David Lemson's WebLog

What's the story with WINS?

dlemson — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 05:56:00 GMT

Recently, someone asked the following question on an internal Microsoft distribution list:

Can someone please outline the ways in which Exchange 2003 is dependant upon WINS..?

Here's the answer I wrote back:

Exchange 2003 is dependent upon three different things that are related to WINS:

1) DNS resolution of "short names" - i.e. there are places in the Exchange 2003 code where it uses the standard DNS resolver libraries to look up things like "japansvr04", and the DNS resolver appends the DNS suffixes, which may help it find the item, which may be "japansvr04.corp.company.com". For instance, we store servers in the AD as short names, and use that name in many places, including in the admin GUI code. In order for this type of lookup to work, you need to ensure that the DNS search suffixes are set correctly on your DHCP servers (or on the servers themselves if you aren't using DHCP).

2) NETBIOS Name resolution of "short names" - i.e. there are a smaller number of places in the code where it uses specific NETBIOS APIs that do not append the DNS suffix. This includes setup, some cluster-related setup/admin, and some Exchange System Manager code. In order for this type of lookup to work, you need one of two solutions:

a) Netbios name resolver - this is a service that uses subnet broadcast to let you find the IP addresses of other hosts on your network, based on the name. This is what lets me, on my desktop machine at home, type in \\server\videos and see the share from my server, without any DNS or AD setup. This works fine but only if all of your admin consoles and servers are on the same subnet!

b) WINS - this allows netbios name resolution between machines on multiple subnets

3) Uniqueness of "short names". WINS enforces that all short names are unique within the set of domains/servers that use the WINS servers. Exchange 2003 stores config info in AD by shortname (think of it as the foldername in the Configuration naming context in the AD) - if you were to have two different servers with the same shortname (but unique FQDNs) and try to put them in the same Admin Group, I'm not sure what would happen - I know it wouldn't work!

In Exchange 2007 we are fixing the first 2 of these. (we can't fix the third one in order to have interop with Exchange 2000/2003). We have code in the pre-requisites check to give you a nice error message if you try to install a second server with the same name in the Exchange org (since all 2007 servers are in the same AG).

Obviously if you have any pre-2007 servers around, you have to keep WINS around.

You can also find more information in this KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=837391

Exchange 12 unveiled

dlemson — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 09:44:00 GMT

Where have I been? I have been so very bad at blog posting. I like to think that I favor quality over quantity :-), but I'm afraid I've been a huge slacker when it comes to this blog. But I'm going to try to change and blog more often, now that we're starting to go more public with Exchange "12".

In case you missed it from the EHLO blog, our first Exchange "12" CTP is now available to TechNet subscribers. I encourage you to check it out.

Also, I will create some posts about my recent Media Center adventures. I built a new theater room in my bonus room, and I'm using the app from "timmmoore" at thegreenbutton.com that uses IEEE-1394 to stream broadcast channels off of a cable box

We are doing webcasts this week on TechNet, you should join in to hear about Exchange "12"! I am doing the webcast on Thursday, Client Access and Web Services in Exchange "12". Today, Tuesday, at 1 pm Pacific, you can see Terry Myerson, the Exchange General Manager, doing an overview of Exchange "12" session.

TechEd Day 1&2 from an Exchange perspective

dlemson — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 13:31:00 GMT

It’s been a huge couple of days for the Exchange team, especially the Exchange Mobile Sync team, which is in my group. In case you missed the news, at TechEd on Monday we announced Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 as well as the Messaging and Security Feature Pack for Windows Mobile 5. It’s so exciting to be able to show the world what we’ve been doing lately. The summary of what this does for mobile sync devices that use Exchange ActiveSync is to give the end user instant email and the mail administrator the ability to set policies to secure devices. There are some other features for both, including a GAL lookup feature on the device, so you can call, email, or look up office locations of people who aren’t in your contacts. Be sure to read the Exchange team blog this week, where developers from the Exchange Mobile Sync team are writing great, candid, deeply technical articles about our sync changes. (You gotta love Sami's post from yesterday - he was the lead dev for our new "Direct Push" technology)

