October 2008 - Posts

• Running low on disk in Vista?

  I lot of people don´t clean up Vista after installing Service pack 1. You could easily get a couple of gigabytes more with making Vista SP1 “permanent” on your computer. When you install Vista SP1 all the orginal files are preserved on your computer, in case you want to uninstall sp 1. If you are like me and don´t want to uninstall service pack 1, you should open a command prompt as administrator, and run the command vsp1cln.exe   This command will make Vista SP 1 permanent, and remove all the orginal files that were updated with service pack 1. I got more than 2 GB from running this command. You should also run Disk Cleanup, it will really do a great job at cleaning up. Go to more options and clean up your System Restore and Shadow Copies as well. Vista creates a lot of restore points, and I´m pretty sure I don´t need the old ones. While we are on the System restore and volume shadow topic; remember you can use vssutil to see how much diskspace it is using: vssadmin list shadowstorage   That´s all for tonight! Posted Oct 26 2008, 10:42 PM by ragnar with no comments Filed under: Vista, commands, vssadmin

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 RTM

  Yes, it´s true. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 released to manufacturing today. You can read more about this here: http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2008/10/21/system-center-virtual-machine-manager-2008-rtms-and-what-i-m-hearing-from-customers-and-partners-about-microsoft-s-virtualization-solutions.aspx Posted Oct 21 2008, 08:02 PM by ragnar with no comments Filed under: Virtual Machine Manager, Virtualization

• The battle between Notes and Exchange

  In Sweden there has been a battle between IBM and Microsoft lately. IBM claimed that Notes was stealing Exchange customers. For me that was a surprise, as Gartner says Exchange is winning over Notes. Now Microsoft has answered IBMs claims, and it looks like IBM is far from reality. Microsoft answered with a list of customers that have migrated from Notes to Exchange. Then they challenged IBM to give a list of the opposite, customers that have migrated from Exchange to Notes. So far, IBM have not answered that question. In a report from Gartner Microsoft has 62 percent of the market, and IBM 26 percent (2007). They predict that the numbers will be 70-17 in Exchanges favor by 2010. Ferris says that Exchange has 65 percent of the market, and that Notes only has 10 percent. I think that however you look at those numbers it´s amazing what a success Exchange is! Microsoft Exchange rocks! You can read about this here ( norwegian ) http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article109565.ece and here http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article105503.ece Posted Oct 21 2008, 12:15 AM by ragnar with no comments Filed under: Exchange 2007, Microsoft vs. others

• Upgrading domain to Windows Server 2008

  There seems to be some people suffering from problems when they try to upgrade their domain from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008. I ran in to this issue when installing a fresh Windows Server 2008 server into an existing Windows Server 2003 Active Directory. The problem is related to applying group policy, and generates error 1055 with source Group Policy on the Windows Server 2008 domain controller. This one says that it was not able to resolve the name of the domain controller, so you should check your name resolution. The resolution seems to be the following KB article from Microsoft ; http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939820  The title seems to make a lot of confusion, and also reading the article could seem a bit “funny”. As the article states there is a hotfix available to solve the problem. While you wait for the hotfix you can try do stop the Kerberos Key Distribution Center service on the Windows Server 2008 domain controller. If you the try gpupdate /force you should be able to apply the computer policy. If you need to be able to connect with RDP from a Vista client afterwards, please read the full Microsoft article as it explains how this could be achived. And don´t forget to apply the hotfix! We also ran into some issues with the SPN on the domain controller computer objects. The SPN problems can be checked with SetSPN command. If you compare the output of SetSPN on the different domain controllers you will be able to see the missing SPN´s. As a minimum you should at least see the following (this is not a comprehensive list): Registered ServicePrincipalNames for CN=dc1,OU=Domain Controllers,DC=mydomain,DC=com: HOST/dc1 HOST/dc1.mydomain.com HOST/dc1.mydomain.com/mydomain.com GC/dc1.mydomain.com/mydomain.com LDAP/3cb25b0f-3809-48fb-8571-59f4a2253846._msdcs.mydomain.com LDAP/dc1.mydomain.com/mydomain LDAP/dc1 LDAP/dc1.mydomain.com LDAP/dc1.mydomain.com/mydomain.com HOST/dc1.mydomain.com/mydomain E3514235-4B06-11D1-AB04-00C04FC2DCD2/3cb25b0f-3809-48fb-8571-59f4a2253846/mydomain.com Please note that you have to look up the GUID from DNS (under the _msdcs.domain). You list the SPNs by using SetSPN domain_controller_name If people find this useful I will add more information later. That´s all for tonight :) Posted Oct 14 2008, 10:58 PM by ragnar with no comments

• Show your Exchange meeting rooms and resources!

