Health Checks I perform ISA Server Health Checks for Premier Support (via Premier Field Engineering) as part of my role. I’ve seen something a few times recently that I thought it might be helpful to call out, while poking around in the Performance Monitor TCPv4 counter area. The Problem In short: Lots of TCP retransmissions per second. Like, lots. More than 1% is annoying; any more than 5% and you pretty surely have a problem. Recently, I’ve been seeing 20% . That’s right, kids, according to Perfmon’s

Yuri’s blog explains some of the detail. But there’s slightly more subtlety to it, which I’ll try to snake-oil in front of you here: Can I install ISA 2006 on 32-bit Windows Server 2008 ? No , it only runs on Windows Server 2003. Okay, so technically, it also runs on Windows 2000, but if you’re installing it like that now, you should check the calendar. Windows 2000 is old, man. Why not ISA Server 2006 on Windows 2008? Whenever I asked that, people mumbled about TCP/IP stack changes. Sounds plausible

Before the holidays, I bought myself an early present: a new quad-core box with 4GB RAM, which I was going to use for a home Hyper-V lab, so that I could run a bunch of 64-bit VMs as well as the 32-bit staples I’ve been using for years (SBS 2003, and a separate ISA Server box). I’d had Windows Server 2008 installed on my Virtual Server host for a while, and use it with Routing and Remote Access (RRAS)’ NAT to provide a simple internet gateway for a segment of my internal network. Lesson #1: Core

I was just catching up on some of my RSS feeds, and noticed that one of the pages I was at didn't have a broken page icon, but wasn't working quite right (some broken javascript in the photos area, I'm guessing... I'll investigate that next). I wondered what that meant, so fired up Fiddler2 to have a look. The Headers collection didn't include the compatibility header (X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7 or similar): HTTP/1.1 200 OK Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Length: 77144

Yes, perhaps my friends are right. Or perhaps they're just not nice people. Oh, enough with the trying-to-suspend-the-tension thing, I'm of course talking about my desk phone (a venerable Meridian thingo) being replaced with a Catalina USB phone as part of our Sydney trial of Unified Everything (or just Unified Communications, but communications is everything, innit?). Yes, Office Communicator 2007 is now my IM client of choice, and the phone on the desk now doesn't have a dial pad . This initially

For when you don't remember that you set your wireless gateway's static IP to .253, and it's not showing up in the list of leases on the DHCP server (predictably, but it's not helping your memory, and it's not in the arp cache either...), and you need to reboot it using the web interface, all through remote desktop from another suburb. Of course, if it's well 'ard and doesn't respond to pings, that won't work, but you might be able to fish the MAC address out of the ARP cache after it's run once.

Back from another holiday (I call it the Arnold Rimmer technique) I've been trying to collect, rework and refurbish my thoughts on web-based Kerberos stuff in a personal Wiki. You're welcome to peruse it with the usual disclaimers that I'm frequently wrong; unlike most people-friendly wikis, this one's read-only unless you're me. So, feel free to poke around; there might be something useful in there somewhere. http://sharepoint.tristank.com/Pub/ I think there's a definite market for a kerberos configurator

A colleague's copy of IE7 on Windows XP was playing up today. When browsing secure sites (that's https or ssl for the search engine crowd), IE would crash with a polite message offering to create a dump file. Otherwise, it was fine, but this was kinda annoying for banking purposes. This had been happening for a while, they said... The file that was created when "Yes" was clicked was called "coredmp", so I opened it up to have a bit of a play around in WinDBG. The stack was inconclusive, but I got

Late to the party as usual, but hey, that's alright! So all our virtualization solutions are now available at no cost. That's fantastic news for anyone that uses this stuff day-in, day-out and might have balked at the cost of acquisition previously and just used Virtual Server, because it was free... I love my Virtual PC. It's the main virtualization tool I use at work, as the copy & paste and drag & drop support make it a winner over the already-free Virtual Server for day-to-day testing.

