When Software Attacks!

Windows 7: Attempting to install to VHD – an odyssey

One of the things I am most impressed about with Windows 7 is the latest Media Center. As a result, I wanted to install the build 7000 beta release onto our media PC at home. However, I already have that working nicely with Windows Vista and, frankly, I didn’t want to have to repeatedly reinstall if the beta caused problems. The solution seemed simple: install Windows 7 to a VHD file sitting on the Vista disk.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, February 7, 2009

SharePoint 2007: Following Adobe Instructions Can Cause Problems

Having just spent a long time examining the state of a new farm we’ve been working on for demonstrations, I would like to issue a warning… The Problem: None of the ‘New…’ menu items in our document libraries would work – we were seeing the error message: ‘Edit Document’ requires a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible application and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or greater. The Solution: Correcting an error in the docicon.xml file which lives in c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, February 6, 2009

Managing Remote Hyper-V Servers From Windows 7

I’m using the Mini9 quite a lot lately, at least in part to fiddle with Windows 7. I decided it would be nice to be able to access our Hyper-V servers so I went looking for the management tools… It turns out that Windows 7 ships with the Hyper-V management snap-ins. No real surprise there as my understanding is that it also includes Hyper-V (although I’ve not managed to run it up on an x64 machine yet so I can’t verify that - it certainly isn’t available in x86).

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Windows 7 on the Dell Mini 9

What better way to try Windows 7 then installing it on the Mini 9? Having read all the commentary about the smaller footprint of the new OS I couldn’t resist. If you want to try this yourself, the procedure is exactly as if you were installing Vista. You will need the drivers folder from the Dell, along with the contents of the Program Files\Wireless Select Switch folder from the XP install and the R192569.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, November 10, 2008

Tech Ed EMEA IT: Day 3 - Steve Riley

The last session of the day was just incredible. A surfer-dude with boundless energy wandering around the audience in shorts, cracking jokes and telling stories and every single one related in some way to his point. Steve Riley is a fantastic presenter, and his session - Do these ten things now or else get 0wned was a great session on security. Sadly, I don’t think it’s repeated or I would urge you all to attend the next viewing.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, November 6, 2008

Tech Ed EMEA IT: Day 4 - Guru Central

So, we’re on the penultimate day of TechEd EMEA and I have to say that exhaustion is starting to creep in. However, the day had a great start with sessions by Steve Riley and then Mark Russinovich. Steve was talking about security implications of virtulisation and his views were stimulating. He was talking in depth about what to consider when virtualising machines and why Microsoft took the architectural approach that they did for the Hyper-V stack when security was considered.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, November 6, 2008

Tech Ed EMEA IT: Day 3 - Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation (MED-V)

OK, MED-V is cool! Sadly, cool though it is, it’s not something we’ll use3 at BM, but in my previous lives doing large organisation IT, MED-V would have been a killer. In a nutshell, it is this: create a Virtual PC image with your legacy OS and legacy App. Deploy that VPC to your users desktop so they can run your legacy app but let them run the app without needing to start the VPC and use two desktops.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Tech Ed EMEA IT: Day 3 - Server 2008 R2

We were in early today, looking forward to a session on SharePoint with Bill Engolish. Sadly, that was cancelled so Andy and I sat in on the Server 2008 R2 overview session presented by Iain McDonald. That was very interesing, and we learned a bit more about BranchCache. It doesn’t look like it will replace WAN accelerators like Riverbved, because it doesn’t appear to function at their low level. However, it does a similar thing at the file level.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, November 5, 2008

TechEd EMEA IT: Day 2 - Threat Management Gateway

Andy and I are now in a TMG preview demo. This looks really interesting - we spoke to the guys at ATE last night and saw a few items that I hope to see now in more detail. TMG is ISA Server vnext - codenamed ‘Nitrogen’ and part of the ‘Stirling’ next wave of Forefront. Stirling family members exchange information to allow ‘dynamic response’ - trigger actions from different forefront elements (client sec etc) based on alerts from other elements (eg mail scanner).

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, November 4, 2008

TechEd EMEA IT: Day 2 - Windows 7 Feature Preview

So, the first session of the day was an extremely well-attended overview of Windows 7 features. When they talk about evolution rather than revolution with regard to Windows 7, I think that’s accurate. It was very much about developing and extending the foundations of Vista. A few things stuck out, however. An almost throwaway comment about DirectConnect requiring IPSEC and IPv6 means that I must dig deeper, and that the technology, whilst cool, is almost totally useless to me, stuck behind two layers of NAT in a managed building.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, November 4, 2008