  Some of our customers have asked for a nice way to display todays meetings. Crayon have developed an web application that reads the appointments from seleceted mailboxes (meeting rooms and resources), and shows this on a web page. You can select from different kind of views, as show further down in this post. All layout is based on masterpages and css stylesheets, making it easy to create your own design. The tool reads the mailboxes to show from active directory or file, and presents appointments from those mailboxes. Standard view: This view shows todays meetings that is not finished. When meetings finish, they will be removed from the list. You can combine this view with an rolling advertisment, welcome text and so on. Typical use of this view is in reception area, on a large screen. Report view This view let you select the date you want to see. With this view cleaners and security can plan what rooms that need to be cleaned/supervied and when. Schedule view Schedule view makes an graphical represtantion about the usage. You will see when there is appointments, and who is the owner of the meeting. You can also see the meetings subject. If you want to know more about this tool – please contact Crayon. Posted Oct 10 2008, 07:16 PM by ragnar with no comments Filed under: Exchange 2007, HERO

• Gratis seminar: Windows Server 2008 Management

  (following article in Norwegian only) Seminar: Windows Server 2008 - Drift og vedlikehold Velkommen til seminar på Windows Server 2008, med spesiell fokus på drift og vedlikehold. Seminaret  arrangeres av Microsoft i samarbeid med Crayon og HP, på teknologisenteret hos HP på Bryn. Dato: 14. oktober, kl. 8:30 - 12:45 Sted: HP Norge AS, Østensjøveien 32, Oslo. Finn fram: klikk her. Agenda: 08.30 - 09.00     Registrering 09.00 - 09.10     Velkommen, introduksjon 09.10 - 10.00     Installasjon og Management nyheter i Windows Server 2008 ved Ragnar Harper og Ingar Kopperud, Crayon 10.15 - 11.30     Demonstrasjon Management av Windows Server 2008  ved Ragnar Harper og Ingar Kopperud, Crayon 11.30 - 12.00     Matpause 12.00 - 12.45     Oppsummering, diskusjon, spørsmål og svar Posted Oct 10 2008, 06:46 PM by ragnar with no comments

• Forefront hits the marks…again :)

  Forefront is awarded VB100 for anti-malware performance on Windows Server 2008. This is the sixth VB100 award for Forefront Client Security. As a sidenote, 24 products were tested, and only 16 vendors passed. You can read the report here and you can read about the earlier awards here And of course, we will gladly assist you with your Forefront implementation. (as the Microsoft awarded security partner of the year) Posted Oct 10 2008, 12:17 AM by ragnar with no comments

• Speaker Community, MANUS og Steve B

  I had the pleasure of meeting Steve Ballmer when he was in Oslo, september 30th. A great guy – listning to him is inspiring ! With me on the picture is the rest of Technet Speaker Community and MANUS (Microsoft user group), and Steve Ballmer :) Posted Oct 06 2008, 01:22 PM by ragnar with 1 comment(s)

• Bli kjent med Powershell – norsk Powershell bok

  (following post in norwegian only) Til dere som har spurt om hvor man får tak i min Powershell bok … Posted Oct 04 2008, 03:36 PM by ragnar with no comments Filed under: commands

• How to list issued certificates that expires soon

  If you wish to list out the soon expiring certificates on your CA, then you can use the following certutil syntax: certutil –view –restrict "NotAfter<=9/1/2008 08:00AM,NotAfter>=10/1/2008 08:00AM" –out "RequestID,RequesterName" The above command will list the certificates expiring in september 2008. Posted Oct 03 2008, 07:46 PM by ragnar with no comments Filed under: Windows Server 2008, PKI, certutil, Certificate Services