Infrastructure snapshots : Misc

Windows 7 breaks Amazon UK pre-order volume record, ousts Harry Potter

mbaher@microsoft.com — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:17:00 GMT

From http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/21/windows-7-breaks-amazon-uk-pre-order-volume-record-ousts-harry/

This is really amazing... Windows 7 rocks:)))

XP is going to Extended Support

mbaher@microsoft.com — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:32:00 GMT

As of 19th of April 2009; Windows XP will go from the mainstream support to the extended support phase. What

What kind of support will customers receive during the Extended Support phase?

During the Extended Support phase, Microsoft will continue to provide security patches at no additional charge, automatically delivered monthly via Windows Update
Customers who purchased Windows XP pre-installed on their machines will continue to receive support from their Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM)
Microsoft will accept no-charge calls from customers with Windows installation issues only. However, all customers can also obtain paid incident support

What is changing on April 14, 2009?

On April 14, 2009, Windows XP will transition from the Mainstream Support phase to the Extended Support phase, as planned and previously announced. Extended Support for Windows XP will be available until April 8, 2014.
During the Extended support phase, Microsoft will provide paid support (example: per-incident telephone/web support, Premier and Essential support, etc.) for all customers.
During the Extended Support phase, non-security hotfixes will be available to Premier customers for a fee via the Extended Hotfix Support (EHS) program.

Please note: As per the Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy, Mainstream and Extended Support require that the supported service packs be installed in order to continue receiving any support, including security updates. Therefore, to receive Extended Support for Windows XP, customers must have the latest, supported service pack installed.

These dates are in line with the Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy, which provides transparent, predictable information about the support lifecycle of Microsoft products. More information is available on the MSL Web site at http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle

Important links:

MSL External Web site: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/

MSL FAQs: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy

Product Support Dates Search: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/

Windows 2003 SP2

mbaher@microsoft.com — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 09:55:00 GMT

We have released Windows 2003 SP2 to the web, go read about it and download it from here http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sp2.mspx

By upgrading to Windows Server 2003 SP2, your Windows Server will benefit in many ways.

•	Administrators will like the improvements to the Microsoft Management Console. MMC 3.0 offers new and improved command-line tools.
•	You can take advantage of improved security, such as Wireless Protected Access 2 (WPA2), which will get you ready for the next generation of wireless access.
•	SP2 provides improved performance for SQL 2005, network scalability, and Windows virtualization.
•	Using Windows Deployment Services (WDS), SP2 will also tune-up your system and get it ready for Windows Vista and Windows Longhorn so that you can enjoy a seamless deployment of this new product.
•	New firewall per port; authentication secures traffic between the extranet environment and internal assets that are protected via IPsec domain isolation.
•	Update either Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP Professional x64.
•	The Scaleable Networking Pack (SNP) allows Windows Server 2003 administrators to cost-effectively scale their network-based applications while optimizing server performance and maximizing network throughput.
•	Microsoft Management Console 3.0 (MMC 3.0) gives you a framework that unifies and simplifies day-to-day system management tasks on Windows by providing common navigation, menus, toolbars, and workflow across diverse tools.
•	Windows Server 2003 and x64 has added support for the following languages: German, French, Korean, Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, Spanish, Italian, Russian and, Portuguese (Brazilian). Windows XP Professional x64 Edition will continue to be supported in only English and Japanese.
•	A new XmlLite library allows developers to build high-performance XML-based applications that provide a high degree of interoperability with other applications that adhere to the XML 1.0 standard.
•	A new improved ICACLS tool is an upgrade of the CACLS tool in Windows Server 2003 SP2. You can us ICACLS to reset the account control lists (ACL) on files from Recovery Console, and to back up ACLs.

Java 6 - Vista compliant

mbaher@microsoft.com — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 23:17:13 GMT

Looking for a Java runtime environment edition that is Vista compliant, go and download version 6 from here http://www.java.com/en/download/windows_manual2.js...

Group Policy Settings Reference Windows Vista

mbaher@microsoft.com — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 21:34:00 GMT

This spreadsheet lists the policy settings for computer and user configurations included in the administrative template files (admx/adml) delivered with Windows Vista (RTM build 6000).

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=41dc179b-3328-4350-ade1-c0d9289f09ef&DisplayLang=en

Final release of the new ISA firewall client

mbaher@microsoft.com — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 21:33:00 GMT

Vista users, the final release of the ISA firewall client is released. Go and download it http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=05C2C932-B15A-4990-B525-66380743DA89&displaylang=en

Enjoy

Running IIS 32-bit Applications on IIS 64-bit

mbaher@microsoft.com — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 12:31:00 GMT

Do you have IIS on Windows 64 bit and want to run application that is for 32 bit. No problem. From the Inetpub admin scripts run the following:

"cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32BitAppOnWin64 true"

Here are the details.

