Archive for the ‘Sys. Admin.’ Category
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Windows 7 turned up in the post today. The red box is Visual Studio 2008 which is there to show that the boxes have a similar profile to the old style hard cases.
I have been running the Beta since it was first available to the general public, and I have had Windows 7 Business at work for a couple of weeks now. Bought Windows 7 Home Premium for about £45 from Tesco. One copy for the main PC which I will probably re-build at Christmas and one copy for the laptop which is re-built now. Scott Hanselman described Vista as an operating system that stabs you in the eye a thousand different ways, I would have to agree with that. Windows 7 is different, things work how you think they should and don’t seem to randomly break when you least expect it.
As for the title of this blog post, I have mostly been installing Windows 7 to Vampire Weekend which Kev introduced me to. The track M79 seems to have taken some inspiration from the Sailor’s Hornpipe better known as the Blue Peter theme tune, seems to cut off just at the moment I am expecting it to carry on into the main part of the music. Maybe there is a Mike Oldfield link in addition to the lyrical Peter Gabriel link.
If I am moved to over the course of the next couple of week I shall try and point out some of the new features available in Windows 7 that are cool. For the time being try the following hold down Alt, while still holding down Alt press “Alt Gr” (The other side of the space bar) then press Tab. For some reason you get the old XP style Alt-Tab window. Utterly pointless?
Posted in Diary, Sys. Admin. | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 5th, 2009
Having done a little experimenting with Visual Studio Extensions for WSS (VSeWSS), I wanted to start actually developing features for our intranet site. I try and add everything that is even slightly important into source control (Subversion). VSeWSS creates normal looking solutions, however when you deploy your project to a SharePoint site it created an additional directory alongside “bin” and “obj” called “pkg”.
This “pkg” folder contains the manifest.xml, soloution.xml and feature.xml files that are used to create the feature to be deployed into SharePoint. Initially I was including this folder in my commits however, I noticed that any tweaks made to feature.xml were overwritten when you deployed the package again. After some searching around I came across an article that suggests deleting the “pkg” folder under certain circumstances. From this I assume that the contents of the “pkg” folder is generated each and every time you package and deploy your solution (or indeed project), thus it does not need to be added to source control.
While writing this post I did come across another blog that suggests adding the “pkg” folder to source control. There does appear to be little advice out there regarding VSeWSS and Source Control. I would be interested to hear others experiences on the subject.
Posted in Programming, Sys. Admin. | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.
The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.
Posted in Sys. Admin. | 1 Comment »
Monday, September 8th, 2008
For my regular day job I am a Systems Administrator, my team and I manage a network with 7 servers and approximately 600 workstations, 200 laptops and 2500 users. All clients are Windows XP SP2 or SP3 and all servers are Windows 2003 SP2 or Windows 2003 R2 SP2.
I am sure I am not alone in knowing least 5 commands that I use day in and day out to manage workstations or servers on the network. I thought I would take the time to share some of these with you now.
Posted in Misc., Sys. Admin. | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
The SMART .notebook format is simply a zipped set of XML and SVG files, This may be common knowledge but it is certainly the first time I have come across it.
To test it you can create a file in SMART Notebook rename the extension from .notebook to .zip, double click to open, you will be presented with several files named pagen.svg where n is a number, as well as a series of other files and folders including settings.xml, preview.png and metadata.xml.
The XML and SVG files can be edited in notepad, or perhaps more useful for the SVG files in a program such as Inkscape.
Posted in Sys. Admin., Things You Find | No Comments »
Saturday, September 1st, 2007
Seeing as Catherine and I finally bought our own house and it looks like we might be staying here for much longer than we have ever stayed anywhere else, we are looking at options for home networking, our current solution involves a 802.11b Wireless Network for laptop connectivity and a cable for my PC, that has to be removed each night to close the living room door.
Posted in Misc., Sys. Admin. | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
I am currently trying to diagnose several Windows XP SP2 computers with severe network problems, the bottleneck is in the network. Whilst deploying a group policy object the Windows Installer Service crashed due to a network time-out, and this was the resultant response from Error Reporting:
So there you go the problem with Windows XP is Windows Vista!
Posted in Sys. Admin. | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
Recently purchaced and installed a new HP ProLiant DL320s to run as the site primary file server, had some issues with Windows 2003 R2 32-bit as it repeatedly BSODed before getting into graphical setup, tried the drivers for the SAS controller also tried the disc on a different computer to no avail. After chatting with a few people someone asked why I wasn’t going for 2k3 R2 64-bit, the main reason for not using it was it I had not had a chance to test it out in a test environment and wasn’t overly happy putting it into a live environment, looked at the software that was going on the File Server and all seemed ok, installed the ProLiant Support Pack migrated files, setup file screening and quotas. All was well, server running very fast and very happy.
Came to install BackupExec 10d yesterday, BIG mistake seeminly when I checked to see if BackupExec supported Windows 2003 R2 64-bit on a x64 Architecture I got confused, yes remote agents are supported on that architecture and the media server is supported on IA64 Architectures, however the media server is not supported on Windows 2003 R2 64-bit (x64)… wooops.
Fortunatly it seems that all is not lost as BackupExec 11d looks like it will work and the options from 10d can be upgraded to 11d, now all I have to do is cost it all up. Note to self and other system Administrators read Symantecs compatability lists VERY carefuly.
Posted in Sys. Admin. | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005
I have done this a couple of times at the request of BT and NTL engineers when internet connections haven’t been working as expected:
netsh int ip reset [log_file_name]
Very useful if you a struggling to figure out why you can’t even ping 127.0.0.1.
Posted in Sys. Admin. | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 21st, 2005
Found a very useful tool called ISORecorder for creating ISOs from CDs, it works well with daemon tools, and burns ISO images created with nLite, pretty good replacement for the ISO Burning portions of Nero.
If you wanted a burning tool similar to Nero with the ability to add individual files and directories to a CD Image take a look at the free CD Burner XP.
On a totaly different topic, there is a heated discussion going on over here about the relative merrits and disadvantages of Wireless Mice over Wired Mice… if you feel like a bit of an expert feel free to join in!
Posted in Sys. Admin. | No Comments »