Last week while the marketing team was working on press releases, press calls, and stuff like that, my PM team and our colleagues in Windows Mobile have been working on the demos that showed off the product on Monday. We had four separate demos on Monday in which we showcased our new mobile features. We had the Steve Ballmer keynote, the Dave Thompson/Kurt DelBene Collaboration Strategic Briefing, the Dave Thompson MSG200 “Exchange Today & Tomorrow” session, and Max Ciccotosto’s SP2 Mobile features session. What a production – we had to make multiple copies of our demo setup and make sure it worked in every room, around the convention center. This is my first time being involved in executive sessions, much less actually doing the demos in one (I did the SP2 demos in MSG200). It involves many slide reviews, runthroughs, and rehearsals. When you see demos go off without a hitch in a big session, you can rest assured that it is because the staff spent tens or hundreds of hours preparing – pre-release software doesn’t just work perfectly by accident!

We also had to cope with handing off a limited number of the cool new devices that we are showing off, like the HTC Universal. It was neat to get to use the Universal – it is a really hot device. The 640x480 screen really makes it look great, and the keyboard is really nice. I can’t wait until I get more time to use one. If you are at the show, make sure to stop by the Windows Mobile booth in the exhibit hall – we have all of the latest Windows Mobile 5 devices on display, including the Universal and the new ruggedized Symbol device shown in the Steve Ballmer keynote.

I also spent some time yesterday in the Exchange "cabana" - a new idea they started at last year's TechEd, where we basically have 10-20 Exchange experts standing/sitting around in one spot all day, waiting to answer customers' questions. I think it's a great thing, and it seems to be well received by attendees. Sometimes I can't believe that we used to just have one evening event of "Ask the Experts" - it's obvious that we're learning and tuning the conference to respond to attendees' wishes.

It's always fascinating to me to see what the "buzz" is in the questions that people have. Of course many of the questions are sort of "the system is doing something it shouldn't, why is that?" which is usually met with a "I have never heard of such behavior, the best way to diagnose that is to call support". We always feel bad when we can't figure something out (as we are driven engineers who take pride in our product!) but sometimes it's hard to diagnose it without seeing the system. People open up their laptops with a terminal services session in to their server, and yesterday I suggested to a guy who works at a bank that he have someone back at the office take a screenshot of his settings and email it to him so he could print it out and bring it over :-). But the most interesting questions are sort of more architectural, "I have this system and I want to change it in this way". It is these questions that allow me to take a "pulse" of the customer base... in 2002, most of those questions were still 5.5 problems from customers who weren't really motivated to move off of 5.5. But in 2003, that started to change, and by TechEd 2004, most of the architectural questions were "I am planning my migration from 5.5 to 2003. Help me make sure I'm doing it right". And that continued in this show - lots of people asking that question (although less than last year, indicating that many of them succeeded).

Finally, the last change that I've seen in this year's TechEd that I applaud is the Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions being more prominently advertised - actually advertised in the mini-booklet that everyone carries. These have always been the most useful for part of many non-MS conferences, e.g. USENIX events, for me, over the years. Just as you often learn more from your peers that you work with than your managers, I think that you may learn more from your peers at a conference than the sometimes-narrowly-focused experts who give the sessions. How do you think we did with BoFs for the Exchange community?

Want to work on mobile/web access technologies in the Exchange Team?

dlemson — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 18:33:00 GMT

See my post on the Exchange Blog for details on some job openings in my team. As a bonus, can you guess who I am channeling in the first paragraph? (hint: there's a lot of rhetorical questions)

My favorite spot on the MS campus

dlemson — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 07:34:00 GMT

I was just reading a not-so-old post on Adam Barr's blog about his favorite spots on the MS campus and then a follow-up to it, and I thought I'd write about my favorite spot. The other day, we were coming back from a meeting in building 31 on our way to the building 34 cafeteria and decided to go through this spot. Next to 163rd Ave NE there is a stand of trees with a path that winds through it in a meandering way. It was obviously deliberately set up to be this way, but for just a minute, you feel like you are out on a hike in the forest. I know there are tons of places in Seattle that are like that (which always surprises someone like me, who spent many years in the midwest), but it's really amazing to be like that right next to your modern office building. Not to try to show up Adam or anything, but here's the overhead view of the spot!

