Windows 2008 R2 is awesome

There are a lot of reasons to upgrade to Windows 2008 R2.  Testing and understanding all the features of an operating system is the key to optimizing a corporate infrastructure as well as completing integration projects. 

This week I learned about a new feature of Windows 2008 R2, restoring a system image.

My primary home/lab server runs Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper-V.  The system has four SATA II  disks:

• (1) 80 Gb system disk
• (2) 1TB drives – Data
• (1) 750 Gb drive – VM’s

Naturally, the 80 Gb drive was not mirrored, and pulled from another workstation.  And it was not mirrored.  And it failed. Actually, it had disk errors and the system would not boot.

So…………

I pulled the 80Gb drive and imaged it with Acronis TrueImage Home 2010 and restored the image to a spare 750Gb SATA drive.  After installing the new drive with the restored image to the server, I restarted the system.  On boot, I found the SYSTEM hive was corrupted and the system went into Repair Mode.  It prompted me to look for a system image, which I have on an external USB drive as well as on the D: partition.  The System Image Wizard found the image (along with a time/date stamp), and I selected it to restore to the C: drive.

The restore took about 30 minutes, and the wizard can restart the system automatically.  I’m up and running and will run updates to make sure I get the latest Microsoft Updates for the server.

Lessons learned:

1. Always have a current image of your server system drive.
2. Use a dedicated system drive that you can image reasonably.  A large system drive (500 Gb, for example), would be a hassle to image and would take a dedicated internal and external drive.  My 80 Gb system drive was fast and easy to image and backup to an external USB drive.
3. Always have a current image of your server system drive.
4. Always have a current image of your server system drive.
5. Retain copies online as well as offline (USB or eSATA).
6. Restore took me under two hours, including the backup and restore of the 80Gb drive, testing three drives to find one that was large enough and SATA II, and Win2008R2 image restore.
7. Always have a current image of your server system drive.

Technorati Tags: hardware,Win2008R2

I’m special, Google told me so…

Below is my notification e-mail from Google regarding the shutdown of FTP support next month.  I always knew I was special, but now Google quantified it for me (0.5%).  I’m not one in a million, but five in one thousand isn’t bad.

I’m moving to WordPress (wordpress.org), but the import (Blogger, and RSS) both failed.  I took a break and will revisit the issue this evening.

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog),  and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/. 

The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.
Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.
For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

Regards,

Rick Klau
Blogger Product Manager
Google
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

[1] http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/05/ftp-vs-custom-domains.html
[2] http://buzz.blogger.com/2007/01/blogger-custom-domains.html
[3] http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/05/ftp-vs-custom-domains.html
[4] http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55373
[5] http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/

----
This e-mail is being sent to notify you of important changes to your Blogger account.

 

Technorati Tags: Blogger,WordPress,PaulIsSad

Bye Bye Blogger

Blogger is eliminating support for FTP publishing as of March 26, 2010.  For once in my life, I’m not waiting until the last minute to change.

I previously experimented with WordPress, then had the mySQL database explode when I attempted an upgrade, so I reverted to Blogger, and have been fat, dumb, and moderately happy since.

After a quick review, I’m looking at WordPress (again), and Movable Type.  I considered using Drupal, and it looks interesting, but I don’t have the bandwidth this year to go deep geek with Open Source. 

I have installed WordPress 2.9.2, and I’m having issues importing ten years of Blogger posts. I don’t want to retain 150 Meg of redundant posts, so I’m looking into alternate methods of exporting and importing Blogger data.

Any input is appreciated. 

Technorati Tags: Blogger,WordPress,Internet,blogging

Google Sandbox closed

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ is now offline.  We have to take our toys and go home.  I enjoy using the various beta products from Google and Microsoft.  For the past few years most of the ‘beta’ tools, with a few exceptions, have been production ready.  Participation in beta programs provides insight into new product features helping define best practices and roadmap technologies for my clients.

Thank you!

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

©2009 Google

Thank you!

