When Software Attacks!

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

Windows 7 on the 8Gb SSD Mini 9: Redux

You may remember that I ended my previous post with about 1.6Gb free on the 8Gb SSD of the Mini 9 after installing Windows 7. I still needed to install Office 2007, or at the very least Word and Excel for the ‘book to be useful. I therefore rummaged out another 16Gb SD card and revisited my earlier vista post about installing apps to an SD card. This time I simply let the card allocate a drive letter and installed Office to d:\Program Files instead.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, February 20, 2009

Windows 7 on the Dell Mini 9 with only the 8Gb SSD

In my previous post about getting Windows 7 onto the fantastic Dell Mini 9 I talked about solving things like the driver issues and antivirus. This time I’m going to cover how I installed Windows 7 onto the 8Gb SSD version of the Mini 9. Interestingly, Windows 7 will actually install in about 8Gb. However, when I tried to run through my previously documented steps, it told me that it did not recommend installing to a disk of less that 8303Mb.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, February 19, 2009

Achieving HDMI audio output with ATI hardware on Windows 7 (and Vista)

The steps in this article were figured out with Windows 7. However, they should work just fine with Vista for anybody having the same issues. Note that whilst this is written for ATI hardware, it may be the case that NVidia gear suffers from the same problem and this solution should help. Background first. I spent a while sorting our AV gear so I could use HDMI as the universal connection standard.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, February 8, 2009