Great MCE 2005 feature: Info on Movies

dlemson — Sat, 25 Dec 2004 05:29:00 GMT

It seems like every day I find a Media Center 2005 feature that makes me say, "wow isn't that cool!" Today's is "More Info" on Movies.

First, when you want to pick something to watch, it treats movies separately, you can see what movies are on now, on in the next hour, etc.:

This was interesting but didn't knock my socks off. Then, we get to the cool stuff. I am an IMDB junkie, I love seeing what actors were in what movies. So I was delighted to see this, when I hit the "Info" button while watching a movie, and then selecting "Cast & More":

You can see what seems (in my small sample size I've looked at) to be a complete list of the credits, a real, critical review of the movie, and a list of other movies you might like to see. Then, if you click on someone in the credits (in this case, Sean Connery):

You can see the other movies that Sean Connery was in, and if they are in the guide on a channel you receive, it will tell you what channel and when. Of course, you can click on it to record it. Neat!

Quiet MCE, Part Deux

dlemson — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 19:10:00 GMT

Earlier this year, after being a TiVo fan for quite a few years (I have the little plush toy they sent me in my window at Microsoft :-), I decided to see what Microsoft's solution was all about and installed a Media Center 2005 machine. Now that we've been using it, the plan is to ditch the DirecTiVos and get Media Center Extenders instead... it is an excellent solution. The only downside for me was that the Dell 400sc I was using was not very living-room-friendly. The ATI 9800 Pro that I need for HD OTA playback sounded like a jet engine, the case was sideways in the bookshelf next to the TV, etc. So I figured I'd use the holiday downtime to put together a new incarnation of the MCE machine... part Deux.

My first step was to quiet the video card. A few months ago, I had bought a VGA Silencer but had not gotten around to affixing it - the steps seemed somewhat daunting, plus it eats up a PCI slot and I didn't want to give up one of the 5 slots I had in the Dell. I figured I'd try it in the Dell first to get a baseline. I pulled out the $10 internal modem card I was using to get Caller ID info on the screen (built into MCE - how nice is that?) and set to modify my 9800 Pro. It turned out that the instructions were much simpler and the procedure much more straightforward than I had figured. You pull off the existing jet engine fan and heatsink, clean the chip, add included super duper thermal grease, set the heat sink on, connect the wire, and screw it on via a clip on the back of the card. The difference is amazing. There are two modes: Silent and Much Quieter Than The Stock Fan. I thought about stopping right here... but I was determined...

The next step was to turn it into a home theater component. I kept reading good things about the Ahanix cases, including the fact that a number of people at Microsoft had the D.Vine 4 cases. I finally settled on that case and ordered one from Newegg. The box it shipped from had a sticker that said "must be double boxed when shipping by UPS or FedEx", and mine shipped by FedEx was not, but the case seemed to be in fine shape. I read a bit more and settled on a Zalman CNPS7000B-AlCu CPU cooler to make the CPU silent.

Regarding the motherboard, my other goal was to switch to digital connection between the PC and the amplifier. I was actually pretty satisfied with the sound from my Creative Audigy 2 with the analog 5.1 cables going to the amp, but it just seemed "unclean". I knew from some friends and co-workers that the best solution is to use an nVidia nForce 2 Ultra motherboard, which has something called 'SoundStorm', which does real time Dolby Digital encoding of whatever source you are using. I was considering buying one, when I realized that the last machine I put together for KC had some kind of fancy motherboard, and was an AthlonXP, so I busted it open and sure enough it had one of the nicest motherboards that fit my bill, the ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe. She had an Athlon 2600+ on there, which should work OK (the Dell was a P4 2.8C and CPU was never an issue). Long story short, I swapped her HD and the Creative card (so she can still have Firewire for camcorder capture) into the Dell, that was about the easiest part of the story. Dell has the best hardware engineering I have ever seen from a computer manufacturer, the case design is phenomenal.

