The Edge of Beyond

Exchange 2010 Storage Calculator available! [update]

The updated version of the Exchange Storage Calculator has just been released! (3.2)

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/01/22/453859.aspx

With the Worldwide Release of Exchange 2010 yesterday, this provides a crucial planning step towards migration!

 

I know what I'm doing today! :P

-H.

Bringing up a PKI Infrastructure (initial)

I'm going to walk myself through setting up a PKI infrastructure, including distribution of the Root CA to Firefox.

For this Lab, I have the following Hyper-V machines:

hs-ca-dc1: Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 Standard (Domain Controller; Management Station)
hs-root-dc1: Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter (Root CA; will be taken offline)
hs-policy-dc1: Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter (Intermediate CA; will be online and run IIS for the CRL)
hs-issuing-dc1: Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter (Issuing CA; Auto-enrolment will be configured)

This is an undertaking in my spare time and as such, updates may be severely delayed. I've just always wanted to document this properly. :) Hope it helps someone out there.

GroupWise to Exchange 2007

What a while!

After a brief Sabbatical, our team rushed straight into AD deployment phase. The initial deployment phase consists of migration of servers, followed by user migration including e-mail. And here lies the Crux!

With Exchange 2007 (E12) on the doorstep,  a plan to migrate from GroupWise 6.5 to Exchange 2007 is needed. While the roadmap is indeed quite similar to Exchange 2003 (E65), a solution to a problem during migration is handled by the Edge Services role, more specfically the SMTP Rewrite function.

So in a Test Lab, I have scaled-down replicas of the Current and To-Be scenarios. While mail-flow using the connectors is no rocket surgery, overlapping authoritative domains plays a role in preventing simple SMTP design. Both GroupWise and Exchange are authoritative for companydomain.com, yielding a power struggle of sorts (Exchange being at the Edge, is of course not quelled :)

Since SMTP Rewrite does not allow rewrites to the GWISE:address connector-space, another method is sought. This is a battle for tomorrow. Indeed, the construction of the City of Rome was not complete within one revolution of the Earth.*

While Microsoft Exchange Shell (or rather the functions necessary for configuration of an Exchange 2007 system) is not a major stumbling block, it is indeed a welcome change for those of us who consider ourselves Keyboard Cowboys. Scripting days are here again!

More on this as it unfolds; The road ahead seems long for now!

 

XeeRz,
Strauß
 

 

 

 

 

Authoritative DS restores

In the fine print of the ArcServe documentation, the lack of support for Windows 2003 R2 was noted. It was more evidently noted in the release notes of Service Pack 1.

I recently attempted a Authoritative DC restore, after (stupidly) trashing "The" Parent OU. Authoritative restore was overwritten by updates from the other DC (the FSMO hoster), but the lack of application of SP1 to the ArcServe (AS) 11.5 installation was in the back of my mind, so I ignored.

 I applied SP1 and restored, leading to the following situation:
 It seems that the restore just restores deleted items, not a restore-to-point-in-time, as it were.

So, since all objects were manually recreated (without the cleanups, etc), restored objects were named $DUPLICATE-XYZ where XYZ is a numeric code.

 I'll be looking into this, especially the ties into the currently running MIIS design integration.

 Post-Note: I have noticed replication is severely messed-up. This may be due to a number of things. More info once I have "phoned-a-friend." :)

XeeRz,
Strauss
 

 

Oh, the un-amity!

Every once in a while, Karmic law takes its course and one can reap a little justice. Today is one of those days :)

I have a problem with Hardware Vendors who present their solutions as the best ever, when it's been available elsewhere (and better) for a long period before. Also unrelentingly and groundlessly defending an inferior product is a point worthy of a lynching, in my ... uh, professional opinion.

 So, on a completely unrelated note, Dell's recalling notebook batteries again, something I've been keeping a quiet eye on for a while. (Source). There've been too many instances in the last few months of notebooks going up in flames, including one on an Airplane.

