technical solutions and commentary

This is a hilarious posting on Todd Watson’s Blog on IBM. The post is below…

“A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest chemical element yet known to science. The new element has been tentatively named ‘Ibmentium.’ Ibmentium has 1 neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 11 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Ibmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Ibmentium causes one reaction to take over 4 days to complete when it would normally take less than a second.”

When installing Citrix MetaFrame and joining an existing farm, which is using a Microsoft Access Database for the Data Collector service, you may receive an error that you can not login to the database on the remote server. In order to get around this, the “Local Administrator” MUST be added to the “MetaFrame Administrators” container in the CMC on the first server in the farm which the access database is located on.

If you can;t get your farms published applications to show up in the Web Interface (and your sure port 80 for XML is open between the servers), make sure you have the option cecked in the server properties list to: “Trust Requests Sent to XML Service” under the ‘XML Service’ area of the server properties which you are trying to populate your published application list from.

If you are running Citrix Servers on a vmware platform, you may get User Enviroment errors when users log off the server. They will get a dialog box that that says “Windows cannot copy file c:\documents and settings\%username%\Application Data\VMware\hgfs.dat to location \\fileserver\profile$\%username%\Application Data\VMware\hgfs.dat. Possible causes of this error include network problems or insufficient security…”.

The workaround for this is to create a Group Policy and apply it with the following setting:

‘Preventthe following directories from roaming with the profile’ : “‘c:\documents and settings\[username]\Application Data\VMware”

There is a free software product that I find invaluable. It’s an application that takes a snapshot of the PC befare and after an application installation and records all the changes made to the system. It works on every platform I’ve tried it on including Windows Server 2003. I actually too a snap-shot of a server before and after a DC promo and recorded all the changes to the system. Worked great.

The same source has another free application that actually allows you to take snap shots and then package the snap shots for deployment. I haven’t used it yet but it looks promising.

These applications can be downloaded here: http://www.epsilonsquared.com/

With the release of Exchange Server 2003 SP2 this last week, there has been a lot of excitement about the new features in the comunity. It hasn’t taken long for people to test and deploy this service pack and ahre their insights. I have put together a list of resources from MS and bloggers on this SP below.

Microsoft released Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 today on it’s download site. Thsi SP adds all kinds of awsome features and expansions to the Exchange 2003, including expanding the mailbox store to 75GB from only 16GB in pre-SP2 Standard editions. It also has a bunch of other great features. It’s really a “must have” service pack for any Exchange deployment… Standard or Enterprise.

Get it from Microsoft here.

I’ve been experimenting with the Windows Sidebar preview. The same sidebar that was shown in the Windows Vista Pre-Beta 1 release. As it turns out a couple of people had that pre-beta build and were able to modify the files to make them run on a Windows XP machine. So, after I got the Sidebar working, I zipped up the files, changes the instructions, and am making it available here. We’ll see how long that lasts.

After running the sidebar for about a week, it reminds me of a reincarnated idea of the Windows 95 Active Desktop. Remember that? You where supposed to be able to add any type HTML content (Active Content) as your desktop background. Interesting idea, but became more annoying than useful after a while. Especially since it seemed to break weekly.

While I love the clock gadget, the search gadget is annoying (at least in this preview version). When you search for someting, it pops open an IE window with your results in search.msn.com… boring. They need to tie something in the MSN Desktop search windows to make this better. The RSS feed box is very limited. The preview version only allows you to add a single RSS source. The photo viewer is nice, but doesn’t really have a practical business application.

Another annoyance is the amount of real estate it takes up on the desktop. When you maximize a window, it expands just up to the edge of the side bar. You can drag windows around the desktop and under the sidebar to move them out of the way, but the side bar always stays on top. That means you can’t click the close, min, max buttons on any windows under the sidebar. It really needs to have a send to background option, and a hide, or shrink to the side feature. You sould also be able to reduce and expand the amount of pixels wide the side bar is…. hopefully that will e the case in the release version. At this point you can’t detatch the gadgets, but MS showed that ability is changing in the new verison they are going to add back into Vista.

My take on the Side Bar thing is… it’s neat, but I see it finding it’s way to the Active Desktop feature, UNLESS, there are some practical applications bult for this by MS or third parties. It also needs options for the user to decide how much space it can use, and make it more user managable. Oterwise I think it will sit on the desktops of new Vista users for a few days until it becomes more of an intrustion or annoyance in the user experience. But that’s just my view. Tryout the preview and see wat you think.

Here are some archiving solutions for Exchange server, that may possibly be used for compliance.

Third party solution vendors:

You may run into a problem with network drives or printers not mapping on Windows XP Pro workstations in your domain. This may be caused by the way XP processes the login process and the application of GPOs. A major factor in this is if you have workstations authenticating over slow links (WAN, VPN, etc) or have high network congestion. If you have this problems with XP workstations, that are a result of the network environment, likely you will not be experiencing this with 2000 workstations since they process the GPOs differently at login.

See the following KB articles for troubleshooting this issue.