Anyway, I set to putting together the machine with the new case. One of the first things to happen was that I was sliding it across the carpet and one of the rubber legs fell off. Oops, factory glue wasn't too strong there. Re-glued. (it fell off again later but I glued it hopefully the final time right before I later installed it) I installed the motherboard, CPU cooler (used 99% isopropyl alcohol to clean the CPU of its original heat sink grease as some web sites suggested), cards. When I got to installing the video card with its massive cooler, I noticed something annoying - the PCI slots are closer to the AGP slot than they were in the Dell - the video card's cooler now covers two PCI slots. One has the heat sink's heat exhaust, the other was blocked, so I used that slot to shoehorn in the motherboard's external firewire header. I got the other cards in and booted up.

Here's another rant... and it bites me every time... in the course of doing this, I decided to just have one disk in this machine, for noise, so I planned to have that one disk the 200 GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA drive that I had in the Dell as a data storage disk. Well of course Windows XP doesn't have the VIA SATA controller built into it, so you have to hit F6 during setup to add the driver. And of course I didn't put a floppy drive into this machine. So I ended up with this frankenstein thing with a floppy drive hanging out the side until I got it set up. The other twist is that I now know the definition of irony: a few weeks ago, when I was using Ghost on my server machine to move the system partition from an old to a new disk, I needed a floppy disk. The only floppy disk I could find in the whole house was one I stole out of a motherboard box from the garage... you guessed it, the ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe box, and it was the VIA SATA driver disk.

Once I got the system installed, I noticed something. It was really loud. It was clear that the problem was not the CPU fan - when I used the "FanMate 2" to turn the speed down, it was pretty quiet. It wasn't the video card. It wasn't the hard drive, that was always quiet. It was the power supply. This thing came with a "pre-installed 'Silent' 350W PSU" from Ahanix. Except it was far from Silent. I figured I had better solve this before installing it. I read some stuff on the web, decided that I wanted some PSU that had a 120 mm fan, and headed to Fry's. The good news is that the PSU ATX standard is really a standard, and I could use any PSU in the case.

At Fry's, I encountered the least helpful employee ever, hanging around the PSU aisle. He asked if he could help me, sure, I'm looking for a quiet power supply. "Uh I don't think there are any quiet ones. I have one that's supposedly silent and it's pretty loud. Of course the CPU is pretty loud too". I suggested he might want to look into the Zalman silent CPU coolers they sell, he apparently had never heard of them, despite working in the computer department. With him properly dispatched to going back to re-stocking ethernet cables in the wrong bins, I started searching through the power supplies. Man, these things are annoying. The boxes have almost no information on them, aside from the purported wattage and what color the LEDs behind the fans are (usually blue). I was standing there looking up "brand names" which did not seem like real brand names into google on my Pocket PC Phone. I finally found one that seemed to have a 120 mm fan, and had a reputable review on silentpcreview.com: the Seasonic Super Tornado 300W. The trick on these is that a 120 mm fan doesn't fit on the back of the case, which is where most fans are - it has to go on the side of the PSU inside. This case has a "honeycomb" on the back - it just lets air out the entire rear of the PSU. This actually helps because the wind is diffused, and you get no wind rush noise. Of course, KC had a good dose of common sense when her first question was, "if it's supposed to be quiet, why is it called a Tornado?" Looking at the web site, it looks like the Super Tornado is quieter than the Super Silencer. Go figure. One last note about buying it at Fry's... buying computer parts at that place is like playing the lottery. I won, on this one: surprise, $10 mail in rebate. If they actually rigorously advertised their rebates on shelves, I think they would sell a lot more of those items. Anyway, installation of the PSU was a breeze and it really is silent (plus, the case is cooler than it was with the stock PSU).

Now, the CPU fan is the loudest thing. No problem, with it turned down all the way, it's fairly silent. I drilled more holes in the TV cabinet to run the VGA cable and got the thing installed over the TV. Everything was great, and then I noticed that the hard drive seeks were very loud. The drive is mounted in a kind of dumb way: there is a 3.5" cage screwed to the front panel of the case. So every vibration from the drive is amplified across the entire front of the case. I also learned that Seagate locked their SATA drives to "loud mode" aka "performance mode" - where seeks go as fast as they can, no matter the seek loudness, while the PATA drives are locked to "quiet mode". So I will definately be taking that into account when I replace that drive with something bigger. In the mean time, I read a review on silentpcreview of an interesting little drive mount that uses rubber bands to hold the drive to a 5 1/4" tray, which fits in the unused 5 1/4" mount under the DVD. It should be arriving today and we'll have to see how motivated I am to take the thing down and install it. I think probably pretty motivated, based on how annoyed I was at the seek noise when I was recording two things at once last night.