 
This announcement coming hours after I've been told that I'm getting a Dell Notebook today. So I'm fearing for my life :) (just kidding!)
 

To be fair, there are numerous other products using the Sony-supplied batteries, so the full extent of the product failure may yet have to be seen. And, the day is still young, so more information (or finger-pointing) may very well still be on its way.

 

Regards,

Strauß

 

…and the ‘other’ 32-bits?

With the hype around 64-bit technology, one might be tempted think that all the 32-bit problems are automagically solved. Welcome to 1995 :)

As an analogue to the 16- to 32-bit transition in '95, driver complications are the bane of any platform change. The blame for the lack of sound-card driver support here lies firmly in Creative's court.

So without sound, I had a look at Vista x64 (build 5384):

I blanked out the partition with nulls, in order to avoid cross-pollination with the 32-bit version :) Surprisingly, the purported Red Screen did not appear, but a White One greeted me. Perhaps the red-one is tied in to corrupt system files, but that's a story for another day's testing :)

The procedure went in much the same vein as the 32-bit version. The only installation hitch I ran into was lack of space for the installation image. My partitioning scheme has a 10 GB C:, which had about 3.5 GB free at the time of installation. While Vista x86 sailed through (DVD image being 3.12GB), the x64 version kept on snagging out there. With a rather vague "Setup was unable to locate a locally attached hard drive suitable for holding temporary Setup files." (Hey! there's 20GBs right there on the other partition!), and a few boots into XP (which, unlike with certain other bootloaders *cough*LILO*cough* continued to work after the main OS partition was trashed) the issue was finally resolved. Freed up some more space on C: and continued.

The memory issues remained, but hey! Debug symbols are quite big and necessary at this point (implied by the word Beta :).

An annoyance inherent in the disk management subsystem is the inability to easily move the boot drive from D:. My automated scripting / Domain Policies are not doing too well coping with the lack of hard-coded structures (see? D: means DATA :), but I guess that should make me use %EnvVars% instead, eh?

I'm struggling to see any visible benefit in x64. Granted, I haven't yet done any hardcore application testing, but the lack of sound (and therefore music) forces me to install Vista x86 again. Maybe by Friday Creative will have released updated drivers, but judging from their track-record, I'm not holding my breath. :(

If there any suggestions to reap the benefits of x64, I'm all ears :^)

Tomorrow, I'm off to MS System Center Bootcamp, so chances are I'll only be doing more Vista work on Friday.

Regards,
Strauß

Life in Vista-land (32-bit)

It's no news that Vista Beta 2 has gone public last week.

I got hold of a copy of Build 5384 on Friday and have been playing with it incessantly.

After installing the OS, I realised that I had made the cardinal mistake of not ensuring all drivers were available. Thankfully, the nForce4 NIC driver had installed successfully making the lack of drivers an annoyance.

My first reaction was that it's considerably faster than Build 5308 (Feb CTP). This could be owing to the RAM upgrade since then (went from 1 to 2 GB).

Most thankfully, the LUA has become less intrusive. Although file operations (in certain system folders) are still at the annoyance phase, it's become a necessary evil. I actually quite like the idea, to be honest. I've not been hard-enough on myself to use a non-administrator account, but should be doing that soon.

Joining a Windows 2003 domain seemingly proved no issue, as it was with the Feb CTP.

The most noted thing was the amount of RAM being used: 623MB upon boot time. Disabling Aero yields a 591MB utilization.

Eventually I got hold of my Soundcard drivers and obtained updated nForce Drivers. Music returned to the Windows Experience, enlightening the mood. The Creative Control Panel was noticibly absent, but the drivers are more than 6 months old.

A most welcome addition is the "More Details"-ed copy window, providing a speed monitor. Sadly, even after 88.61 Vista Geforce drivers, the Aero-specific Task Switcher still has "jaggies" to my dismay.

