Todd's Blog

I started playing with the VHD files Microsoft provides. The exchange VHD had its own domain controller. I ran it on the Beta Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and it seemed okay. I didn’t try it on Virtual PC 2007, but I was told it wouldn’t work by on the group at OWSUG’s study group. You’ll want Virtual Server for the ISA image as you will want a couple of virtual networks to test this out. The other thing they don’t tell you is you can extend the functionality of the VHD’s until March 2008 if you have Technet or MSDN. Simply put in the key from your subscription and the 30 day limit disappears. Again the same rules apply as though it was a technet trial.

I also started playing with the free elearning courses at Microsoft E-Learning site. These will be handy on the train tomorrow as I am in Toronto for work. So far I am about half way through the Vista and Office Business Deployment course. I want to try and get through these prior to the launch event.

We moved to a new Windows 2003 domain to resolve the server issue from the last post. As part of the domain migration  I moved my Windows Vista RC1 machine from the old domain to the new domain. When I rebooted, I was able to login with the new domain administrator account. When I tried logging in as myself on the new domain I got the error "The user Profile Service failed the logon.  User profile cannot be loaded"" and it kicked me out. I saw a good article here, but unfortunately it didn’t help me any. I was able to login as my user on the old domain but when I tried logging in as the local machine admin, it was a no go but I never tried safe mode. In hindsight, I don’t know why I didn’t try that. I made the decision to nuke Vista and install XP again as I need it for QuarkXpress 6.5 to work.

Back to the last days issues, as soon as the first Domain Controller was up and going, I promoted a second server to a Domain Controller. I really don’t want a repeat of Friday’s events. With Windows 2003 R2, you can deploy printers through Group Policy. I found this pretty handy today as I didn’t need to run around and install printers on everyone’s computer. Using the printer manager console in R2, you can see all the printers in the domain which are attached to a server, (I haven’t tried local workstations yet) their status and whether or not they are deployed via GP. It was really slick rolling out these new print devices to the workstations. Technet has a great article on deploying them and you need to put a file into the startup script in GP as well.

My next project as part of this fiasco is to use Distributed File System to have multiple servers setup to provide increased availability of data. The data will be available through multiple server and be backed up to multiple machines . Once this is done, I’ll be a little happier as I know the servers will have some fault tolerance, redundancy and the network will be easier to maintain as the domain is organized into multiple OU’s now by department.