Kicking and Screaming I am Bloggin

Last night I was updating the website for my user group (the Triad SBS Group) and after I finished, it occured to me that I had not shared anything about this great new hardware platform from Intel that I have fallen in love with.

I don’t want y’all to feel slighted so here is what I wrote. Complete with links so you can read up on it as well as  EBS.

At Our Feburary Meeting

In February we had a good round table discussion and then I was able to share some of what I learned in Chicago at the boot camp put on by Intel featuring their new Intel Modular Server Platform. Everyone was intrigued with this new product, I wish I could have had one to demo there instead of just the pictures from the marketing DVD they gave us.

This is some really cool technology and in my mind a natural fit for the upcoming release from Microsoft called Windows Essential Business Server which needs a minimum of 3 servers just to install but will most likely end up being 4 or 5 if you do a full suite and add a Terminal Server. The Intel Modular Server tops out at 6 compute modules, so that would allow the entire EBS Premium Suite, a TS and a stand-by module for redundancy! With it’s 14 bay internal SAN the only thing you need to add is a back-up device.

So by now I am sure you are all using the SBS BPA (Best Practices Analyser), well this morning MS released a BPA Rule Update with over a hundred new rules, no need to reinstall BPA. Just rerun it and let it update it’s rule set. This tool remains one of the coolest things to come out of Redmond to make our lives easier and it’s free. Hard to believe isn’t it :>) Now go retest all those systems.

This morning Microsoft announced a new product family called ”Windows Essential Server Solutions Family of Products”   well it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it does promote SBS from the red haired step-child of the MS server world to a full fledged family member, this can only mean great things for us SBS partners and the SMB clients we serve. Now when we walk in the door, we have a family of solutions ranging from 1 to 4 servers in our arsenal with bundled pricing (exact prices yet to be announced)

So let me be the first to say Welcome to the Essential Server Solution Family!

Want more info CLICK HERE or

Well Sir, What Can I Say?

Did you miss the title of the blog?

I have only two blogging mentors, first the Diva herself who beat me into submission  to enter the blog world itself, and secondly you sir, my this is how you create a blog mentor ( btw thankx for hosting it). Neither of you said I was supposed to do something to expose it, nor have either of you mentioned what it is I need to do. I just assumed (ya I know) that it was an automatic blog thing. So I guess I will have to suffer along in anonymity until someone shares that great cosmic secrect.

That is right, if you are a subscriber to TechNetPlus you can download the Vista SP1 update right now, just goto THIS SITE and follow the directions.

Also the slipstreamed ISO will be available very shortly from the same place as noted in the article above.

Happy Updating.

btw once you are happy with SP1 (and why wouldn’t you be) check out Susan’s find to RECLAIM SOME HARD DRIVE SPACE

I have been using SP1 for a long time now through many of the beta versions and I have to say it is ROCK SOLID and it is the version that MS should have waited for to RTM Vista!

So here I am minding my own business after having just approved a slug of patch Tuesday updates, when low and behold I notice a message pop into Outlook.

Alert on 1NEKTON at 2/14/2008 6:13:15 PM

The following disk is low on free disk space. Low levels of free disk space can cause performance problems and prevent users from saving files on the disk.

Drive Letter: L:

Free Disk Space: 201.000000. MB

% Free Disk Space: 0.670089.%

You can disable this alert or change its threshold by using the Change Alert Notifications task in the Server Management Monitoring and Reporting taskpad.

I guess I better take a look and see what is up, I know that is a 32 Gb partition. All it holds is some software install shares and the WSUS updates.

Well back when I originally installed WSUS 2.0 on this server it said something about making sure you had 5 or 6 Gb of free space, so I figured 4x that would be safe. Well along came WSUS 3.o and then SP1 and more things WSUS watches and now with these current updates we see

Now of course that server is on the other side of North Carolina.

But wait, I have ShadowProtectServer installed on it, so I find some available space on one of the Online Backup Drives, Stop the Internal Database SSEE## that WSUS runs on and grab an image of the L drive.

Next I stop the Server Service (I have a number of shares on the L Drive) and then blow away the L Partition, Create a new bigger L Partition, Restore the ShadowProtect Image, Change the drive letter to L, Start the Server Service and the other services that stopped. And finally reboot the server.

Time from the E-mail warning until the reboot 1 Hour and 20 minutes, less time than I would have spent driving one way!

So Thank You StorageCraft for the wonderful Valentines Day Gift, you gave me back my evening to spend with my lovley wife!

Well it is now 7:49 and the afore mentioned lovely wife is calling me for din din,

So Long and Have a Wonderful Evening, I know I will Now :>)

I have been using Vista for quite a while now, and it is finally starting to grow on me, hopefully not like a mold or fungus :>)

One of the things that still drives me nuts is the way it thinks it knows better than me what is in my folders, and not only does it get confused, but it passes that confusion on to other folders. Well someone figured out how to fix it, hop on over to THIS POST ON MY DIGITAL LIFE

And btw, Thankx to the SBS Diva for pointing me to this post.

Now if I could just stop the directory tree from jumping around, scrolling left and right by itself and auto-expanding. I know where I want to go today, and I am getting seasick trying to focus on the directory tree in file open/save dialogue boxes trying to get there.

Update, more info on tweaking folder setting HERE

Read Dana’s Ramblings on His Blog

This afternoon I got a link to see a Video on EBS taken at IT Forum.

I was excited to take a look as I have been invloved with the beta for quite some time now.

But when you go to the link to watch the video, you are forced to install the SilverLight plug-in just to watch it. Well that wouldn’t be too bad except it DOESN’T WORK, if anyone is out there listening, please make sure this CR@P works before you force it on us! What was wrong with good MS old media player, you know you click on the link and it plays the video, what a concept!

Silverlight error message
ErrorCode: 4001
Error Type: MediaError
Message: AG_E_NETWORK_ERROR

Hope you luck is better than mine, let me know how the video is if you can get it to play.

I am sure you all know Mike Iem from the Ziem Group, he was the director of Harry’s SMB Nation Conference a few years ago. He was the director of the SMBTN Conference last year and he is doing it again this year. He puts out the Windows SBS Partner Group Newsletter to keep all of us SBS Group Leaders and partners up to date on the SMB Info coming from Microsoft, but today I found out he has two hidden talents, he produces his own video content and most importantly he can make HOME MADE PASTA. I knew I liked Mike, now I know why :>)

Btw for those who have never seen it here is a bit of the current issue