Thoughts on Windows 7

Ever since Microsoft came out with the beta for Windows 7 I have been testing it and running it on my work computer.  There have been very few hiccups and no major problems since I’ve been testing it.  I’ve installed Windows 7 on several Dell computer desktops, and a Dell laptop.  We have a Toshiba tablet PC also that I’ve upgrade to Windows 7, and another custom built HTPC in our break room.

Over all, I will have to say I’m very impressed.  The drivers that come packaged with Windows 7 makes setting it up a breeze.  Also, when I have to install drivers, most of the time a simple click to update the device driver works!  Never have I found that feature of any previous Windows useful. 

My co-worker who sits next to me is a Mac fan all the way, but due to our software licensing at work, he has to use Windows.  When Vista came out, I made the mistake of installing it on his machine.  I never heard the end to cursing.  So when Windows 7 came out I gave him the option to upgrade and he agreed.  Now I rarely hear cursing due to his operating system.

On my work computer I have an Intel Dual Core 3.00GHz with 8 gigabytes of memory.  The reason for so much memory is because I run virtual machines to test out the Windows operating systems, test new software we purchase for our engineers, and play around a little with Linux.  I also do some web and software development so there are times when the memory gets close to full.  Now, before I had Windows 7 on my work computer, I had Vista installed, which ran well, but the one thing I really disliked was the amount of time it took to restart or boot up my computer.  Since I have so many applications installed on my work computer it took Vista about 6-8 minutes to restart.  With Windows 7 it takes about half that time with the same software installed.

Now if you are thinking about upgrading to Windows 7 here are my suggestions.  Make sure you have a Dual core processor with at least 2 GBs of memory.  If you still have a single core processor with Windows XP then I would recommend saving up to upgrade your computer before you go to Windows 7.  However, if you are already running Vista, then by all means you should upgrade.  Windows 7 is Vista done right.  Sure there are bugs in some older software but that can all be worked around and fixed.  Right now you can get Windows 7 Professional for $30 if you are a student.

To further convince you that Windows 7 is amazing, I upgraded my home computer from Vista to Windows 7 without formatting the OS.  It took an hour and a half and the only driver I had to reinstall was the Dell all-in-one printer driver.  My computer is now much smoother and the visual UI effects are much better.

In summary, I cannot say enough good about the operating system.  I highly recommend it.  Use the new features and you will find a much better operating system.  There are many sites out there that talk about the new features of Windows 7.  Just give Google a search and you will find much.

Windows Firewall and non-secure FTP traffic

I was recently trying to setup an FTP server on server 2008 and could not get it to work properly. Turns out, even though the firewall had allowed the ftp service I needed to open port 21. I accomplished this by running the two simple commands.

Windows firewall can be configured from command line using netsh command.

1) Open port 21 on the firewall

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="FTP (no SSL)" action=allow protocol=TCP dir=in localport=21

2) Activate firewall application filter for FTP (aka Stateful FTP) that will dynamically open ports for data connections

netsh advfirewall set global StatefulFtp enable

Server 2003 System Volume Information folder filling up hard drive

So I have a VM with Microsoft Server 2003 running on it and the other day I noticed the hard drive only had 4gb of space left on it. So I went of to find what was going on. I found that the "System Volume Information" folder was being filled up by huge files which took 40gb of space! No wonder my backups were so big. So I searched and searched the internet and found this solution from the egghead cafe forum: Forum

There were other solutions I tried that did not work, one including turning off the system restore option which there is none in server 2003.

1. Open "My Computer".
2. Right click on the drive letter of the drive that is being filled, and click "Properties".
3. Open the "Shadow Copies" tab and click enable.
4. Then click Settings and set the use limit to something low like 300mb.
5. Now disable the setting. All of your files under the "System Volume Information" folder should be deleted.

Hope this helps someone! If you have any answers to why that folder might fill up in the first place and why enabling/disabling the Shadows Copies options deletes the files, please let me know.

Busy

For the past couple of months I have been busy with different things and have neglected to post anything on my blog.  I got maried a month ago tomorrow and have been settling in.  School has been keeping me really busy as well.  At work I have been working on creating a Silverlight 2.0 accordion control, similar to the asp.net ajax accordion control.  I'm still fairly new at programming and programming techniques so once I finish it I will post a tutorial on how to create the control.  

Till then, have a great Thanksgiving!!

Exchange Server 2007 Offline Address Book (OAB)

When I came into work today, I found I hadn't completely fixed the error with my Offline Address Book. While the previous post fixed a major issue, I still had problems. All the users kept getting a pop up authentication box saying they needed to log on to the OAB. When I ran the previous fix, every thing started working. However, after a period of time, no set time, the Outlook clients would start asking for a user name and password.

It seems now, every time I restart the Web Service, the authentication works properly. Well, I just created a new Self-Certificate for the web service because I noticed that autodiscover.domain.com was not one of the domains in the certificate. I changed that and everything seems to be working fine so far.

To add more than one domain name to a certificate, I used the following Exchange Management Shell command to create a certificate request: New-ExchangeCertificate -DomainName Myserver.domain.net, autodiscover.domain.net, autodiscover.domain.com -GenerateRequest:$True -privatekeyExportable:$true

After that, I created the certificate with the local server certificate website and completed the request with IIS.

I guess I'll see if this fixes this for good, though for some reason I have doubt that it will fix the problem.

EDIT: 9/26/08
Ok, so I finally figured out a solution to my problem. I found out that the OAB virtual directory was supposed to be set to not require SSL. But, whenever I would change it to not require SSL, then the clients could not download the OAB at all. It would return this error:

8:46:40 Microsoft Exchange offline address book
8:46:40 0X80190194

So I did a little more searching with that error and found another solution on Dgoldman's weblog. (http://blogs.msdn.com/dgoldman/archive/2006/11/27/Error-0x80190194-when-using-an-outlook-2007-client-to-download-a-web-distribution-enabled-oab.aspx). What I did not realize was that the system replicated the OAB files from C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ExchangeOAB to c:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Client Access\OAB\. So I checked the second folder, Client Access\OAB, and the files had replicated.

I figured it must be a permission problem since the files had been replicating. I created a new OAB to see what the permissions where and sure enough, they were different. On the original OAB the permissions had somehow gotten really messed up. The only permissions should be Administrators and System with full control. Once I fixed that, then the clients could sync perfectly without having to restart any services.

This is one more problem I can check off my list! I've been trying to fix this for over a month now so it will be a nice change to not worry about that.

EDIT: 9/26/08
Just kidding with the last. There is something seriously wrong here. The permissions were correct.

EDIT: 11/24/2008

I know it's been a while since I've updated this, but I actually fixed the problem a couple months ago.  I finally had to convert the OAB virtual directory in IIS to an application and then it worked correctly.  It still works today and I haven't had problems with the syncing anymore since then so I know this was a solution to my problem.