Vista Service Pack 1 – Who cares?

The big buzz is the apparent release of Vista Service Pack 1 but I say who cares? Not me that’s for sure. I do run Vista on my business workstation but I’m in no hurry to download and install it. I’ll let some other idiot download it and stuff up their machine before I do it.

Look, as far as I’m concerned Vista has been a total waste of time. No client we have wants it, most clients specifically tell us ‘don’t give me that F*&^ING Vista’ and personally I tend to agree. Vista is SLOW, it consumes so many systems resources that you need at least 2GB of RAM to make it work with any application, the interface is all different and heaps of important things are now in different locations. By and large it is a pain.

It was even more of a pain until I disabled the Aero interface and all the advanced features so it would run quickly. Now my desktop looks as boring as Windows 2000 and it still isn’t even as quick. So without the Aero interface why the hell would you buy Vista unless you had do? I expect after Service Pack 1 is released Microsoft is going to make it harder to obtain XP since for many Service Pack 1 is the theoretical point at which they install Microsoft software.

So if you look at it pragmatically, if you have Vista (sucker) then I’d wait and see what other people find with Service Pack 1 because I’m sure it is going to cause some issues and let me tell you that you don’t want to be the first to experience that pain. If you have Windows XP (lucky) then I’d say hang onto it with all your might because it is probably the fastest “supported” Operating system Microsoft currently has.

So whether you have Vista or XP I’d just get on with what you’re doing and let Vista Service Pack 1 wreck someone else’s system.

Restoring Exchange 2003 video

In celebration of reaching 50,000 views of the YouTube videos I have created and uploaded a new video (number 39) that shows the basics of Exchange 2003 restoration. Firstly, you’ll see how to create a ‘dial-tone’ Exchange database, which is basically an empty mail database that allows Exchange to run and allows users to get on with sending and receiving emails. The video also covers how to a complete restoration of Exchange server.

You can view the video by clicking here or going to the Videos – Links section of the Supportweb web site.

When you watch the video you’ll probably notice more zooming and panning shots. I think that I now understand how to do all this now but probably need some more time to get it smooth but overall it should be a little easier to follow exactly what I’m showing. The new version of Camtasia certainly has some great features and hopefully I’ll soon be able to implement the complete range to bring you a more professional output. I have also “optimised” this video for 320×200 which apparently is what displays best in YouTube. I’ll have to go back and do some comparisons to know for sure.

Another interesting issue is that it is becoming harder and harder to get the videos into the the YouTube restriction of only 10 minutes. I am finding that I have to cut more and more out (which is easy with Camtasia admittedly) but if the result seems a little choppy that is why. However, hopefully I think the overall quality is improving but as always I’m open to feedback on how to improve what I create.

So sit back and enjoy video 39.

Ever heard of Flash cookies?

Have you ever gone to the trouble of deleting all your Internet temporary files, cookies, browsing history and so on, then rebooting only to find that a web site still knows who you are? For a long time it really puzzled me how this particular web site still knew who I was after killing what I thought was every piece of identifying material on my PC.
Turns out that Adobe Flash can also be used to store cookies, unsurprisingly these are known as ‘Flash Cookies’. As you can see from the image below this is how the sites were still able to track me.

When I looked through the list of sites that had stored Flash Cookies on my system I found quite a variety including those typically from people like Doubleclick whose ‘third party cookies’ allow your browsing machine (and people who use it) to be tracked across different web sites. So, it is possible that if you go two different web sites with ‘third party cookies’, people like Doubleclick know where you’ve been and can thus start to profile you. The more you browse the more ‘third party cookies’ you get and the better the profile that is constructed about you. This profile allows advertisers to direct certain banners at you (ah ha you say, so that is why the ad seem to ‘know’ me) as well as sell your browsing habits to marketing companies. That is why many normal ‘third party cookies’ are considered spyware, because they track your activity WITHOUT your consent!
So even if your turn off or reject normal cookies these Flash cookies can still be recorded on your system allowing you to be profiled. Now, that you know about flash cookies you may well ask where on my PC can I go to turn them off? Ah ha, another gotcha – there is no setting on your PC (that I found anyway). You have to go to a page on the Adobe web site (Abode are the owners of Flash), which will query the settings on your system and allow you to make machines and present you with the control panel you see in the above picture.
As with normal cookies, disabling or deleting Flash cookies may prevent some sites from working correctly so beware. However, now that you at least know how to change the settings you can always return and adjust your settings to allow only what you deem necessary. So all you need now is the Adobe web site where you make these changes and here it is :
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager.html
Clearly many sites are using whatever means they can to record information about you so they can profile you. To me, if they didn’t ask, that is an invasion of my privacy. I am only happy for the SITES I WANT to profile me but NO OTHERS. Heaven knows how many other avenues are out there that companies are using to track web surfers but at least now you know how to control this one.
PS I’d also make sure your select the option to TURN OFF unrestricted access to your microphone and camera. Why the hell this should ever be on by default beats the hell out of me.

More than 50,000 views

Wow, what can I say? The YouTube videos that I have created how now surpassed a total of 50,000 views since I uploaded the first video. For those that have watched the videos, I thank you, for those who have provided feedback and comments, I also thank you but I would especially like to thank all those people who have chosen to actually subscribe to my channel (which you can find at http://www.youtube.com/saturnalliance). The next target that I would like to achieve with the videos is 100 subscribers. The current count is about 85 and rising.

