I've been busy over the past few days recording a series of blogcasts about setting up the essentials for a typical well-managed infrastructure. The network so far consists of six machines as shown in the diagram below. The intention of these blogcasts...

Part 1. Starting with the basics .... (it does get more complex, a lot more complex, I assure you). In this blogcast , you see an overview of the infrastructure and browse the "emulated" Internet using a client machine connected directly to the Internet...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. Part three of this blogcast series looks at how to install the ISA Server firewall client and updating the configuration of our ISA Server to detect who is browsing for what, rather than...

At the IDF (Intel Developers Forum) yesterday, Microsoft made the announcement I've been waiting to go public on for a couple of months now. Virtual Server 2005 SP1 is no more. Well, that isn't exactly true, the changes which are present for those of...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. Yesterday, we saw an overview of our network infrastructure and started diagnosing why Internet browsing from our corporate network was not working. In part 2 of this blogcast series on infrastructure...

I've been meaning to blog this for a couple of weeks now. I was approached by Gagik with a query about ADSI scripting. Fortunately, I've certainly done a fair bit with ADSI given my background. The problem Gagik was having was adding a user to a group...

I was attempting to install Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 on my laptop a week or so ago, and struggling to work out why the MOM installed kept saying that the pre-requisites for installing MOM weren't up to scratch. Specificially, it was complaining...

The Microsoft IT Forum 2005 web-site is now live to take registrations. The agenda is being formulated now and will be going live in the next few weeks. This is a major event for IT Professionals in Europe (or even further in many cases) with many high...

Gilles Vollant of WinImage fame contacted me a few weeks ago to have a look at the latest beta of WinImage. I've been playing with it for a while now and it's been acting flawlessly. Why would this be of particular interest to me? One very good reason...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. The next stage in our infrastructure is to extend our infrastructure by building in one of the most important infrastructure applications - email. Our configuration uses Exchange 2003, and...

It's a long bank holiday long weekend over in the UK, so a quick blog entry which has absolutely nothing to do with work. You need to be over a certain age to have a clue what "xyzzy" has to do with anything. I first came across the term probably in the...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. At the end of the last infrastructure blogcast, you will have noticed the error 0x8004010F "The operation failed. An object could not be found" error. In this blogcast, we solve that problem...

This is fairly well publicised if you look around the Internet, but not in a single place that I could find. Hence, more for my own reference once I blow this beta build away, I'll want to get back to where I am. Certain sites don't recognise IE7 in the...

Kind of interesting this one. I was looking through some of the logs for my home-brewed spam system on my home hetwork. Not perfect, but a lot cheaper than commercial products - even as a Microsoft employee, I would still need to buy this stuff otherwise...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. Where we left off, we were able to browse the Internet from clients connected to the intranet, but we had to manually configure the ISA Firewall Client application for the name of the ISA...

So what do you do with a Unisys ES7000 32 CPU / 32 GB RAM Server with Microsoft Windows 2003 Datacenter Edition running on it? Have a look at this link to find out one highly constructive use which unfortunately you won't find active in most datacentres...

So hot off the heals of getting MOM 2005 installed with SQL 2004 SP4 , I find out that SP1 for MOM is now available. Now they tell me... quoting from the SP1 homepage (link at bottom) " Broader OS and database support, including <snip> and SQL 2000...

This really interesting white paper was published just over a week ago. It describes how Virtual Server 2005 is being used by Microsoft IT almost in a "commodity" capacity. Virtual Server 2005 provided Microsoft with the means to take consolidation to...

For connecting to the Microsoft Corporate Network over VPN, we use connection manager and SmartCards. I've got two PCMCIA smartcard readers, one for each laptop, made by GemPlus. One is the standard GemPlus PC reader, and the other is a GemPlus 400 model...

You may have noticed, if you've been downloading anything recently from microsoft.com, that with the exception of security updates, you now have to install an ActiveX control. Windows Genuine Advantage went live on 25th July after some 10 months of beta...

This interesting question came up in a discussion recently. The answer is no, but you have to think very carefully before coming up with a definite answer. Understandly, you need to enable DHCP on virtual networks to simulate the environment you're...

I wanted to clarify this common problem - I was asked it a couple of times over at TechEd this year, and I got an email asking the same question last week. The answer is: It depends. If you are using Virtual PC, you must be logged on to the host machine...

I've been playing with Vista Beta 1 over the past few days, and although I can get it working reasonably well on my Dell Latitude D600, I've pretty much given up on my Dell 5160. Unfortunately, there's no LDDM drivers available to enable Aero Glass on...

After posting up the link to the whitepaper about how Microsoft IT is using Virtual Server internally, I've now found out about a webcast on 16th August which will give the opportunity to ask the "what's and why's" about the implementation. I've included...

Marc Shepard, a Program Manager for Microsoft in the US held a session at Tech·Ed Orlando this year about how to upgrade from SUS to Windows Server Update Services, the next version of SUS. I know this session was highly rated, and I've already listened...