Curiosity got the better of me. When I was analyzing why Hyper-V Remote Management didn't always work over a VPN connection due to DNS the other day, I mentioned that I wasn't familiar with the replacement technology for CMAK in Windows Server 2003. Well, I found it (but it was surprisingly well hidden...

This post examines a problem several people have reported when running Hyper-V Remote Management tools over a VPN connection  - specifically hitting an error “Access denied. Unable to establish communication between ‘SERVER’ and ‘CLIENT’”. In some variations,...

This is a question I’ve seen come up a few times so figured it was time to examine why in a little more detail. In Virtual Server, you were able to copy VHDs and the associated VMC (Virtual Machine Configuration) file from one host to another, add the VMC to the other host and everything would...

In a physical only world, you don’t usually have to worry about MAC addresses that much as each NIC vendor carves off a MAC address from their ranges which have been allocated to them. However, in a virtual environment, you have to be a little more careful, particularly if you are using dynamic MAC address...

If you followed yesterdays post explaining the basics of networking in Hyper-V, you may be wondering what the different types of virtual networks are, when you should use them, and how they look in terms of traffic flow. When you open Virtual Network Manager from Hyper-V Manager, there are three types...

This week has been a little strained, hence quiet on the blogging front. Apart from a hectic week at work (more to follow on that shortly), the reason was a "disaster" which happened late last Sunday evening - everything was working at home one moment, and dead the next. Since the move over from the...

Yesterday evening, I was at home and attempting to remotely connect to my XP desktop machine in the office to access an application which was installed there, but not installed on my laptop. This was over VPN. Now I’ve only had both machines for a few weeks since moving over here and was positive that...

One of those oddities I discovered a couple of days ago after trying to tune down my IIS box which is configured with a static IP address. I stopped the DHCP Client service as I figured (incorrectly) that it wouldn't be needed due to not using DHCP for that server. I didn't notice a problem until I tried...

Although I have a fair few ideas as to mini-projects to complete over the Christmas & New Year holiday, it will probably come as no surprise to many of you that there is always the possibility that family will get in the way ;) On the assumption that I can find enough excuses, one thing I've prepped...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. The final part to the RPC/HTTPS series shows you how to alter the configuration we have such that Outlook 2003 can move seamlessly between external and internal connectivity through the use of integrated authentication. To do this, we need...

Another question asked on Wednesday evening's Intro to R2 event was about the blob size limitation in Domain Based (ie Active Directory integrated) DFS-Namespaces. Has it changed since Windows Server 2003 SP1? The answer is no, the same limits apply. The recommendation is for around 5,000 links and the...

If you watched the demonstration blogcast of Virtual Server 2005 R2 I posted up at the weekend, yesterday, I ripped the environment apart to build it again from scratch so you can see how I built it. The last part of this mini series is where we setup the networking on the Virtual Machine guest we...

If you watched the demonstration blogcast of Virtual Server 2005 R2 I posted up at the weekend, yesterday, I ripped the environment apart to build it again from scratch so you can see how I built it. In part 3, the new cluster group for the virtual machine was created. In the penultimate part of this...

If you watched the demonstration blogcast of Virtual Server 2005 R2 I posted up at the weekend, yesterday, I ripped the environment apart to build it again from scratch so you can see how I built it. Part 3 of 5 gets into the "nitty-gritty" of the configuration. We create a new group in the cluster...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. In the last part, forms based authentication for Outlook Web Access was back running again, bouncing through the localhost listener. In this part, we put RPC/HTTP back into place. We create a publishing rule for the Exchange Virtual Directory...

If you watched the demonstration blogcast of Virtual Server 2005 R2 I posted up at the weekend, yesterday, I ripped the environment apart to build it again from scratch so you can see how I built it. Part 2 of 5 performs a similar configuration to what we did in the previous part on Node 1, but on...

If you watched the demonstration blogcast of Virtual Server 2005 R2 I posted up at the weekend, yesterday, I ripped the environment apart to build it again from scratch so you can see how I built it. So, another blogcast series starts, but only 5 parts this time. This first part configures the shared...

With Virtual Server 2005 R2 just a few days away from public availability, many of you will want to know more about Host Clustering - a new capability supported with this release - what better way to find out than with a live on-demand demonstration, so read on.... Some of you may have been fortunate...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. We now move Outlook Web Access back to HTTPS, and we correct a naming error on the Network Listener "FBA LocalHost 443" in the last part (it's actually listening and remains listening on port 80). After having ripped things apart over the...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. To make the next steps clearer, here's a picture of what we're trying to achieve in combining Forms Based Authentication with RPC/HTTP, and the routes through which traffic will flow. Hopefully a picture speaks a thousand words - the blogcast...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. With our new rule in place on the ISA Server, this sixth part of configuring TPC over HTTP for Outlook 2003 first takes a quick look at the effects on Outlook Web Access - we now get a basic authentication challenge instead of Forms Basic...

Many people are in the process of upgrading from 100MBps to Gigabit (I've got a few machines Gigabit capable at home, but am still running almost exclusively 100MBps except for my iSCSI storage device). I noticed there's a KB article on microsoft.com which documents a couple of solutions to slow performance...

So after numerous emails about this, and some comments on my previous blog post back in June , I spent a couple of hours this afternoon improving the backup script (which although was written as a generic Exchange backup script, is suitable for file system, system state and more - it just depends entirely...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. This fifth part of configuring RPC over HTTP for Outlook 2003 changes direction in getting RPC/HTTPS available from the Internet now that it is working internally. We backtrack on our ISA Server configuration as we can't (easily) have forms...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. This fourth part of configuring RPC over HTTP for Outlook 2003 moves us on to ensuring that RPC/HTTP works internally from our Outlook 2003 client to our Exchange 2003 Server. First though, we correct a typo in the registry settings from...