Windows Server 2003^TM, Service Pack 1 enables IIS 6.0 to run 32-bit Web applications on 64-bit Windows using the Windows-32-on-Windows-64 (WOW64) compatibility layer. IIS 6.0 using WOW64 is intended to run 32-bit personal productivity applications needed by software developers and administrators, including 32-bit Internet Information Services (IIS) Web applications.

On 64-bit Windows, 32-bit processes cannot load 64-bit DLLs, and 64-bit processes cannot load 32-bit DLLs. If you plan to run 32-bit applications on 64-bit Windows, you must configure IIS to create 32-bit worker processes. Once you have configured IIS to create 32-bit worker processes, you can run the following types of IIS applications on 64-bit Windows:

Internet Server API (ISAPI) extensions
ISAPI filters
Active Server Page (ASP) applications (specifically, scripts calling COM objects where the COM object can be 32-bit or 64-bit)
ASP.NET applications

IIS can, by default, launch Common Gateway Interface (CGI) applications on 64-bit Windows, because CGI applications run in a separate process.

Before you configure IIS to run 32-bit applications on 64-bit Windows, note the following:

IIS only supports 32bit worker processes in Worker Process Isolation mode on 64-bit Windows
On 64-bit Windows, the World Wide Web Publishing service can run 32-bit and 64-bit worker processes. Other IIS services like the IIS Admin service, the SMTP service, the NNTP service, and the FTP service run 64-bit processes only
On 64-bit Windows, the World Wide Web Publishing service does not support running 32-bit and 64-bit worker processes concurrently on the same server

Large Logical Unit Support and Windows Server 2003 SP1

mbaher@microsoft.com — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 12:22:00 GMT

today I got a question about the maximum size for a partition that windows can see and that it is always known that it is limited to 2TB… This is no moreJ. Read this.

This article describes changes in Windows operating systems that will support disk logical unit sizes larger than 2 TB.

In past editions, Windows used 32-bit block numbers in the lower storage stack. This effectively limited support for single disk devices-which might be hardware RAID sets, sometimes called virtual disks or LUNs-to being no larger than 2 terabytes (TB). To get storage unit sizes beyond 2 TB, one had to combine multiple LUNs using the Volume Manager, leading to a volume limit of 64 TB with RAID0 or spanning or 62 TB with RAID5. RAID1 was also limited to 2 TB. The use of Volume Manager sets, however, imposes a performance penalty and can make some storage management scenarios difficult or impossible.

In contrast, the file system uses a 64-bit signed byte offset. This means that the absolute file system limit is actually 2⁵⁴ 512-byte blocks. However, NTFS reduces this, because it supports a 32-bit cluster number * 64K per cluster maximum, which equals 256 TB.

Another complicating factor was the use of Master Book Record (MBR) partition types, which can only contain up to 2³² blocks. GUID Partition Tables (GPT) can support a much larger number of blocks, but Windows only supported GPT on Intel Itanium machines.

Note: Microsoft recommends that for Windows Server 2003, basic disks should use 512-byte sectors (dynamic disks will only work with 512-byte sectors). Windows Vista and later operating systems will support up to 4-KB sector sizes.

With Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows XP 64-bit Edition (x64), these limits have changed.

Microsoft added support for 64-bit block numbers in the disk/class layer, using the new SCSI Commands included in the SCSI-3 Block Commands-2 command set. Microsoft also enabled GPT support for all Windows Server 2003 SP1 platforms. With this change, for example, a snapshot of a GPT partition on an Itanium-based machine can now be transported to a 32-bit machine for data mining or archiving purposes.

The new limits are as follows:

· Basic or dynamic volume size: 2⁶⁴ blocks = 2⁷³ bytes (too big to pronounce)

· Maximum NTFS file system size that can be realized on Windows: 256 TB

Note: Disk devices with more than 2 TB of disk space must be converted to GPT format for all of the disk space to be usable. If the device uses MBR format, the disk space beyond 2 TB will be unusable

How to move the storage of email and attachments out of main memory and on to the storage card for WM5

mbaher@microsoft.com — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 00:17:00 GMT

First thing you need to do is create a couple folders on your storage card.The first folder should be \Storage Card\Mail\ and the second folder should be \Storage Card\Mail\Attachments\.

Once these are created, you'll need to edit your registry.

Open your favourite Windows Mobile registry editor
browse to HKRY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\MAPI and create 2 new string values.

PropertyPath and should have a value matching the mail folder you created
AttachPath and should have a value matchings the attachments folder you created

So PropertyPath = \Storage Card\Mail and AttachPath = \Storage Card\Mail\Attachments

Enjoy the new free space:)