Confessions of an IT Geek

Updated TCP/IP Guide

Microsoft recently updated their TCP/IP fundamentals guide. This is a fairly extensive document that covers IPv4 and IPv6 as well as DHCP, DNS, VPN, and IPv6 transition strategies. If you are looking for more background about how IP functions, this is a good resource.

Dallas Windows Server 2008 Launch Event

Attended the Dallas version of the Windows Server 2008 launch event today. Overall I think the event was useful. I stayed within the IT Infrastructure track. John Weston of Microsoft hosted the infrastructure breakouts sessions and did a great job. Let me run through a few random notes that wasn't completely aware of that I learned today (and hopefully you will learn too!)

• Hyper-v - this is still scheduled for final release in August of this year. John did discuss the OS licensing for the VMs though. If you are running a Windows Server 2008 server with Hyper-v you have licenses to run up to 4 Windows Server 2008 VM without the need to purchase additional licenses. If you need to run 5 server VMs then you will need to purchase an additional Windows Server license. This does not give you licenses for running any other OSes in the VMs (e.g. Windows Server 2003). If you are considering migrating existing Virtual PC or Virtual Server 2005 VMs over, think again. Apparently it takes a large effort do to so (hopefully MS will come out with a migration tool but I am not holding my breath).
• John made a lot of use of the Zoomit utility for blowing up small text areas of server desktops during the demos. Made it a lot easier to read stuff. Check it out!
• In the GPO Management Tool when editing individual settings on a GPO, there is now a Comment pane available that allows you to comment on why you made a specific configuration setting.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 is apparently on the roadmap. Currently scheduled for 2009 but we will see....

Check out John's blog for a large number of links on Windows Server 2008. Also if you were not able to make one of these launch events, the slide decks for the infrastructure track can be accessed here.

Well Here We Go Again....

Well just after we deal with the changes in Daylight Saving Time (DST) earlier this year now it looks like we will be dealing with it again. If you are running Windows servers/desktops and Microsoft Outlook you had to deal with several patches as well as running an update tool to modify meeting times in the user's calendar before DST took affect earlier this year.

Now due to additional changes in the law since the first set of patches were released we now have another set of patches to reapply. While it would nice to be able to blame Microsoft for all of this work, you can't. Rather blame the government for the additional law changes. The additional countries that made law changes include Australia, New Zealand, Egypt and Venezuela. But if you are thinking that you are a US only based entity don't think you are immune to the need to apply patches. There unfortunately are 5 counties in Indiana, USA that didn't make the DST changes earlier in the year as the rest of the country did so now you may to check to see if you have any users or servers in these areas and apply the updates appropriate. What a mess...

Here are some links to more information.

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_hottopics

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_prodlist