As many of you who support PCs are aware, PC Magazine bit the dust earlier this year and is now online-only. Computer Shopper, another one that I enjoyed from time to time, is likewise departed from the physical magazine space. My favorite microcomputer journal ever, Byte, has been off the magazine racks for many years. And while these publications sometimes live on via the Internet, you can’t read Internet articles easily on a train, subway, airplane, or in an airport. Read more
A few years ago, I sprung for some 15,000 rpm SCSI drives to run my HP engineering workstation. That’s still a high water mark in terms of spindle speed. Even today, the most common speed for workaday drives seems to be 7200 rpm. So it was pretty interesting for me to notice that some mainstream hard drive vendors are actually slowing their drives down! Read more
So I’m dutifully studying up on Server 2008 R2 and reading on Microsoft’s website about how Terminal Services is so good now, that we really can’t call it Terminal Services anymore. In fact, we need at least three new names to describe it. Trouble is, they all seem to mean the same thing. Read more
The Law of Unintended Consequences sometimes works against us but on happier occasions it works in our favor. We’ve been looking at Solid-State Disks recently, and it turns out that they have some unintended benefits beyond the main virtue of being fast. (Although maybe I shouldn’t say “unintended” because I don’t know what the inventors and designers actually intended!) Read more
In an earlier posting, I noted that Solid-State Disks (SSDs) have certain behavioral differences from traditional spinning disks. One of these has to do with the speed of disk writes. Read more
I recently had occasion to upgrade a system drive on a simple server box (no fancy RAID arrays) to a new drive with much higher capacity, lower power consumption, and lower noise. I reviewed the Windows options for performing this operation: 1) Make a full backup to a local hard drive, DVD drive, or network share, 2) install the new drive, 3) reboot to DVD, 4) make a full restore. Read more
Last posting we started looking into using Solid-State Disks (SSDs) in server systems. SSDs still cost in the ballpark of four to five times more than traditional spinning disks, but you can use them in lower-size applications such as system disks, e.g. to reduce reboot times. And the costs are coming down at about 50% per gigabyte per year, which is a faster decline than we are seeing in spinning disks. Read more
One of the things I’ve noticed (and I’m sure you have too) with Server 2008 is that we still see many scenarios in which a reboot is required. For example, adding or removing many of the roles in Server Manager requires a restart. Microsoft has tried a number of tricks (see: delayed-start services) to make these restarts faster, or at least to make them feel faster, but it still takes a pretty long time on many machines before they are fully functional. And don’t forget those reboots we perform in troubleshooting sessions that don’t seem to respond to anything else! Read more
If you’ve ever used a computer with both a wireless and a wired connection, you’ve used a “multi-homed” computer. With Server 2003 and Windows XP, you may be familiar with the scenario where you’re using a multihomed computer to perform a file download, and you realize that you’ve forgotten to plug in your LAN cable. Read more
Microsoft has provided monitoring tools ever since the NT days, and in fact some of those tools don’t look too different even in Server 2008 (wish I still had a screenshot of NT PerfMon, it looks almost the same in its new location under the Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor). And, now as then, it has been somewhat less than easy to get a grip on what all those objects, counters, and instances might actually mean.
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The last couple of postings on this blog have had to do with self-documenting systems. In our society’s ongoing effort to avoid killing trees whenever possible, and at the same time increase the general availability of knowledge, electronic documentation systems have become more popular. Two tools in particular come to mind. Read more
Last time I wrote briefly about the concept of self-documenting systems, and mentioned that Group Policy in Server 2008 finally allows you to comment your GPO’s. Another opportunity for creating self-documenting systems is to annotate your Registry settings. (Of course if you can avoid direct Registry edits, it’s good to do so, but sometimes you don’t have a choice – for example, if you want to completely disable IPv6 on your systems.)
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While changing a tire recently, I ran across something I hadn’t seen before: plastic caps over the lug nuts. There was no obvious way to remove them, so I checked the yellow sticker next to the jack in the trunk – no clues there. The owner’s manual was more informative, instructing me to use a tool that was, unfortunately, missing… but a McGyver’d clothes hanger did the trick.
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So I decided to hunt around a bit and see if I could quickly and easily buy a Windows Server 2008, Foundation Edition bundle. If my experience is any indication, you’re not going to have an easy time of it!
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Many of you have probably noticed that the “run as” feature in Server 2008 is less flexible than the similar feature in Server 2003. Whereas in the earlier operating system, you could run a program “as” any user whose credentials you could specify, Server 2008 only gives you one choice: run as Administrator.
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So I’m working away on a Server 2008 box yesterday and fire up the DNS console, and I’m reminded of a bug that’s been hanging around this console since, ummm, the year 2000. When you right-click a node in the navigation pane of the console, you sometimes don’t see the correct context menu. You have to left-click the node first, to select it, THEN you can right-click it and see the correct context menu.
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So Microsoft is making its Server 2008 Foundation product available only to purchasers of a new computer. This seems at first glance to give hardware manufacturers a nice spiff: hey, the only way customers can get S2008F is if they buy one of your shiny new machines. It also seems to diss the customer by saying, in effect, we doubt you can handle the installation of this product, so we’re not going to let you do it yourself, on your own (possibly perfectly good) hardware. Read more
OK, I’ve done some digging and found out more details on this new small business version of Windows Server 2008. (There *is* information on Microsoft’s site but it’s spread out over several pages and there doesn’t seem to be a single, authoritative PDF.)
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Glenn Weadock is currently an instructor with Global Knowledge, teaching various Microsoft training courses such as MCSA, MCSE, Server 2008 and Vista tracks.
Global Knowledge offers a comprehensive catalog of Microsoft courses:
Microsoft 2003 MCSA Boot Camp
Microsoft 2003 MCSE Boot Camp
MCITP: Server 2008 Combo Boot Camp
Migrating to Server 2008
Managing and Maintaining Server 2008
More Microsoft Courses
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