When Software Attacks!

Places to eat in Seattle: Marcella’s Cookery

Tonight we ate in a place we’d seen recommended by Sara Ford in her blog: Marcella’s Cookery. A fantastic little New Orleans-style eatery run by the eponymous (and very friendly) Marcella and her husband, Anthony. The food was fabulous, well cooked and happily discussed by the chef himself. Between us we tried a number of dishes and all were excellent. Anthony (the chef) told us that he moved to Seattle after Hurricane Katrina and I think it’s Seattle’s gain – we had a great time and I can wholeheartedly recommend the place.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, June 7, 2009

Things to do in Seattle: Baseball

Seattle 2009 008 We had a great night tonight. Our visit to Seattle coincided with three home games for the Mariners, and I went to my first baseball game tonight. Not only was it a fantastic match, going right down to the last pitch, but one of the batters obviously realised I was a baseball newbie and kindly hit me a ball as keepsake! Seattle 2009 010

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, June 4, 2009

Places to eat in Seattle: Lowell’s

slide1 Richard’s an old hand in Seattle, so he suggested we ate breakfast at Lowell’s down at the Pike Place Market. I’m really glad he did – the eggs benedict were fantastic. We ate great food with a fantastic view of the bay. If you’re ever in Seattle I can wholeheartedly recommend that you try Lowell’s while you’re here.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, June 3, 2009

UK Hotels take note – this how to do coffee in my room!

I’m in Seattle this week (just as a big heatwave has rolled in). As I type this I’m looking out from my room at the Westin over a great view of the bay. In the corner I hear my coffee brewing. None of your little kettles and sachets of instant coffee here. Look what I got: Coffee filter machine and Starbucks coffee That’s right, my very own coffee machine with Starbucks coffee.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Configuring IIS Bindings to include host headers with https on Windows Server 2008 (for SharePoint)

NOTE: We use a wildcard SSL certificate which makes our life much easier when dealing with multiple hostnames. I have not tested this approach with multiple SSL certificates for specific sites. We’ve been reconfiguring our SharePoint 2007 farm over the past couple of days and it’s now hosted on Windows Server 2008 and using NLB (network load balancing). The load balancer has been configured with a single public IP address and all our previous DNS CNAME registrations have been replaced with hostname A registrations pointing at the address.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Incoming Email with SharePoint on Windows Server 2008

I’ve been meaning to write this up for a while, simply because it’s not quite as straightforward as with Server 2005. To configure incoming email on SharePoint when running on Server 2008 you’ll need to run through the following steps: Install the SMTP feature Open Server Manager. Click on Features in the left hand column then click add features in the right hand pane. Tick the SMTP Server check box and click install.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, May 27, 2009

SharePoint Service Pack 2 Pains

I finally bit the bullet and decided to upgrade our SharePoint farm yesterday. I’d been holding off for a while because of time constraints and because of a known issue with Project Server, also part of our farm. I took careful steps to increment the farm from the SP1+Infrastructure update all the way through each CU up until the service pack. That all worked fine. It was when I tried SP2 I hit problems.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Creating a new Virtual PC using the Virtual Windows XP Base Disk

One of the most useful elements of the Virtual Windows XP feature in Windows 7 is that the VPC is easily replicated and you can have multiple virtual machines all publishing applications which run in their own sandboxes. Create a new Virtual Machine Create a Differencing Hard Disk from the Virtual Windows XP Base Start the VM and run through the setup wizard: Accept the Licence Agreement image ] Set the keyboard and locale to your needs

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, May 26, 2009

NewSID fails on Windows Server 2008 R2

The title says it all. I’m currently building a virtual lab to test DirectAccess and every time I run newsid on windows server 2008 R2 the system bluescreens irrevocably on reboot. I’ve now switched to using sysprep to change the SID. Here’s hoping the sysinternals guys update what is undoubtedly one of the most useful tools around!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, May 8, 2009

Install System Center Capacity Planner 2007 on Windows 7

I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now, but I’ve never needed to install the System Center Capacity Planner (Andy usually handles that side of our SharePoint engagements). He now has taken the plunge with Microsoft’s shiny OS and hit a problem: SCCP refused to install with an error message saying it was only supported on Windows XP (!) We tried all sorts, and in the end I resorted to our old friend, Orca – the MSI editor shipped with the Windows SDK.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 31, 2009