Server Operating Systems:

At this time, I see little reason to upgrade to Windows 2008. For what most servers do, Windows 2003 does the job just fine, and is still being supported (with hot-fixes, but not Service Packs) by Microsoft. The software you run on it likes 2003 just fine. Before long, new hardware will be built with Windows 2008 in mind, and Windows 2003 drivers for your hardware might get harder to find. However, I recommend moving to virtual servers at that time, and it will then not be necessary to have Windows drivers for your new server. The virtualization layer (hypervisor) will handle that, and the “virtual hardware” assigned to your server will work fine with Windows 2003 for many years to come.

Exchange 2007? Let’s just not talk about that right now. This is an OS discussion, and I will just say that I intend to resist that one as long as possible too, until Microsoft remembers that if we wanted to manage everything with command lines and scripts, we’d be using Linux with Sendmail or some open-source, command-line driven equivalent.

Terminal Servers, however, could benefit from a Windows 2008 upgrade. Terminal Services (now called Remote Desktop Services) functions have been greatly improved in 2008, specifically in the area of publishing applications seamlessly without giving the users access to the entire desktop – and in the area of remote printing. Remote printing has been a major thorn in your side, and Windows 2008 can help you with that. I believe the new Terminal Services is web-accessible, making it very easy to set up new workstations to use it.

Here is another, more detailed discussion of those improvements.

Is it worth the cost to upgrade? Your customer will have to decide.
Workstation Operating Systems:

I am happy to say that most of my customers have managed to skip right over Windows Vista.

I have not had much experience yet with Windows 7, but my limited experience suggests that Microsoft learned a lot from their Vista flop, and worked to smooth out the rough edges that made people despise Vista. My limited experience also suggests that Windows 7 is still too new for widespread adoption, with pitfalls lurking due to software applications and drivers not being fully compatible with Windows 7 yet.

That being said, we are entering a more sophisticated age of malware and viruses, and it may be time to leave behind the less intrusive security measures we have been enjoying with Windows XP, which is now allowing more and more PCs to become infected – just as it happened with Windows 2000. It will be a rocky time, when we try to balance having appropriate access to our own computers against making them wide open to attacks. Some software will work OK when installed with an administrative account and then used by someone else. Some will not. We’ll have to work out which software requires which installation method, and perhaps sometimes temporarily give a user administrative access to their machine to get something installed and configured, then take it away to help protect them. We can do this with Windows XP for now, and then later with Windows 7.

For the time being, I will recommend that my customers continue to purchase workstations that come with Windows 7 licenses, but have a downgrade to XP installed on them. This will continue for as long as possible, until we start seeing the rate of virus infection become too high, or other factors necessitate a change. The age-old cycle of viruses and antivirus software one-upping each other continues, and maybe we’ll see a comeback of the antivirus software.

For now, Dell is offering workstations with Windows 7 licenses, with Windows XP installed – but only in the Business section.

So, am I just being resistant to change? There is some of that, but I do not embrace change for its own sake. there has to be some benefit, other than the many hours of billable work I could get from pushing customers into unfamilair operating systems just because Microsoft wants to keep their money machine rolling. Let me just say that I was determined to be open-minded abot Vista. I gave it a solid try. When asked whether I wanted Vista or XP on my company-supplied laptop, I chose Vista. I suffered it for 6 months, before finally deciding that enough was enough. I had passed the learning curve and the pain continued. I went back to XP. So no, it is not just resistance to change. There are good reasons for me to hold back. They are related to deficiencies of the new OSes, financial reasons, and the general difficulty of being among the first to move to new technology.

Unless there are specific, compelling benefits to be gained in each scenario, then you won’t see me jumping first to new versions of the OS. Not me, not this time.

Tags: remote Desktop Services, Terminal Services, Virtualization, Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

I loaded drivers on my SBS 2008 server for the HP Color Laserjet 2600n printer.

On my 32-bit XP workstation, I connected to the server via UNC path, right-clicked the printer, and told it to connect. This is usually sufficient to load the driver, and give access to the printer.

