The Sean Blog

Are you a Windows Guru?

If you love technology, Windows Vista, and live in one of the following locations, you can be a Windows Guru!

From the job description:

Beyond Best Practices

After mentioning the new SharePoint Best Practices Resource Center, I see that they have also put up a Performance and Capacity Planning Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007.  I am loving this Resource Center concept!

SQL Server Best Practices

In my last post, I lauded the SharePoint team for putting up a site covering their Best Practices, and mentioned that the other Product Groups should do the same.

Ask and you shall receive…

SQL Server Best Practices here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb671430.aspx

SharePoint Server Best Practices

Great concept!  I hope that the other product groups follow suit and put their best practices all in one place…

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb736746.aspx

Followup

When managing projects or people, delegation is A Good Thing™. 

I have had a problem, however, that emails I send (no matter how clear I make it that a response is needed) are often simply ignored by the recipient.

Since I send and receive about 4 million emails a day, I tend to not notice that nobody replied to my email until I am searching through my sent items a month later, and notice the SUPER IMPORTANT EMAIL that nobody ever replied to.

(I have a theory that many people on my team have an Outlook rule that says

“If FROM=Sean Then SEND TO /dev/null/bitbucket”

but what are you going to do?) ;)

So how can I remind myself to check on a response a day, a week, or a month from now?

It turns out that there is a GIANT RED FLAG button in Outlook that I have somehow overlooked, entitled (strangely enough) “Follow Up”.  Hmmm… I wonder what that button does?

You can select one of the built-in flags, or select “Add Reminder…”, which brings up the following box.

Now, you can set a reminder for an hour before your next meeting, so you can remember to bug the recipient about his/her response the next time you speak.  Imagine that. :)

This is my life

It Rains So Much In Seattle!

Well, not really.  In fact, Seattle actually receives less rain than Atlanta or Houston.  According to our Wikipedia article:

"Despite being on the margin of the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains, the city has a reputation for frequent rain.^[62] This reputation derives from this frequency of precipitation as well as the fact that it is cloudy an average of 226 days per year (cf. 132 in New York City).^[59] Nonetheless, the so-called "rainy city" receives a smaller quantity of actual precipitation annually, at 37.1 inches (94 cm)^[63], than New York City, Atlanta, Houston, and most cities of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Seattle was also not listed in a study that revealed the 10 Rainiest Cities in the continental United States. ^[64] Most of the precipitation falls as drizzle or light rain, with only occasional downpours."

In short, it is gray more often than it is not.  If something happens to break up the monotony of the gray, drivers in Seattle freak out and turn I-5 and I-405 into parking lots.  The sun comes out? We end up with a 55-car pile-up a week before a 12-car collision followed by 16 separate accidents involving at least 42 vehicles.   A little snow?  Nobody leaves their houses (and those that do end up in a 60-car pile-up).

And what was the horror that turned traffic black today (as you can see in the screen-shot of Live Maps Traffic to the left)?  What was it that caused 6 separate accidents?

It rained.  Good grief.

Search and Give

Neat opportunity to make a difference throughout the day without even having to get out of your seat.  Head on over to:

http://www.searchandgive.com and set it as your home page.  For every search you make, Microsoft will contribute to the charity of your choice.

I am contributing to my kiddo’s Elementary School, but you can contribute to any of over 1 million US non-profit organizations.  Make a difference!

Blogging Windows 7

AWESOME news… two of the smartest people I have ever met are starting up a blog on Windows 7, and the engineering that has gone into it. 

Steven Sinofsky is the Senior Vice President of the Window Engineering team, and was responsible for the masterpiece that is Office 2007 (which shipped on time, with the right features, to rave reviews). 

Jon DeVaan is the Senior Vice President of the Windows Core Operating System Division, and established the Engineering Excellence initiative at Microsoft.

These are the best possible people to lead Windows 7 Development, and I am looking forward to WinHEC and PDC, where the technical aspects of Windows 7 will be revealed to the OEMs and Developers that are critical to our success at Microsoft.

So… go check out the blog (it looks like the RSS feed is down temporarily, but should be up shortly so that you can subscribe in your RSS reader of choice)

Engineering Windows 7

Jon DeVaan	Steven Sinofsky

Microsoft, you are my friend

http://microsoft.youaremyfriend.com

Priceless ;)  (Make sure you listen with sound)

Viewing RSS Feeds Chronologically in Outlook 2007

Wow... that is a painful post title.  Titles like that that make my wife re-affirm her decision to not read my blog ;)  However, the title will work well in search engines when someone is trying to figure out how to sort their RSS feeds chronologically in Outlook 2007... I guess you win some, you lose some.