Dugie clued me up on the .lnk technique , which looks pretty cool, but I wondered if there was an easy, shortcutty way to use the search box in IE7 ( now I've got my provider ducks in a line )... Looks like it's in the help! (slightly consolidated) To do this Press this Go to the Toolbar S e arch box CTRL+E Open your search query in a new tab ALT+ENTER Open the search provider menu CTRL+DOWN ARROW Select the text in the A d dress bar ALT+D Yaaay! Why not stick with .URLs or .LNKs? I love it, but

Well Parky, you asked , so I'm going to try to answer! The way I think about PAE is that it kinda works a bit like a stonking great in-memory pagefile might. It doesn't change the game for 32-bit applications, but it does give the OS more headroom to manage them. Without PAE, any memory over 4GB can't be "seen" by the OS itself, so it can't be used. With PAE, the memory manager can see all the installed memory, but it doesn't change the per-process or kernel limits. So if, for example, you ran 3

Beta 2's been absolutely stunning for me, but suddenly today my desktop icons were going nuts (er, flickering) whenever I changed tabs, or switched between an IE and a non-IE window. I couldn't work out what was different at first, so figured it was probably an addin... after disabling all the add-ins it was still happening, though. Then, I stumbled across an oddity in the menu bar: I had "Classic Menus" ticked, but they weren't showing. I had Links unticked. This seemed weird. More weird was that

Back from the beach now, and starting to wade through the email morass via OWA (1000s of messages... makes you really appreciate fat clients, rules and desktop search). Here's an interesting one from the blog feedback folder: I am trying to configure our corporate firewall to allow hosting of Joint Ops. On my linksys type firewall this is as easy as port forwarding UDP port 32768 to the game box. But in ISA creating a simple Server listener (on UDP port 32768) isn't enough. There's something missing.

Another wonderful word suggestion to add to your custom.dic, from the mind that brought you " Fnjorkel ". The Suggestion IM has become ubiquitous, but there's no widely accepted way of easily saying "IM me" in a non-vendor-specific manner without using more than two syllables . Therefore, I move that "bing" be used in place of any given term for "instant message". Bing! Synonymous with "instant message". verb: "Bing me!" noun: "I got a bing from Dennis..." The Rationale Two-syllable words like "message"

That's all*. I hadn't even heard of FolderShare before the announcement that we'd acquired them, but having just synced my first few files and folders, I'm going to be using it much more. I found the setup a little counter-intuitive (in that I hadn't seen it before and doing this type of thing through a web interface after downloading the GUI portion didn't quite map to anything I was expecting), but the sync seems speedy, and it's convenient not to have to email myself files so I can download them

Funny how you just assume you added a deskbar shortcut , but you didn't. For pasting into the MSN Desktop Search Toolbar: @rfc,http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc$w.txt Then, "rfc 2616" takes you straight there...

The MSN Search blog just announced that they've made available a Phishing Filter for IE6 (for XPSP2, says the site), as an MSN Toolbar Add-In . I'll be applying this to the PCs of all the over-40s that I know, including my Parental Units. Phishing scares me, on their behalf. I've been Phished at before. It makes me sad (and angry). I'm using IE7 Beta 1 here at the office, so I have that Phishing Filter (there's a drinking game there, I'm telling you) installed already, but just glancing at the MSN

via IEBlog , it's the first Exploring IE column: The Local Intranet Zone and Proxies: The Surprising Connection , by everyone's favourite fiddler , Eric Lawrence. It's well worth a read - if I had a dollar for every time I'd had to explain how a site was determined to be in/out of the Local Intranet Zone, I'd have about seven bucks by now*. I'd like to see an article explaining general proxy configuration, but if there's something you'd like to see in the series, go hit up the link at the bottom

There's a KB article that pretty much covers it: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/898060/ . For my money, a really good KB article, with detailed symptoms that allow you to quickly diagnose the problem from a network capture. MS05-019 was re-released this month, and the update contains fixes for the problems listed in the KB. If you installed the original release of MS05-019 on any computer, it's a Really Good Idea to upgrade that to the new version as soon as you can. And if nothing

The ISA In SBS Blog has a tip on ISA 2004 version numbering that covers how to check SP1 is installed quickly through the MMC. For ISA Server 2004 Standard Edition, the RTM version is 4.0.2161.50. To round out the versiony goodness, Enterprise Edition RTM is 4.0.3439.50.