The symptom:
This time, although it connected successfully and I had a printer object for it, whenever I tried to print to it, Windows wanted to send a love note to Microsoft, and when I closed that dialog, Explorer crashed and restarted.

This works fine on the Vista computers in my network.

I right-clicked on the printer object and tried to get to Properties. Windows XP told me that I needed to install a driver for the printer. I gave it the proper driver and it showed me the properties. I tried printing again, and BANG! another Explorer crash. It turns out that no matter how many times I gave it that driver, it still thought it did not have the driver.

I tried a variety of different ways, from loading the drivers at the local console of the server, connecting from Windows XP and Vista workstations to \\server\printers and loading it there, across the network. I downloaded new drivers from HP and tried those.

Since this is a 2600n and has a JetDirect card, I realize that I could easily have created a port on the XP workstation and mapped directly to the printer instead of going through the server, but I was getting stubborn.

Finally, I tried something a little different.

I created a new port on the XP workstation. I used the “Local Port” option, but when it asked for a port name, I typed \\server\printersharename in the “Enter a port name:” field.

It works like a charm. The icon even looks like a network printer icon instead of a local one. I edited the printer name to be <printername> on <server> to make it look just like the other network printers, and I can manage its print jobs centrally.

There is one drawback to this approach: Terminal Services does not map back the printer when I do this. However, since it is networked printer on the same LAN with the server, and I do not often use this feature when connecting to other networks, it’s not an issue for me.

Tags: Laserjet 2600N, SBS 2008, Windows XP

Who the heck runs Windows XP on ESXi anyway? I suppose someone with an excess of Windows XP licenses who doesn’t want to buy TS CALs might do it. Someone with RDP-enabled thin clients might do it as well.

Anyway, I was about to kill the XP workstation VM I used to test my trial run of the SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 migration, and decided to try out this ASR thing. I ran a backup, including ASR. I stored the BKF file on a remote workstation share, and stored the ASR file on a virtual floppy.

Then I created a new VM with appropriate disk, ram, and CPU settings, and attached the virtual floppy image to it. I also inserted the VMware SCSI drivers for Bus Logic into that virtual floppy image. Next, I attached a Windows XP ISO image to the VM, and set it to boot into the BIOS at first boot.

Booted it, fixed the time, set the boot sequence, rebooted.

During boot, I pressed F6 to specify hardware drivers, and pressed F2 to tell it I was doing an ASR operation.

I gave it the VMware hard disk controller drivers, it formatted the hard disk, and we moved on.

About the time I was starting to wonder when this was going to stop being a normal Windows OS load followed by a restore, and start being ASR, some unfamiliar windows came up. The first thing it did was c0mplain about not being able to find the backup at the UNC path listed in the ASR.SIF file. I tried to work around that but quickly came to the realization that either there were no network drivers, or Windows Setup was not allowing me to do any networking at that time.

So what next? How do I get the BKF file to where it can be seen? What would MS be expecting people to do with a physical machine at this point? I suppose it would either be a USB disk (which won’t work in ESXi), or a locally attached hard disk. So, I got creative with VMDK files. I loaded up an extra virtual hard disk on another VM, copied the BKF file to it, shut down that VM, and attached the virtual disk to the XP VM I was trying to restore. Didn’t see it, so I rebooted with it attached. It resumed the ASR process, but once again could not see the second hard disk. The only drives it would see were the C drive and the CD drive.

What finally worked was starting over with a larger VMDK, then shutting down the VM at the first reboot, attaching it to another VM that had a Bus Logic controller, and copying the BKF file to the drive that would become C during the ASR boot.

That done, I fired up the VM with the ASR process running, found the BKF on the C drive, and finished the restore. When done, it booted fine, logged in with cached credentials (the SBS2008 server was undergoing another restore at the time), opened the OST file just fine, and did not require re-activation, even though the disk (and its size) was different.

Since most Server VMs are made using the LSI Logic controller, it means having another XP VM handy to do this trick – or building one from scratch and then using it. Is it worth it to build one from scratch and then go through the ASR restore for the other? I’m not sure, having never done a restore using ASR on a fully loaded XP.

Anyway, it was an interesting experiment.

Tags: ASR, backup, ESXi, Windows XP