Once again to anyone who has taken the time to view the videos I thank you very much. Roll on 100,000 views!

/PAE on ML110

Well I tried the /PAE switch in the boot.ini of a HP ML110 with exactly 4GB of RAM and it didn’t recover any additional RAM that I eluded to a previous post.

Now juts gotta wait for a ML or DL series HP to come in the door to test with the /PAE switch.

One virtualization too many

Being so chuffed at converting all my physical machines to virtual machines I decided that maybe it was time to look at Virtual Server 2005 R2 as an option.

The good thing about Virtual Server 2005 is that it can use Virtual PC images directly which saves any messy conversions. The bad things are one – it has to go onto a Windows Server box (Virtual PC can go on Windows XP or Server) and it also needs IIS for its management console. It certainly does provide some additional flexibility but to my way of thinking makes things more complicated that I really wanted but hey I’ll give it a go.

So I copied the existing virtual PC hard disk across from the original XP host machine, configured a new virtual PC in Virtual Server 2005 and bang the image was up and running. Wow, that was easy I thought. Maybe Virtual Server is the way to go? Everything seemed to be going along swimmingly until I began to notice a number of unexpected reboots of the newly created virtual PC. Then I started to get errors about disk corruptions and messages saying the virtual PC hard disk was locked and therefore the virtual PC wouldn’t start.

Hmmm…what is the problem here? Thinking, thinking. Ah ha, noticed that most of the issues seemed to happen at the top of the hour. This was also was the time that our Shadowprotect was running creating image backups of our host machine hard disk. So it appears that Virtual Server 2005 machines don’t like imaging software like Shadowprotect. My guess would be that this is because the virtual PC hosted by Virtual Server 2005 has no idea that an image is being taken and doesn’t invoke Volume Shadow Copy. Thus the virtual server hard disk (apart from being HUGE) doesn’t get ‘frozen’ by VSS and thus issues arise. Just my guess mind you.

So in the end I shut down the Virtual Server 2005 image, copied the virtual PC hard disk back to the original XP machine, fired up Virtual PC on the original XP Machine and then launched the original virtual PC (with the updated virtual hard disk – no other changes made). Guess what? It just powered up without any issues! Clearly another benefit of using Microsoft virtual technology (ie virtual hard disk inter-changeability).

So in my experience it appears that if you have Shadowprotect (or any other imaging disk software for that matter I suspect) and you are running virtual machines (again my guess is you’ll see this whether you use Virtual PC, Virtual Server or VMWare) then you are going to have problems, that may lead to all sorts of virtual PC reboots and possible disk corruption. As I said I am not exactly sure of the specific cause but I am in the process of speaking to Storagecraft (the makers of Shadowprotect) about the issues.

You have been warned.

I found another 512MB in my HP server

Every time I install a HP with SBS I always install 4GB of RAM. Why? Well, simply put this is the limit of SBS 2003 (since it run Windows Server 2003 Standard edition) and memory is so cheap these days. In some systems (SBS Standard) sure it is probably an overkill but you never know, so 4GB it is. Problem is with HP servers you never get access to the whole 4GB of RAM. Usually about 512MB goes missing.

Missing where you ask? Well, I understood that it has to do with the motherboard and memory reserved for PCX controllers (and what not) that is never really used anyway so it just get wasted. I always accepted that as fact since I generally didn’t have much time to muck about on clients systems. However, after recently virtualizing all my server onto a single HP server with exactly 4GB of RAM I decided that I wanted to know where that lost memory actually went to, since the more RAM I have on my server the more RAM I can give my virtual machines.

So after doing some poking around I found the following link that talks about the missing memory. Now, it appears to access the memory above 4GB of RAM in Windows systems that support it (ie Windows Server Enterprise and Datacenter) you need to add the /PAE switch to the boot.ini. What does the /PAE switch do? Well, here’s a link from Microsoft that explains the function of the /PAE option.

So, because my HP server is running Windows 2003 Enterprise and has exactly 4GB of RAM I decided I had nothing to lose by giving it a go. Guess what? After the reboot I now had exactly 4GB of RAM! That’s at least 512MB more than what I had prior to adding the /PAE switch.

Hmmm…upon reading the HP link a little closer and doing some more poking about it appears that the /PAE option maybe valid on HP systems with exactly 4GB of RAM even if they are running Windows 2003 Server Standard (ie SBS 2003). Now, not having a 4GB SBS 2003 HP server to test this on I need to find a (non-production) system that I can test this on to see if it does in fact give back the 512MB consumed on SBS 2003 systems with 4GB of RAM installed.

So, if you have a HP server running SBS 2003 with exactly 4GB of RAM it may be worthwhile adding the /PAE switch to the boot.ini to see if you recover the “lost” 512MB of RAM. It shouldn’t work on SBS 2003 but it may do because it has something to do with HP machines specifically. Like I said, I haven’t actually tried this on a HP system running SBS but it certainly worked on a HP server running Windows Enterprise Server.

If someone out there wants to test the /PAE switch and let me know if it does recover the RAM I’d be grateful but in the meantime I’ll just have to bide my time until we get a new SBS order so I can test it for myself.