HELLOMOTO

dlemson — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 01:59:00 GMT

Today, our second Exchange ActiveSync licensee announced their upcoming device with direct Exchange Server connectivity: Motorola and their upcoming A780. Of course Motorola has several Windows Mobile devices (the now-shipping MPX 220 and upcoming MPx) which, like all Windows Mobile devices, can also connect directly to Exchange Server, but the A780 is remarkable because it is using a Motorola-customized OS and will have the ActiveSync capability.

Treo 650 and Exchange ActiveSync

dlemson — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 05:12:00 GMT

I am sorely overdue in posting, and I apologize about that. I will hide behind the sorry excuse that the vast majority of what I do nowadays is work on an upcoming release of Exchange that we aren't talking about yet, so I feel like I can't blog all that much about my current work. But last week we had an exciting piece of news hit the world: we have licensed the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to palmOne and the new Treo 650 phone includes it in its VersaMail application. This means that every Treo 650 phone, out of the box with no extra software, can be configured to sync email and calendar directly from an Exchange 2003 server. This is super cool!

You can read a lot more about this feature on the palmOne web site: http://www.palmone.com/us/products/smartphones/treo650/activesync.epl

This announcement was made at CTIA Wireless last week, and there were a whole slough of other Windows Mobile device announcements as well, including several carriers announcing they will be carrying the "Blue Angel" device in the US. This is a great device because it combines the full screen size of the current XDA/MDA/ T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition with a keyboard that slides open when you need to use it.

The RFC 2821 "Covenant"

dlemson — Sat, 03 Jul 2004 06:07:00 GMT

In a recent comment, Mark Hicks asks:

Is there a way to accept a message for an invlaid recipient and then delete it without generating an NDR to the (usually fake) sender? I still want to generate an NDR for my internal users when mail cannot be delivered to an external recipient. -Thanks.

No, Mark, Exchange doesn't have that built in. And while as a mail administrator, in certain circumstances, I can see why you might want to do that, in general that would be a feature that would let people “shoot themselves in the foot”. The reason is that this would break a fundamental rule in the way that Internet mail works. Quoting from RFC 2821, Section 3.7 - Relaying:

If an SMTP server has accepted the task of relaying the mail and
later finds that the destination is incorrect or that the mail cannot
be delivered for some other reason, then it MUST construct an
"undeliverable mail" notification message and send it to the
originator of the undeliverable mail (as indicated by the reverse-
path).

Put a lot more simply: imagine your grandma was sending you a mail. Instead of markhicks@hostname.com, she accidentally typed markhixks@hostname.com. It gets to the right host, and with your request, that mail would just disappear. RFC 2821 requires that your grandma get an error message telling her that her mail didn't get through. Either your server, or the machine that was trying to submit the message to you, needs to create that error notification. Now, whether or not the error message is formatted so bizarrely such that your grandma has a hope in understanding that reason is another thing... but at least she's going to call you and ask you why you're refusing her mail!

Incidentally, the next line of that RFC is interesting for Exchange 5.5 aficionados:

Formats specified for non-delivery reports by other standards
(see, for example, [24, 25]) SHOULD be used if possible.

For reference, [24] is RFC 1891 and [25] is RFC 1894. When Exchange 5.5 was the most prevalent version of Exchange out there, we got a fair amount of heat for the fact that Exchange 5.5 does not generate RFC 1894-compliant non-delivery reports, although it does support RFC 1891. I won't debate whether or not that was the right thing to do, but I will point out that SHOULD in there. Of course, we did support RFC 1894 reports fully starting in Windows 2000 SMTP / Exchange 2000, so we're all good now. And, finally, I am proud of the fact that Exchange users who use Outlook or Outlook Web Access don't have to see the potentially-confusing format of RFC 1894 notifications, we have a nice readable non-delivery report error form, which in Outlook includes a “send again” button, which is mighty handy.