Changes to RSAT tools for Windows Vista SP2

RSAT is the Remote Server Administration Tools, which replaced the Adminkit that was supplied in Windows Server 2003. RSAT is for managing a Windows Server 2008 box in Vista. The RSAT and the related Hyper-V management component were updated when SP2 of Vista was released. I found a lot of difficulty trying to locate the correct version of the Hyper-V tools for SP2 but eventually I got the right file version.

However you may see an error message which reads “Access denied. Unable to establish communication between <server> and <client”. The fix is to change DCOM permissions as described here.

Hyper-V is so good that I expect our site will eventually just have two physical servers (instead of four at present) and these will be two Hyper-V servers.

Last week I talked about rebuilding some desktop PCs. We have another scenario of computers in tower cases. Rebuilding these is a much more viable option because the power supply is likely to be a drop in replacement (standard ATX style, although I haven’t yet checked). The issue of rebuilding is that basically, an old PC still has two useful components that may be in as-new condition but their actual market value is next to nothing. These components are, the Windows chassis sticker, and the chassis itself. Together these could be worth around $200-250, about the same as the resale value of a 4-5 year old PC system unit in working order. Obviously in that price you are getting much more than a chassis and license. This is providing that the Windows volume license allows direct upgrades from the version of Windows on the sticker.

When we last upgraded the PCs at our site, the chassis were old style pre-“Prescott” ATX, meaning they lacked the ventilation duct in the side, and power supplies were failing. However provided the chassis you have now has the duct fitted, modern boards should be OK for this chassis. We discarded most of those old PCs, and when you do that, you are effectively throwing away that Windows OEM license. But if you can rebuild the PC by replacing most of its internal components, you can retain the replacement value of both the chassis and sticker. Rebuilding isn’t for the faint hearted, however. Installing the CPU into the board, installing the CPU heatsink/fan and installing the mainboard into the chassis are tasks that I have found challenging in the past, even though these days the boards don’t have the jumpers to worry about. A little slip could result in expensive damage due to fragility of components. Once you have the thing assembled you must run a burn in test, for which you may have to buy software. The burn in helps guard against future component failures by stress testing the components to ensure they are reliable.

The Windows 7 Week Wrap-up

Although this is only the fourth day, it is Friday today so it is the last day of the week. The old 915 bit the dust and got binned, the “new” 915 got a fresh Vista installation on its second 80 GB HDD after all attempts to restore the original installation were unsuccessful. Obviously I should have just ghosted the original image from the start, an easy thing to do here where we ghost PCs all the time. However it is only fair to say that the problems I experienced were completely unpredictable, as hardware failure often is; the old 915 must have corrupted the hard disk so that it couldn’t be made to boot. I breathed a sigh of relief when that new Vista installation came up for the first time on that PC. It has a good XP installation so there won’t be any more issues with it. Four year old PCs with board problems are not worth repairing; the Foxconn TS-001 chassis and its Windows sticker are together worth about $250, and if form factors are still the same, they will come in handy when the time comes next year to rebuild either or both of my secondary work PC or my home PC with new parts as referred in a recent blog.

And now back to Windows 7. This PC running the Release Candidate has rapidly become my main work computer much as I expected. Being both Windows 7 and x64, there are going to be a few hiccups, but these haven’t been especially major. The general experience worldwide is that this RC is so good that many people are running it as a primary PC. I expect the production version will become my primary just as Vista did before it, but I need that secondary for the times when 7 doesn’t stack up, until the first SP comes out. As yet I haven’t done much experimentation with the new features like libraries, or tried any additional hardware on it; the card reader is going to stay on the secondary for now. Integris, which has been pretty patchy at our site on Vista, seems to be OK on this 7 installation for now. I haven’t really noticed any issues with other applications except the printer drivers which seem to take two or three goes to install. There are a couple of other PCs here at site running 7 and I expect I will get some feedback on them, and what will come out eventually and predictably is that we will offer the release 7 version to staff users as an option. Rolling out Vista has been a terrible disappointment. As an OS it is only any good for home PCs, in a domain environment there are massive challenges and only now do I fully understand why people have chosen not to deploy it.

