Test Layout

Many organizations are still in the process of figuring out Windows 7 deployment. One thing that can come into play with a new Windows 7 deployment is the default profile. When a user logs on to Windows 7 for the first time their profile is created from the default profile. If the default profile is configured as you want it to be for the users then there is not need to modify the user profile after log on. Sounds good right? The problem with modifying the default profile as a method of standardizing user profiles is maintenance. After desktop computers have been deployed it is very awkward to modify the default profile. The officially supported method of configuring the default profiles is: Create a blank install of Windows 7 Install applications Log on as a local administrator and customize the profile Sysprep the system using an unattend.txt file with the copyprofile tag Take image of sysprepped system and deploy Note: When you run sysprep, ensure that there is only one administrat...

We have done several migrations from SBS 2003 to SBS 2011 without any significant incidents. This week we had a bit of hassle with Exchange 2010 not installing during the installation. No errors were reported by any of the premigration tools. In the Exchangesetup.log and SBSSetup.log we got the following error: [REQUIRED] A reboot from a previous installation is pending. Please restart the system and rerun setup. Based on some quick research, the general recommendation seems to be that you should reinstall SBS 2011 rather than trying to add Exchange 2010 after the fact. So, to recover, we restored the system state to the old SBS 2003 server (which we cleverly created just before starting the installation). At this point, we figured that maybe there was something weird because we had selected to download and install updates as part of the install. So, for attempt number two we did not install the updates and got a different error about being unable to find a domain controller. This one...

In some cases, you'd like a single externally hosted DNS record to resolve to a different IP internally than externally. For example, you may have an hostname such as webapp.domain.com to a valid external IP when on the Internet but an internal IP when on the internal network. The key here is that you want the same name to resolve to two different addresses depending on whether they are internal or external. Let's also assume that domain.com is hosted externally on Internet accessible DNS servers that are different from your internal DNS servers. For example, domain.com is hosted by GoDaddy or your ISP. So, on GoDaddy, you would have webapp.domain.com resolve to an external IP address such as 1.1.1.1. Now, you can't create domain.com on your internal DNS servers. If you do, you'll need to manually synchronize all external DNS names to your internal DNS server. This can quite the pain to keep track of. We have several clients where the web hosting company is in control o...

This is an error that is unlikely to occur for most of us because our servers are relatively up to date, but I work with training centers that use workstation images which are not updated on a regular basis. Today I helped a training center resolve a problem with a Hyper-V virtual machine that would not start. Scenario: Windows 2008 R2 (not SP1) New hardware The OS image with VM worked fine on older hardware The errors: An error occurred while attempting to start the selected virtual machine(s). < virtual machine name > could not initialize < virtual machine name > could not initialize. (Virtual machine ID < virtual machine GUID >) < virtual machine name > Failed to set/change partition property The problem occurs only for new hardware because some newer Intel processors support AVX instructions ( http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/introduction-to-intel-advanced-vector-extensions/ ) and Hyper-V in Windows 2008 R2 RTM, doesn't know what to do with them....