In any case, sometimes I realize that something I take for granted is not common knowledge.  I love reading blogs, and currently subscribe to too many feeds (433 to be exact).  When Outlook 2007 added support for RSS feeds, I was glad.  In Outlook, posts are treated similar to mail items.  You can have folder hierarchies, forward items, search them, etc.  All of that works great, but imagine having 433 folders under your inbox, one for each person you corresponded with.  Every time you checked your mail, you had to scroll through each folder to see if a new message had been received.  Very frustrating!

The solution, of course, is to simply view your RSS feeds all in one folder, sorted chronologically. Unfortunately, Outlook does not do this by default.  Fortunately, it is an easy problem to solve using Search Folders.  Let's do it!

Start by clicking on File --> New --> Search Folder... (or hit Ctrl+Shift+P)

Next, scroll down to "Create a custom Search Folder" and click on "Choose..."

Name your search folder (ideally, something more creative than Chronological RSS Feeds), and hit the "Browse..." button to change the scope to your RSS Feeds folder.  I suppose you can leave it on the default of your Mailbox.  Whatever floats your boat.

Next, hit the Criteria... button that I forgot to circle in the picture above.  In the resulting window, click on the Advanced tab

In the "Field" drop down, choose "Message Class", set the condition to contains, and the value to IPM.Post.Rss.

It should look like this:

Hit OK a bunch of times until you get back out to the main Outlook screen, and you should now have a folder with all your posts sorted by date.  You can sort by size, from, "In Folder", whatever.  Good times!

Gigabits and Petabytes

Just saw this over on Microsoft Watch, but this is a fascinating interview with Debra Chrapaty, the Corporate VP in charge of Microsoft’s data center and network expansion.  The scale is absolutely mind-boggling.  Seriously… watch the whole interview. It’s worth your time.

Network Utilization between Vista and Windows Server 2008

I love the next-generation TCP/IP Stack and SMB 2.0. It makes for quite zippy transfers :)

More on the new networking features of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb726965.aspx

Installing SQL Server 2005 on Windows Server 2008

I am in the process of installing SQL Server 2005 on a new Windows 2008 Server, and ran into the following warning about missing some required components of IIS:

- IIS Feature Requirement (Warning)
Messages
IIS Feature Requirement
Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) is either not installed or is disabled. IIS is required by some SQL Server features.  Without IIS, some SQL Server features will not be available for installation. To install all SQL Server features, install IIS from Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel or enable the IIS service through the Control Panel if it is already installed, and then run SQL Server Setup again. For a list of features that depend on IIS, see Features Supported by Editions of SQL Server in Books Online.

Fortunately, I was able to find the solution here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920201

The solution is simply to enable the following role services of IIS 7 (right click on Web Server (IIS) in Server Manager, and choose Add Role Services).  Then add the role services from the following table:

Linux on Hyper-V

As you have probably seen on every blog under the sun, Hyper-V has released.

Rather than rehash the announcement, I thought I would try something fun.  How hard is it to get various Linux distributions up and running in Hyper-V?

The official list of supported operating systems on Hyper-V is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-supported-guest-os.aspx.  While there are a ton of supported Operating Systems, you will notice only one supported Linux distro:

Linux Distributions (VMs configured with 1 virtual processor only)

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Service Pack 2 x86 Edition

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Service Pack 2 x64 Edition

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Service Pack 1 x86 Edition

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Service Pack 1 x64 Edition

Before we go any further, I want to clarify "supported" (and this is my own paraphrasing, not the Official Microsoft Support Policy).  Supported means that we have thoroughly tested a specific configuration.  If you have a problem, you can call up Microsoft Support, and we will troubleshoot and resolve the problem, and release a fix if necessary.  If the problem is with somewhere in SUSE, we can work with the fine folks at Novell to have a fix released on their end.  In other words, if you are running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on top of Hyper-V and encounter a problem, between Microsoft and Novell, we will support you. If you are running your company on Hyper-V virtualized instances of BeOS or Ubuntu... you do so at your own risk.  Is it because we hate BeOS or Ubuntu?  Heck No!  It's just that we can't do a whole lot to fix a problem when a linux kernel update breaks compatibility.  Can you imagine the slashdot story if we released updates to the Linux kernel?  Good grief!