Next week I plan on being back to the more humdrum, or in this case, ISA 2006 and making Outlook Web Access, Outlook RPC over HTTP and Terminal Services Gateway work through it. All three of those services running on the same server make use of SSL, and ISA, which will be brought into production as a firewall on our site at that time, will filter and route all of the SSL traffic to those three applications. Having all of them on SSL reduces the number of ports we have to have open on the firewall down to just two for incoming traffic, a few more for outgoing traffic. All of the rules for these have to be set up in ISA. It is pretty much the final stage of a big year long project with setting up the two servers, the mail/terminal server gateway and the firewall. And I’d hope that in future it would be viable to have Exchange hosted offsite so that when the two oldest servers come up for replacement at the end of next year, we can downsize.

Windows 7 Week, Day 3

Today was the day that I rashly decided to do what I didn’t want to do yesterday. That is, to turn the D915 (old XP box) into a dual boot Vista/XP system, and the Q35 (old Vista box) into Windows 7. All this would be relatively simple, just a matter of moving some HDDs and peripherals around wouldn’t it? Unfortunately a long way short of simple is how it has turned out.

The first problems came with the D915 which refused to boot either 160 GB HDD – Vista or XP – the dreaded “Error loading operating system” message came up. Even trying a fresh XP install onto its 160 GB disk initially seemed to work, until first reboot. Vista diagnostics and EasyBCD could not make the Vista disk boot at all. The only thing that would work, initially, was the original 80 GB boot disk with XP from this machine – until something else phutted and it stopped booting, then the BIOS seems to have had a fit and reset itself to the original settings, or some default mode. At this point I have tried another identical computer, which still couldn’t boot anything except its own 80 GB XP disk, so that is what I’m using, and right now I am ghosting the Vista image to see if it can be made to boot if it is loaded onto an 80 GB disk also, which it will just fit onto. It seems strange these BIOSes would not be able to boot a 160 GB disk, since LBA 48 has been around for quite a few years, and I don’t remember any problems with my D915 at home, which I’m fairly sure with an older BIOS version is running Vista on a 160 GB HDD (Update: Well I was wrong about that, it is booting off the second newer 80 GB HDD). I tried putting the Vista HDD back into the Q35 but it still is no go. It looks like something in the BIOS of the D915 has scrambled part of the disk. Funny thing is the D915 recognised a 160 GB HDD and a 500 GB HDD in the same machine… just didn’t want to boot a 160.

So far the only thing that has worked as planned is moving 7 from the temporary box into my Q35, completely problem free, as expected due to identical hardware. Let’s hope that ghosting the Vista image onto a smaller disk works, if not I could still try ImageX on this disk from XP and then restore everything except the boot files which get installed with a fresh Vista install, now this is getting a bit desperate LOL). The big disappointment of the day is that Intel has absolutely nothing on its website referring to this disk limitation on these boards. The ATA-6 standard that introduced 48 bit LBA first came out in 2001 and has been supported by Windows since then, and as the D915 chipset boards are able to recognise drives greater than 128 GiB when they are not boot disks (I’ve used a 500 GB tertiary disk in one of these machines for a couple of years with full access to all its capacity) it is not a very helpful situation when a major motherboard manufacturer has got this kind of limitation in some of its boards and yet has absolutely no documentation of this situation.

Windows 7 Week, Day 2

Today was relatively ho-hum, the main excitement has been turning the Vista box into dual boot XP/Vista and taking some bits out of the old XP box to put into the temporary 7 box. But that four year old Intel 915 system won’t get the boot just yet. When 7 becomes real next year, the Vista box will become the 7 box (just swap over the HDDs) and then the HDD from the Vista box goes into the old XP box. At that point XP may have to be reinstalled if there are HAL problems, and surely Vista will have to be reactivated, but this is going to be the quickest and most pain free way of getting everything set up again. (Why don’t I do that now? Um, err… it hadn’t occurred to me) – actually I’m not quite ready to make the big box the 7 system with all the stuff in it like the Lightscribe DVD writer and card reader, I still need those to be able to run in Vista or XP in case there are problems in 7. Instead I spent a lot of time squeezing a 500 GB HDD into the 7’s low profile case and setting up the Vista box to dual boot XP. Which itself was surely fun as well…and also an opportunity to discover neither of these systems ever had a floppy drive in them – Intel got all carried away with minimalism on some of the Q35 chipset boards and dropped the FDD connector, as well as the PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. Well guess which three connectors have re-emerged in the desktop line (and the parallel IDE connector still exists as well)

