Latest Updates: microsoft RSS

  • Windows 7 on an IdeaPad S10e

    Mirco 19:01 on Monday, 26. October 2009 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , diskpart, driver, ideapad, , lenovo, microsoft, netbook, s10e, upgrade, , win7, , windows7

    Last week Microsoft introduced the new Windows 7 to the humble consumer and since I’ve known about the increased performance over Windows Vista from the Beta program it was to to send the installation of Windows XP on my netbook into retirement for good.

    The Atom processor of the S10e doesn’t support 64 Bit operating systems and the onboard graphic isn’t the fastest either. And since I rarely store any data directly on the netbook I won’t need the BitLocker feature, so I went for a solid 32 Bit Home Premium version. These are available as System Builder Version from 69€ to 89€ at retail shops (perfectly legal according to German law). The only differences to the regular retail version is the missing 64 Bit DVD and the lack of Microsoft support.

    The first obstacle was the DVD. The IdeaPad, like any netbook, doesn’t have an internal optical drive. So I have two options:

    1. use an external USB DVD drive
    2. copy the DVD onto a USB thumb drive (at least a 4GB size)

    I went with option 2 because I didn’t want to buy a new DVD drive.

    Before I started to copy I had to prepare the thumb drive using some command. Open the Command Prompt (CMD) as an Administrator (important!).

    c:>diskpart
    DISKPART>lis dis
    DISKPART>sel dis 3 (3 was my thumb drive)
    DISKPART>lis par
    DISKPART>sel par 1 (1 usually the only partition on the thumb drive)
    DISKPART>format fs=FAT32 LABEL=”Windows 7” QUICK OVERRIDE
    DISKPART>active
    DISKPART>exit

    Your thumb drive should now be empty and most importantly bootable.

    Now insert the Windows 7 DVD into your DVD drive (D:) on your PC and copy the content to the thumb drive (G:) using Robocopy. (use drive letters that match your configuration)

    c:>Robocopy d: g: *.* /e /copyall

    This could take a while, depending on the writing speed of your thumb drive. Now you can boot the netbook with the memory stick and start the installation process. I still had the original recovery partition which I wanted to keep. I had to choose custom setup to select the system partition for installation. The automatic mode went into a menu loop because the recovery partition (the first partition on the disk) was too small to install Windows 7. A simple error or warning message would have helped at this point.

    The main installation was done within 30 minutes.

    From good tradition the first thing I did was to run Windows Update. It found only 9 updates, most of which where device drivers. but still I missed some functionality.

    • Microphone
    • Bluetooth
    • Energiemanagement
    • Multi Touch function of the touchpad

    Lenovo doesn’t provide any Windows 7 drivers to the IdeaPad S10e, since the device is currently phasing out and is only sold with Windows XP. But the new IdeaPad S10-2 is sold with Windows 7 and besides some minor differences it’s practically the same hardware.

    Here’s a list of needed device drivers:

    For the 3G version of the S10e you’ll need additional UMTS card drivers. There’s a complete list of all working drivers and tools at the ThinkPad Forum (only German content, but the drivers are available in Englisch).

    Update: I just found a video tutorial

    Click here for Part 2

     

  • Tick, Tick, Tick, … Boom!

    Mirco 8:05 on Wednesday, 3. December 2008 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , blaster, breach, , clean, cleaning, consultant, coordination, , infection, , microsoft, , , patch, patches, , , , symantec, update, , , , ,

    I still don’t know why I gave into my manager wanting me to postpone my scheduled vacation by a week, so he has some billable hours to report in December.

    So here I was, stumbling into the office after a terrible drive through heavy traffic and a 20km detour because of a roadblock caused by a serious accident. As expected most of my customers administrators where either still not in office or in a meeting. I start the computer and fire up Outlook and the Operations Manager Console, and… Uh-Oh, this can’t be good.

    I was looking at about 1000 critical alerts, all less than 36 hours old and of the same type.

    It turned out that a new Windows worm has appeared over the weekend, infecting computers without a previously released patch and/or old versions of Antivirus Software.

    To say I was surprised of this sort of fallout would be … a huge lie, since I kept telling every responsible stakeholder for months this could be happening anytime at the way they are handling update and patch distribution.

    And it continued to play out just as I had expected it would. Someone found the single patch that would prevent an infection, and everyone with an Administrator account jumped at any server they could get a hold on to install exactly this single patch manually, instead of installing the other 28 – 79 missing patches along the way.

    It also reminded some of them that I had published a process on how to identify and classify servers for automatic update distribution. After all this document was available to everyone for the last few months and presented to management for consideration.

    Two days later most of the monitored servers are responding again, which doesn’t imply they are no longer infected, just patched. But as far as I can tell we are only monitoring about 60% of all servers after all.

    Since there is no active WSUS on the network, all patches had to be downloaded from Microsoft to the servers which took hours. The worm was putting so much additional traffic on the network that the proxy servers collapsed several times. User where constantly complaining about service and accessibility.

    The last company I witnessed this kind of chaos after a virus out brake was during the Blaster era (2001). It took them less than a month after this incident to implement strict policies and processes to prevent this from happening again. And as far as I know it never has since.