<double-negative alert!>

Just because something isn't "supported", however, doesn't mean that it won't work.

</double-negative alert!>

If you are running servers in a production environment, you want to be in a supported configuration (see above). If you are a an IT-Pro geek that just likes playing with things to see how they work, then you can throw caution to the wind and try things out that haven't been tested :)  With that... let's load a few distros up on Hyper-V!

(by the way, Hyper-V has a really cool "Capture screen" option that is awesome for taking screenshots :)

#1 OpenSuse 11

On Virtual PC 2007, OpenSuse 10.2 installed like a champ.  OpenSUSE 11 was somewhat touch-and-go.  On Hyper-V, OpenSUSE 11 installs and runs like a champ.  The following screenshots are all from the installation:

The only thing that did not work when I hit the desktop was the network adapter.  By default, Hyper-V uses a synthetic network adapter, which requires you load integration components.  From the read-me for the Linux integration components (downloadable from http://connect.microsoft.com):

When installed into a virtual machine running a supported Linux operating system, the Linux Integration components provide the following functionality:

· Driver support for synthetic devices: The Linux integration components include support for both the synthetic network controller and synthetic storage controller that have been developed specifically for Hyper-V. These components take advantage of the new high-speed bus, VMBus, which was developed specifically for Hyper-V.

· Hypercall adapter: The Hypercall adapter is a thin layer of software that sits underneath the Xen-enabled Linux kernel, and translates the Xen-specific virtualization function calls to Microsoft Hyper-V hypercalls. This results in faster performance for the Linux virtual machine.

· *BETA* Mouse Support: Support for the synthetic mouse device has been added in the form of an early “preview” driver. This new mouse support allows the mouse to move in and out of the window without having to use the CTRL-ALT-LEFTARROW key command to break out.

· *BETA* Fastpath Boot Support: Support for faster single disk configurations has been added to the RC2 release. Boot devices now take advantage of the storage VSC to provide enhanced performance.

In other words, it makes everything go faster.  I don't know if these components only work with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, but the read-me does mention that "Integration Components for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 will be available in a future update." 

The install procedure looked too complex for a Saturday evening, so I will give you the workaround that (should) work on all distributions, whether or not integration components are available.  Shut down the VM, go into the properties, and add a legacy network adapter. 

Once back in the running OS, I had to run the two following commands to get an IP address, and then networking worked fine:

sudo /sbin/ifconfig eth0 up

sudo /sbin/dhclient

The other thing that does not work is sound, but that is because Hyper-V is a server product, and in the datacenter, no-one can hear you beep.  With Windows, you can get sound by RDP-ing into the VM (steps courtesy of James O'Neill here), but beats the heck out of me how you might get it to work on Linux.  Other than that, OpenSUSE 11 works like a champ, with no wrangling needed to get it up and running.

#2 Ubuntu 8.04 x64

I've done a ton of installs of Ubuntu (for the last several versions) in Virtual PC 2007 here: http://blogs.technet.com/seanearp/search.aspx?q=ubuntu&p=1.  All have had varying levels of success, and all of them have required a ton of tweaking to get running.  In Hyper-V, install was a snap.  The only snag was the fact that Ubuntu defaulted to a screen resolution of 1600x1200, which was much larger than my physical monitor, so I had to scroll around quite a bit during initial setup.  Once I logged on, I was able to change the resolution through the GUI, and all was well.  As with OpenSUSE, requires the Legacy Network Adapter to be able to browse the Internet.

#3 Fedora 9 x64

You can read about my attempts to install various version of Fedora on Virtual PC 2007 here: http://blogs.technet.com/seanearp/search.aspx?q=fedora&p=1.  All of them have required tweaking to get things like the mouse to work or the kernel to boot.  On Hyper-V, Fedora 9 x64 installs (just like OpenSUSE and Ubuntu) with no problems at all.  Like Ubuntu, it defaulted to a strange screen resolution (1152x864), but I was able to change the resolution in the GUI with no problems.  Fedora x64 works just fine on Hyper-V as well!

Yaaaay.

I will leave you with a screenshot of the Hyper-V manager showing me running with a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit virtual machines, both Linux and Windows, and all working like a champ.  How's this for the ultimate geek playground?!?!?  I can setup and tear down machines at will, play with them, and practice setting up networks, all on a quite-responsive Hypervisor.  Good times!

Remember... just because it isn't supported, doesn't mean it won't work. (Just don't call Microsoft looking for support ;)