Anyway, workwise, things have settled down a bit with 7, except for compatible printer drivers (Brother). Some work and some don’t. New ones are coming soon. The lack of a driver that would work on the colour printer led me to fire up the Vista box of sheer necessity in order to print some pictures, and to use its card reader to download them from the camera. That’s why I am setting it up to dual boot with XP, because XP may still be needed in some form, and in the meantime I want three OSs to be on only two PCs, which is quite reasonable. The day is concluding with SP2 going onto the Vista system.

One day of Windows 7

Having set up a PC at work with the Windows 7 x64 RC installed on it a few weeks ago, I decided that today would be the day that I would start doing as much as possible of my day to day work on 7. It has been reasonably straightforward so far although this PC grunts a bit with only 1 GB of RAM. This is not a long term solution, of course. Where we go to with 7 is very dependent on getting a new Schools agreement between the MOE and Microsoft. As such it may be that the RC’s time limit runs out before 7 becomes available to schools. So it is hard to say where any school will go in terms of 7, as I expect the agreement will have to be renegotiated, but also because it isn’t very clear at this stage what the MOE has planned for schools in terms of these agreements in the future. To administer a server from a Windows 7 PC you must have the Windows 7 version of the RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tools). Microsoft released a new RSAT soon after the RC of 7 came out, but have now withdrawn it. Fortunately, I downloaded the x64 edition of the RSAT when I first installed 7, and therefore I have been able to install it on this PC.

To use one of the more interesting features of Windows 7, the XP Virtual Mode, your PC must have a CPU that supports hardware virtualisation. This is of course the same requirement for running Hyper-V on a Windows 2008 server. Of course, Hyper-V isn’t available on desktop OSs, and previous releases of Virtual PC for desktops have run on any old CPU, but now the version of Virtual PC that XP Virtual Mode is based on (renamed Windows Virtual PC) requires the VT-x feature. It turns out that my main work PC that I bought two years ago to run Vista, which is the same hardware spec as the box that I’ve got running Windows 7, will only need the CPU changed (the cheapest VT-x model is the Pentium E6300 dual core) to make it compatible with this feature (and possibly a BIOS flash). Same goes for some of our other newer PCs that we have in our school. It would be preferable just to change the CPU, for example, in three relatively new PCs that our office staff got last year, since these are expected to have a life of several more years. At home it is different of course, I would need to replace the motherboard, CPU, memory and power supply all in one hit to get the full works of 7 there. Sometime I will look at that kind of upgrade, probably just swap that PC with a similar aged one from work that has had the new bits put in.

Last time I posted about options for upgrading older PCs to Windows 7. In respect of that particular discussion, the main issue we would face for our PCs is getting the right power supply for this particular case. As far as I can tell, FSP of Taiwan is the only company that makes power supplies that will fit the Foxconn DH153A chassis, and then I would have to find a supplier. The 300 watt model provides the rails that newer motherboards need, although there is some question over peak power ratings, but I wouldn’t expect power use of this type of PC to be high, so it may be OK, since the CPU power rating is practically the same. The model number needed is the FSP300-60GLV. I would want to do a good bit of testing of a prototype before committing anything towards production because of questions like the power supply. The cost that we can get these parts for makes it quite a favourable option in our present economic climate where prices have risen sharply in the last year.

So here ends the first blog post made on Windows 7…

Rebuilding vs Replacing?