Technorati Tags: Google,beta,internet

Free Exchange 2010 eBook - "Exchange 2010 - A Practical Approach"

 

Red Gate Software - Exchange Server Archiver and "Exchange 2010 - A Practical Approach"

Considering Exchange 2010 is a fresh-out-of-beta product, this is a welcome overview of the product.  The book covers the following topics:

Chapter 1 – Overview of Exchange 2010 new features
Chapter 2 – Installation
Chapter 2 – Co-existance with previous Exchange versions
Chapter 4 – Exchange Management
Chapter 5 – High Availability – new features of 2010

 

Technorati Tags: Exch2010,archive,eBooks

Google Experimental Search

http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html

Keeping track of new features in Google is almost a part time job.  I stumbled onto the Alternate View for search results and thought I should post the Experimental Search page.

A comprehensive overview with examples was posted on Ars Technica

My first week at Unisys, I took an accelerated Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 course. Craig (the awesome Unified Communications Instructor) pointed out you can narrow searches to just Microsoft or Linux topics by appending 'microsoft' or 'linux' to google.com to get an alternate, filtered search view.

http://www.google.com/microsoft

http://www.google.com/linux

Technorati Tags: Google,beta,Microsoft,search

Vista SP1 Install

I am in the process of installing Vista SP1 on my HP AMD laptop.  The process is rather tedious, but you run a CMD script which updates your registry.  The update preps your system so you receive up to four hotfixes which are prerequisites for Vista SP1.  I applied two out of three required a restart.  I restarted after the third and my system was able to see the SP1 update when I forced a Windows Update check.

The download was ~300 Meg, and it was 'stuck' at 95% for the better part of an hour. 

After the download, you walk through an SP1 install wizard.  After the update is applied, you restart the system.  It restarts in character mode and applies 66,829 file updates which display on the top of the screen.  The last update is a registry update and the system automatically restarts into graphics mode.

After the restart, it updates the system in three stages, the progress is displayed as the Stage number and the percent complete for the stage.  The last phase took about 30-35 minutes and at this point, the update has taken several hours...

I was one of the many people who experienced the joy of the Vista "unauthorized change" feature and I'm not happy.

I'm not sure what happened, I install *lots* of beta, Microsoft, and third party software on all my systems.  I know what I am doing - aside from an engineering degree, I have been an MCSE since 1996 and MCT since 1998, teaching server and client operating systems.

Currently, my system is still unusable.  I will work on it later today and re-install an operating system if I am unsuccessful in fixing the Vista SP1 upgrade.  I may just choose to upgrade to Windows XP Professional, using an unused license I already own.  I am NOT happy.

Technorati Tags: Vista,SP1,XP,operating systems,Windows,Microsoft

Joel Oleson's Blog SharePoint Land : 7 Years of SharePoint - a History Lesson

Joel Oleson's Blog SharePoint Land : 7 Years of SharePoint - a History Lesson

Sharepoint is a great tool. I am doing a deep dive on SharePoint after joining Unisys, but I have used it in limited capacities for the past four years and it's an awesome tool, particularly when you use Web Parts and MOSS Search. For me, Search is the key - a product can have all the features in the world, but if I can't find what I need, when I need it, it's worthless.

This is an interesting article by one of the SharePoint team members that gives you some background into the origins of the product and product components.

Personal Computing Experiment

I am in the process of re-architect my personal computing life.     Over the next 3-6 months I want to re-focus on technology.  Partly this is a response to my attending Microsoft TechEd 2007 this past June.  The last time I attended TechEd was in June, 2003.  This was when Microsoft released Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003.  This year, I was very, very impressed with not only the depth, but the enterprise quality of the products.  I feel that doing a 'Total Immersion' in Microsoft technologies will help me become a better technical resource for my group, and also improve my ability to provide comprehensive, cost effective solutions to our clients.

Starting this week and through the end of the year, I plan to move from a 'best of breed' approach to a pure Microsoft environment for all aspects of my personal and professional computing.  I will document the process and note exceptions and challenges as they occur. 

I am starting by converting all my tools to Microsoft and upgrading my home network to Windows 2008.  We will be All Beta All The Time!

I am posting this with the latest release of Windows Live Writer.  This web site is running on a CentOS server I share with Peter Gamble.  I will maintain this site, but also experiment with Microsoft Live Spaces where I have a site.