack 1 running on Windows server 2000 with service pack 4 has been certified by ICSA. As a side note, for anyone looking at the area of firewalls, the ICSA firewall buyer’s guide is worth a read.

So it seems that a Windows server can be secure enough to run a firewall; and that Microsoft’s firewall product is also pretty secure. EAL 2 might not be the highest certification level, but if ISA Server 2004 achieves EAL 4+, then maybe all of those network administrators’ minds can be put to rest.

Whatever the platform, it’s the solution that counts (problems with AOL on a Mac via ADSL)

Posted on By Mark Wilson

At the danger of being flamed by Apple Macintosh fans everywhere (please don’t) – I thought Macs were supposed to be simple.

To be honest, that’s one of the reasons I didn’t get on with my iMac in the late 90s – it was too big a shift for me as a long-time Windows user (even though I had used Macs at uni’ many years before), but that was with OS 8 or 9 (I can’t remember) and I guess, being UNIX based, that OS X will also give me a command prompt?

Anyway, a couple of nights back, my neighbour, who is very proud of his new purchase – an iMac G5 – dropped by to ask if I could help him get his Mac connected to the Internet. His Windows PC connects fine, using a BT Voyager 100 ADSL modem and AOL but when he called AOL, they said they don’t provide Macintosh support. We spent a few hours looking at this and the best advice I could find was to obtain the Mac drivers for the modem and some configuration information (as well as a phone number for AOL Mac support!) from the Mac User’s forum. Unfortunately the last post at the time of writing is just a few days old and is from someone who had a working connection that has just stopped and we couldn’t get it working either.

Fast forward a couple of days and my neighbour dropped by to say that he phoned AOL and they only support dial-up connections for Macintosh users. He also found the same anecdotal evidence I had found of people who have their Macs working with AOL broadband (but not consistently). Once glimmer of hope is that net4nowt and MacUser talk about AOL Services for Macintosh, which it seems was released on 6 May 2005 as AOL Service Assistant, allowing Macintosh users to access AOL services, although the net4nowt advice seems to be to use this on a routed connection (not direct via ADSL modem).

My neighbour is now off to buy a broadband router (probably the best solution for him anyway given that he has multiple computers now) – fingers crossed that gets him on line with the Mac.

The irony of all this is that he upgraded from Windows ME to XP and couldn’t get his broadband connection working – until I downloaded the BT voyager 100 drivers for Windows XP for him a couple of weeks back! Now his Windows PC works, but the Mac he bought in frustration doesn’t… just goes to show that it doesn’t matter what platform you use, there will usually be some complications in getting the various elements of a solution to pull together (and it seems that for broadband AOL on a Mac it just won’t work at all).

Useful operational advice on the Microsoft website

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Finding information on the Microsoft website is not always easy, but there is some good stuff buried deep there. Like the Windows Server 2003 TechCenter, with topics including:

For anyone looking at developing a set of operational procedures, the Active Directory product operations guide is worth a look. Drill down through this, and it goes right down to the level of commands/clicks in the detailed procedures (e.g. back up system state and the system disk). Other product operations guides are linked from the Microsoft management and operations page for both core products (AD, DHCP, DNS, file, print, WINS) and server application products (Exchange Server, MOM, SMS, SQL Server).

Why consultants should leave hardware alone…

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Today has not been a good day for me and computer hardware.

It all started a couple of weeks back, when I dropped the bag in which I carry the Dell Latitude D600 that I use for work. When I took the computer out of the bag, I had cracked the case on the edge of the screen, although everything was still working. Of course, this type of damage is not covered by warranty (and I can hardly blame Dell on this one) but when I e-mailed the internal support department they had an identical computer over which a colleague had spilt red wine. So, it should just be a case of swapping over the screens and my laptop will be good as new – or that’s what I thought…

Once I put it all back together, I powered on the computer and… smelt burning electronics, combined with wisps of smoke from the motherboard. So that was the end of laptops 1 and 2.

The guys in internal support are helpful (and do have a sense of humour); luckily they had a spare D600 which was working, although the previous user had reported a problem with the display that no-one had managed to look at yet. I slid my original hard disk into the spare unit and it all fired up. Windows Server 2003 plug and play detected a hardware change (just a different wireless network card) and I was away – except that the display switched off after a few minutes, and attaching an external monitor didn’t make any difference. After half an hour on the phone (during which I reseated the monitor connector and restarted the computer several times, with the screen going blank on each occasion after varying lengths of time) I managed to convince Dell that a new motherboard was required and they are dispatching an engineer in due course. In the meantime, I need a computer to work with and so, on to laptop number 4, on which I am typing this post (it has a dodgy trackpad and the DVD drive makes some funny noises, but I can live with that for a few days).

Now, the combination of my recent iPod purchase (so far I’ve managed to rip about a sixth of my CD collection and I’m up to 11Gb of MP3s) and my hobby as a photographer (over 2000 6-megapixel images in the last 6 months) means that I have run out of hard disk space on my home PC, so this morning I bought a 250Gb Seagate Barracuda hard disk from RL Supplies. I was understandably a bit nervous about installing new hardware after the debacle which destroyed 2 laptops and disabled one more – my IT Manager suggested I look out for at least two pairs of magpies on the way home, hang a horseshoe over the door, get hold of some lucky heather and find a four-leaf clover before even opening the case.

I quickly hooked up the new disk and then, armed only with an MS-DOS boot disk and a copy of Symantec Ghost, I cloned my old disk onto the new one in half an hour. Then I removed the original disk, rebooted and after a quick restart to let Windows XP sort itself out once it had detected the hardware change I was away again with a 625% increase in capacity.

Phew! Now I think I’ll stick to software for a while…

Troubleshooting group policy

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I picked up the following advice for troubleshooting application of group policy objects (GPOs) from John Howard at a recent Microsoft TechNet UK event and thought it might be useful if I posted it here:

  1. Is the client operating system Windows 2000 or later? Group policy is not available with legacy clients.
  2. Are computer and user accounts valid in the Active Directory (AD) domain? Group policy is not available with NT domains.
  3. Are the accounts in the correct organizational unit (OU)?
  4. Can clients access the sysvol share on the domain controller? GPOs are partly stored in AD, but also within sysvol.
  5. Is AD replicating correctly? AD information and sysvol information are replicated via the file replication service (FRS).
  6. What is the connectivity like between the client and the nearest domain controller (it may be useful to know that slow link detection relies on ICMP – if ICMP is disabled then this may cause some issues and further information is contained in Microsoft knowledge base article 816045).
  7. Have changes been made to the default policies that may be causing issues? Microsoft recommend that the default policies are not changed, but instead to new policies created to override the defaults (policy precedence is discussed in the priority order for the application of GPOs post from September 2004.
  8. Check DNS – Microsoft UK claim that 50% of the GPO calls received by their product support services (PSS) division are actually DNS issues.

If none of the above resolve the issue, then the issue is likely to be with a GPO itself and there are several tools available to assist with diagnosing this. The group policy modelling wizard and group policy results wizard (which includes WMI filtering) are both included within the group policy management console (GPMC), a free download from Microsoft which also provides reports on policy settings (discussed in the new features of Windows Server 2003 Active Directory post from February 2005). GPMC makes use of the resultant set of policy (RSoP) service to ascertain the policies that would have been applied. Although it is an older utility, the gpresult.exe command line tool (along with gpupdate.exe) is extremely useful for diagnosing the application of GPOs.