With the imminent introduction of Windows 7 and consequent phase-out of XP, all schools in NZ (and elsewhere) will be compelled to consider upgrading older PCs if their spec is insufficient to be able to run Windows 7. I am currently interested in whether this would be a viable option for some of our school’s older PCs, which are almost 5 years of age. The economics are favourable if you have access to wholesale or nearly wholesale pricing, and can rebuild the PCs within your school. To get a Windows 7 PC which has a reasonable amount of memory, 64 bit and Intel hardware virtualisation capability, the following are examples of what would need to be purchased

• Intel DG31PR mainboard (may be available cheaper in a 10 pack)
• Intel E6300 Pentium Dual Core boxed CPU (including heatsink and fan in the box)
• DDDR2-667 memory: 1 GB or 2 GB
• If you have only CDRW drives, you may wish to purchase a replacement DVD writer.
• If your power supply is less than 300W it may need to be replaced. In our case, a TFX supply is the type required and should fit into the case (Foxconn DH153)
• A card reader is desirable in today’s media-conscious environment. Sony make the MRW6202 which is internal and can be installed in the FDD bay (the nearly-obsolete FDD being discarded). You could buy one or two USB external FDDs to keep for a rainy day when an occasional Floppy might turn up from somewhere.

The key questions needing to be answered include how well everything will fit into an existing case. This depends very much on whether there has been much change to the microATX form factor in the past five years. Another question is how much life you can expect the existing HDD to provide. However an HDD replacement is a fairly straightforward procedure to carry out where it is required.

The main benefit is in recycling the case and Windows XP Home license. We are assuming here that the MOE will get a new license deal for 7 that will give effectively a free upgrade from XP. I’d prefer to wait until the new licensing comes out to be able to confirm that will be the case before proceeding with any upgrade programme. However the case and license together could be worth as much as $300 depending on specs. Since most cases are well made, they can be expected to give many years of useful service and as such can be effectively recycled without problems. If reuse of case and license work out this would be extremely worthwhile since this value would never be recoverable in resale of these items. In our situation our existing LCD screens which are four years old can be expected to last for years yet. In fact it is fair to say that no one really knows how long LCD displays will last because they haven’t been in production that long.

Assembly is relatively straightforward if you are confident about your skills of putting a board together and inserting it into a case. If you can find assistance within your school community for the assembly then it could be cost effective and economic to consider a rebuilding rather than replacement option.

The Windows 7 lock-in / lock-out

Everyone knows that Windows 7 has progressed through its various stages and been well-received. It is now in production having been released to manufacturing a few weeks back and will appear in retail channels towards the end of October. Windows 7 is a mixture of new technologies and features, and fixes to parts of Vista that have caused endless trouble to users who adopted version 6.0 of Windows when it was released in January 2007. Here lies the rub. W7 fixes a lot of problems people have been having with Vista, particularly the Business edition on corporate networks. It is smoother and more stable, but Microsoft expects you to pay an additional license fee, rather than releasing additional service packs to Vista to fix all those problems with it. This situation is called lock-in or lock-out, and its previous appearances in Microsoft products led directly to the well-known anti-trust case against the company by the US Department of Justice and similar cases in other jurisdictions such as the European Union and Korea.

In a previous post I referred to the lockout that my site had experienced with ISA Server that has forced us to set up an additional server because of non support of ISA on the Windows Server 2008 platform. The latest example of this approach in the server market is that Windows Server 2008 R2 will not be able to support Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. I think it is very likely that the 2008R2-EX2007 and Windows 7-Vista scenarios in particular are likely to result in further legal action against Microsoft in major jurisdictions, and probably (political) pressure in the US to extend the anti-trust case.

To me, Microsoft is something of an enigma. Sysadmins like me recommend and install Microsoft products because, in the education market at least, they offer the best combination of features, value and support out there. The Linux community at large is yet to get their head around the idea that a GUI, integrated documentation and professional levels of support are worth having. Until we see that kind of commitment from that community I would hesitate to suggest that they have any idea of what is needed by administrators who don’t want to have to learn the nuts and bolts of a new unfamiliar operating system. The comparison between the Linux startup screen with screeds of text gibberish, compared to Windows’ graphical initialisation with occasional progress messages is a case in point. Against this we have the constant monopolistic behaviour resulting in the lock-in/lock-out situations with the results of extra expense to end users. Hmmm…..

I have already made my views known also on what appears to be a diminishing standard of free end user support, where Google searching will usually turn up answers on half a dozen third party or “community” sites before any official Microsoft site.