    Knowing there are still companies like my current customer out there, that don’t have a clue about processes, security and management only fill me with the assurance that there is still a great potential for future business, if only they would listen to their consultants.

    That’s why the pay us, right?

     

  • Shiny new Browsers

    Mirco 7:27 on Wednesday, 3. September 2008 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: application, browser, browserwar, chrome, , explorer, firefox, , internet, internetexplorer, microsoft, mozilla, opera

    So now we have Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome along with some mashup browsers competing for their marketshare of Wíndows users.

    I’m running Firefox 3 for a few months now, and so far I like that they finally decided to ditch the Bookmark.htm after nearly 15 years. But it’s still clogging my machines memory and keeps crashing down if there is no free RAM left. Remember when we all switched from Netscape Navigator to Firefox, because it was a small minimalistic browser with a tiny footprint both in size an memory consumption?

    Last weeks big news was the release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta2. After using it for a few days I found some quirks, like crashing when processing some JavaScripts or that it’s painfully slow at some points. And Why did they separate The Favorites Bar from the favorites Menu? And why can’t I place them both left of the page tabs? I guess I just have to wait for the next release.

    And now it’s Google’s surprise browser. And at first look it reminded me of something I liked several years ago. Firefox 0.9x. It’s again small, fast, and doesn’t come with a bunch of useless features. It’s still Beta, so I won’t be expecting too much, but for the time it serves it’s purpose of reminding everybody else, that a small fast browser is possible and will be used by the masses.

     

  • Getting the 100 biggest Agent Queues out of your Operations Manager Database

    Mirco 16:00 on Tuesday, 22. July 2008 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , center, database, datawarehouse, , microsoft, , , , query, queue, , , , systemcenter, usage

    Getting a decent overview of you Operations Manager Agents sometimes is a bit hard. There’s a nice graph to display the “Send Queue % Usage” but you have to click through every agent status to find the interesting ones. Most likely the ones with a high percentage status.

    Another way, although with less current data would be to query your Data Warehouse with the following statement

    SELECT     TOP (100) vManagedEntity.Path,
                     vPerformanceRule.CounterName,
                     Perf.vPerfHourly.DateTime,
                     Perf.vPerfHourly.AverageValue AS Avg,
                     Perf.vPerfHourly.MinValue AS Min,
                     Perf.vPerfHourly.MaxValue AS Max
FROM       Perf.vPerfHourly
INNER JOIN vManagedEntity ON Perf.vPerfHourly.ManagedEntityRowId = vManagedEntity.ManagedEntityRowId
INNER JOIN vPerformanceRuleInstance ON Perf.vPerfHourly.PerformanceRuleInstanceRowId = vPerformanceRuleInstance.PerformanceRuleInstanceRowId
INNER JOIN vPerformanceRule ON vPerformanceRuleInstance.RuleRowId = vPerformanceRule.RuleRowId
WHERE      (vPerformanceRule.CounterName LIKE N'%send queue % used')
ORDER BY   Perf.vPerfHourly.DateTime DESC,
           Avg DESC

    This query returns the 100 Queue with the highest fill rate. Note, that data in the Data Warehouse DB can be several hours behind the Operations Database.

     

  • How to restore a Domain Controller you cannot logon to

    Mirco 6:54 on Wednesday, 16. July 2008 | View Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: account, active, active directory, adsi, controller, dc, dcpromo, directory, , edit, kerberos, login, logon, microsoft, ntdsutil, registry, restore,

    For some reason we had multiple Domain Controllers that refused any logon attempt in the last few weeks.

    After getting a closer look at the event logs we found pages full of Kerberos errors. Somehow the machine account expired and wasn’t renewed, so the controller could no longer replicate and thou refused our logon attempts.

    I tried to fix the Kerberos issue, but nothing I found was helping the situation. But how do I restore a Domain Controller I cannot logon to, without reinstalling the server?

    After a quick search I found this: Microsoft Article KB332199, which had a useful subsection on the “If the domain controller cannot start in normal mode” issue.

    First restart the Domain Controller in Directory Services Restore Mode (using F8) and open REGEDIT. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ProductOptions and Edit the value of ProductType from “NavmanNT” to “ServerNT”. Be careful to spell this correctly! This will tell the server that it is only a member server in the domain, and you can use a local logon account.

    Restart the system and logon using the Administrator account with the restore password. Open REGEDIT again and this time browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NTDS\Parameters. Find the Src Root Domain Srv Entry and delete it. This way the server will believe it’s the last Domain Controller in the current domain.

    Start DCPROMO and create a new temporary domain. Yes, create. No need to delete anything yet. This will overwrite any Active Directory values stored on your local server. After it’s done restart and run DCPROMO again. This time we will shut down the temporary domain and remove all Domain Controller traces from the harddrive.

    That’s it. All you need to do now is remove the Active Directory objects related to the original Domain Controller (KB216498) from the directory, wait for the replication to finish and run DCPROMO to add this server as Domain Controller of your domain.

     

Older Posts →

c
compose new post
j
next post/next comment
k
previous post/previous comment
r
reply
e
edit
o
show/hide comments
t
go to top
esc
cancel