From Ed Bott
Oops, Microsoft did it again. Someone in Redmond accidentally published a page offering downloads of the Windows 7 release candidate to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. That appears to be a slip-up, but the page also confirms the date when the Windows 7 release candidate will be publicly available.
Microsoft’s free product support for paid users of all versions of Windows XP officially ended as of April 14. What this means is that Microsoft will no longer give complementary product support to XP users.
This doesn’t mean the end of the free security updates. There will still be Hotfixes but no new Service Packs.
Time to move on.
After a slight delay here are downloadable Slides and Handouts from OU Admin Day 2009.
The files are all included in a single ZIP file.
The Sixth Annual “OU Admin Day” took place this year on 8th April 2009
Programme of talks
Thanks to all who attended.
I needed to resize some VHDs this weekend and came across some useful tools from vmToolkit
VHD Resizer and VMDK to VHD Converter
For those on CAMPUS I have downloaded a copy of each to iss\public.
As discussed at our OU Admin Day event, OWA 2007 has the ability to offer read-only access to campus Windows file-servers from a web browser. This is a handy alternative to Webfolders, FTP and RAS and of course is accessible from anywhere.
This feature is only available with OWA 2007 Premium and subsequently Internet Explorer is the only supported browser. Hopefully Microsoft will remedy this with the next version of Exchange Server.
We need to enable any file-servers in an ‘allow list’ on the Exchange Client Access servers before users can access them. We can add school file-servers within reason. Please speak to your School Computing Officer and get them to contact helpline with a request.
At present the following servers are enabled:
All Tower servers
All Turret servers
crag.ncl.ac.uk
campus.ncl.ac.uk – This is a DFS name space allowing access to towers/turrets/software and high availability servers.
To access:
Log on to OWA 2007 as normal
From the left hand menu buttons, Select ‘Documents’:
Select ‘Open Location’ from the left hand menu:
A Box will appear where you can enter a path to a file server. As an example I have included the correct format for access to your home directory. Replace the ‘X’ with whichever tower and home share that your home directory resides.
Example: \\tower3.ncl.ac.uk\home17\njwd
It is important that the location you want to open is prefixed with the two forward slashes in standard UNC format and the server name is fully qualified with .ncl.ac.uk
If you have the appropriate permissions to open that location, you should be presented with the contents of that file-share in the right hand pane:
Item 1: ‘Open in Windows Explorer’ will only work whilst on campus, but will open a Windows Explorer window to the directory that you currently have selected.
Item 2: Lets you go up the directory structure, if you have permission to do so.
Item 3: Adds the current location to the ‘Favorites Menu’ as depicted in item 5.
Item 4: Is a breadcrumb style link to your current location. Click on any of the parts separated by slashes to go to that level, if you have permission to do so.
Item 5: Lists ‘favorite” places that you have added.
Double clicking on a folder will take you to the contents of that folder.
Double clicking on a file will try to open that file natively on your computer, should you have the application that can open it.
If you right click a file a context sensitive menu will appear:
Selecting ‘Open’ will try and open the file as if you have double clicked it.
If you select ‘Open as Web Page’, OWA will try and interpret the contents of that file and display it in a web-page. This is particularly handy if you are on a computer without Microsoft Office, but need to read an Office Document. The supported file types include (doc, pdf, pps, ppt, rtf and xls).
Selecting ‘Send by E-Mail’ opens a new mail message in OWA and automatically includes the file as an attachment.
‘Copy Shortcut’, copies the UNC path of the file to the computer clipboard.
For the second VBUG Newcastle IT Pro event, we’re fortunate to have a great speaker. Eileen Brown is the manager of Microsoft’s TechNet UK IT Professional Evangelist Team, and writes a hugely popular blog on Management, Messaging, Mobility and Real Time Collaboration.
Here’s the overview of Eileen’s talk:
“If the PCs on our desks do much more than they did 10 years ago, why don’t our phones ?
On a Mobile phone calls are dialled from your phone book – UC allows your PC contacts to be used to place calls rather than re-keying the number into a desk, and identifies your contacts by name when they call you and routes your calls to the best phone. Unified communications is bringing together Voice, Fax, Video, Email and Instant messaging, into one system. So Voice mail which arrives in your mailbox And e-mail which can be read to you over the phone. With UC you can see if someone is around to take a call or answer a message before you contact them – and choose the best medium. And a conversation can move seamlessly from email, to instant message, to data sharing and video conference. Harnessing UC can mean less travel, less frustration and greater productivity.”
This presentation is particularly timely in the University, since this year we’ll be looking at adding some unified messaging features to our existing Exchange infrastructure. This is a great opportunity to hear about what the future might look like, from a real expert in this area.
The presentation will take place in Room 118 of Claremont Tower on Thursday 14th May, 18:30 (for a 19:00 start). If you plan to attend, please could you sign up at the VBUG site (just so we have numbers for refreshments, etc): http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/May-2009/VBUG-Newcastle-Unified-Communications-with-Eileen-Brown.aspx
You don’t have to be a VBUG member and the event is free to attend.
If you’re on Twitter, you might like to follow Eileen.
The Windows Server Backup feature provides a basic backup and recovery solution for computers running the Windows Server 2008 operating system and offers significant improvements over its predecessor. Windows Server Backup introduces new backup and recovery technology and replaces the previous Windows Backup (Ntbackup.exe) feature that was available with earlier versions of the Windows operating system.
One or two people have asked recently how to schedule a backup using the Windows Server Backup feature in Windows Server 2008. This is certainly a legitimate question as the GUI tools provides little or no flexibility is choosing which volumes to backup and to where. As such we need to look to the command line for WBADMIN
In order to schedule the task you will either need a dedicated hard disk and it’s drive letter or a UNC path to a share.
The following command will backup drives H, I and Z to a share called weekly backup on server1.
wbadmin start backup -backupTarget:\\server1\weeklybackup -include:H:,I:,Z:: -quiet
The command can be broken down in to 4 parts:
Wbadmin start backup
Runs a one-time backup. If used with no parameters, uses the settings from the daily backup schedule.
backupTarget
Specifies the destination to which the backups will be stored.
-include
This switch allows you to specify which volumes you would like to backup.
-quiet
Supresses any prompts to the user allowing you to run the command unattended as a the task.
Important:
If you save a backup to a remote shared folder, that backup will be overwritten if you use the same folder to back up the same computer again. In addition, if the backup operation fails, you may end up with no backup because the older backup will be overwritten, but the newer backup will not be usable. You can avoid this by creating subfolders in the remote shared folder to organize your backups. If you do this, the subfolders will need twice the space as the parent folder.
On Tuesday, the University hosted the first IT Pro event held by VBUG Newcastle. Going forward the aim is to host developer and sys admin events in alternate months. For the first set of sys admin content, I did a presentation entitled “PowerShell: 0-60 in One Evening”, which you can find the details of at: http://www.jonoble.com/blog/2009/3/26/powershell-0-60-in-one-evening.html
For a first event of a brand new group, I think a turnout in the high teens was ok, and from a speaker’s perspective the level of interaction was good, but we’d love to see double that number next time. We’ve got a great speaker planned for the May event and I’ll post the details here as soon as everything is confirmed.
For anyone who is curious how our software servers and other DFS paths work there is an excellent blog by Jose Barreto at Microsoft explaining the principles and rationale behind the Distributed File System (DFS)