And "the only improved feature" doesn't seem to exist: The Red-Screen of Death seemed quite black and white. A photo will accompany the 64-bit review in the next two days. It was forced (blanking the partition with Vista). The bootloader continued to work (booting Windows XP), which is more than I can say for most Linux distributions using LILO.

The scariest moment was the 1791MB memory usage noted yesterday. But since it's Beta code, it can surely be forgiven :) And I haven't considered the inner kernel workings yet. More post-64-bit-review work :)

Regards,
Strauß

Comparing 64-bit AMD architectures

I've recently had the opportunity to test a Sun Ultra 20 Workstation. With 2GB of ECC SDRAM, 250GB SATA and an Opteron 152 (clocks at 2.6GHz), the loan machine is quite a workstation, even by today's standards.

For reasons of comparison, my home machine is an Athlon64 3800+ X2.

My first reaction to the Opteron was the noise level. The Dell Optiplex at the office is completely silent. My whitebox Athlon is quite quiet, too. The Sun machine, however, runs so loud that I suspected neighbours were vacuuming at 05h00.

I was also (disappointingly) surprised that an nForce motherboard was included. While I like the nForce mainboards, I was expecting a Workstation-class motherboard be installed. The Quadro FX shipped with the Workstation did not ship with a DVI-VGA converter and mine was out of reach for the test period (lending to people is always fun…) I thus fell back to a GF6600GT for testing the Gaming Suitability.

In conclusion, the results were mediocre, with the benchmarking results' scores around 60-70% of my home machine.

It should be noted that Quake 3 benchmarks ran about 10% faster on the Opteron, although it had a 30% clock speed advantage. And in it's defense, I have two cores.

The price difference between my white-box and the Sun box means the Opteron is way out of line. And the Opteron 152 is a single-core processor.
 
R21k for a 2.6 GHz machine is overkill… And it's noisy as all Hell…

On the Intel front,

Critical Hole in IE

Secunia is reporting a critical exploit in IE 6 and IE7b2 regarding the createTextRange() function.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1941507,00.asp

http://secunia.com/advisories/18680/

This affects a fully patched XPSP2 system as well.

Regards,
Strauß

Vista .NET applications/services (and a mini-review of the X-Fi)

This article trends the number of .net applications and services in the last few builds of Vista. It suggests that the number of managed applications is decreasing in each build. This was to be expected, as managed code is frequently touted as being slower than native code.

On a completely unrelated note, I got hold of a Creative X-Fi sound card.

First impression was mild disappointment, though I've yet to use a higher quality source (HDCD or DVDA). The highly touted 24-bit crystaliser seems like no more than a graphic equaliser boosting Bass and Treble.

The EAX effects have not yet been given a day in the park, but I will be testing F.E.A.R. and Half-Life² to get an idea of the advancement.

So advertising wins another round :(

Regards, Strauß.

Firefox Alpha to feature this week

It looks like the new Firefox Alpha 2.0 will be released this week.

Story on Digg
Mozilla Wiki

Any work on the Memory Management Issues inherent to the Gecko Rendering Engine will seemingly only be addressed in Firefox 3.0. This will allow for a market share erosion when Vista / IE 7.0 ships.

No allusion to the "issue" related in Carlos's post, though :)

Regards, Strauß

…to the land of the extant!

Well today marked the beginning of my first migration from NDS to Active Directory. The day consisted mostly of getting the base deployment ready and the migration testing will continue through the rest of the week.

In addition, I had hands-on experience on Windows Vista Beta 2 today, which I saw at TechDays on Thursday. I must admit that it's quite responsive compared to the Beta 1 code I have seen being demonstrated. Also the driver support (out of the box) seems rather comprehensive, including the ATi driver which had no issues running AeroGlass.

Many features are revamped with my favourite little-feature being the ability to Alt-Tab to the desktop. This allows browsing with very little mouse contact, a favourite parlour-trick of mine.

After a year of absence from even reading code (and with the freebie from TechDays :) I've decided to re-look at programming. Judging from my Java background, I'll probably stick to C# for the moment.

Regards, Strauß.