The Braun Blog

I ran into a scenario last week where we had loaded the Compellent Storage Center Command Set for Windows PowerShell on a server.  When we launched the shell shortcut, the window opened but took a long time to get to a PowerShell command prompt.

So, what causes slow start-up when loading PowerShell?

The most common reason seems to be that machines experiencing this slowness are not connected to the Internet.

What?

Well, when Since PowerShell is loading the Compellent Command Set DLL externally, .NET has a security feature to check Microsoft’s CRL, or Certificate Relocation List.  This process verifies the authenticity and validity of the software publisher’s certificate.  If this check can’t reach the Internet, the process will time out after several minutes.  Now, this doesn’t prevent anything from loading (which seems odd), but it takes a couple minutes for a process that should take only a couple of seconds.

The easiest resolution at this point appears to allow Internet access to the server.  If that is not possible, you can disable the check for the publisher’s certificate revocation.  You can do this from Internet Explorer (or Control Panel, Internet Options) by clicking on Tools, Internet Options.  Under the Security section of the Advanced tab, uncheck “Check for publisher’s certificate revocation”.

NOTE: These type of security features are in place for a reason.  Take extreme caution when considering disabling these.

I came across this one this week.  Did you know there are a few hidden themes built-in to Windows 7?  They’re in a hidden directory, so you’ll have to type their path directly or use search with the option to location hidden files or folders.

If you navigate to C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT you’ll find several different directories.  Inside of each of those folders is a directory called “Theme”.  If you open that folder, you’ll see a .theme file which you can double-click to activate the theme.  My favorite is the UK theme.

If you haven’t checked it out, do it now.  The Web Platform Installer makes your life a lot easier, especially when it comes to installing and configuring applications like WordPress on your own server.

I provisioned a new Windows 2008 R2 Web Server and needed to move my websites off of an old 2003 server and on to this new box.  In the past, installing mySQL, PHP, and other required components to get WordPress to work properly on a Windows server was a huge pain, that is, until the Web Platform Installer came along.

A number of applications have decided to use the WPI.  Applications like WordPress , DasBlog, Visual Studio Express products, and even SQL 2008.  You click through an interface, select the stuff you want to install, enter the requested config info, and the WPI takes care of the rest.  I actually used it to install WordPress flawlessly today.  It identify pre-reqs and other requirements and makes sure you have what you need before it gets started.

You can read more about, and download the Web Platform Installer here.

Not that all my desktops and laptops are running Windows 7, I wanted to get the newest tools for administering my Windows environment, including Hyper-V.

It took a little bit of searching, and a lot of the search results pointed to the beta tools or the RSAT for Windows Vista, neither of which will work with the released version of Windows 7.

So, if you’re looking for the link, here it is:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7d2f6ad7-656b-4313-a005-4e344e43997d&displaylang=en#filelist

From there, you’ll find the direct download links to both the x86 and x64 versions of the tools.  Happy administering!

Here is an easy way to determine the partition alignment of any given disk on the local system or remotely.

$OffsetKB = @{label=”Offset(KB)”;Expression={$_.StartingOffset/1024 -as [int]}}

$SizeMB = @{label=”Size(MB)”;Expression={$_.Size/1MB -as [int]}} 

Get-WmiObject -ComputerName "localhost" -Class "Win32_DiskPartition" | ft`

SystemName, Name, DiskIndex, $SizeMB, $OffsetKB  -AutoSize

This will output table that looks like this:

Why should you care about this?  This is particularly useful for determining partition alignment of existing disks that may be running applications like Exchange or SQL.  Exchange recommends a 64K partition alignment as does SQL in most cases.  In Windows Server 2008, partition alignment is automatic and defaults to 1024KB for new partitions. Note that the alignment of partitions on servers that were upgraded from Windows 2003 to 2008 are not changed.

First and foremost, I am a Windows user. I have been forever. I was a “blue badge” so I was very much a “fanboy” of Microsoft from the platform to desktop apps to mobile devices and still pretty much am. I have also opened my eyes to other computing technologies like the Mac and iPhone.

I used to try to make my Microsoft software work the way I wanted in every case. There really wasn’t any other solution. I have moved away from that thought process, and accepted that some other technologies do the job better.

Take Windows Mobile for example. I owned no less than 10 devices in a matter of less than five years because I thought that the issue had to be the device, not the platform. Last year, I finally purchased an iPhone. I absolutely love this device and it will take me a long time to go back to Windows Mobile. Perhaps if Microsoft controlled the hardware platform for Windows Mobile devices, they might share the same success that Apple has had.

I also have a MacBook Pro, which runs virtualization software so I can run Windows. Since most enterprise companies still use Windows as a primary platform, I too still use Windows for 95% of my work-related business. I have had few issues with the Windows platform for the most part; I was even a fan of Vista. I didn’t see all of the same issues that caused droves of people to jump on the anti-Vista bandwagon. I still prefer Vista to Windows XP, a sentiment that isn’t shared by many. But at the end of the day, I run it on my MacBook. I do most of my blogging from a Mac now, I get all of my newsfeeds on the Mac, and Twitter too! Bottom line, a lot of Mac apps offer better stability and robustness compared to their Windows counterparts. Whether this is related to the platform or just bad coding, that’s a topic for a different day. Microsoft wins at a lot of battles – I favor Visual Studio and Office 2007. Those have been solid, just as a lot of the server apps like Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint.

Since I have had my Mac I have looked for ways to synchronize files and folders. Between my Macs would be fine, but across platforms would be even better. Apple’s MobileMe is a nice solution, although I don’t believe $99/year is worth what it gives me. Yesterday I was searching around for file sync tools on the Mac again and came across Microsoft Live Sync. I’ve used Live Sync for file storage on the PC side, but I was surprised to find that a Mac client was available. I installed it on both of my Macs, as well as my Vista laptop and work laptop too. I started syncing folders and they appeared across the platforms. Amazing! (and free too).

Looking further, I started digging into Microsoft Live Mesh which bridges the gap for connected devices allowing them to sync files and access their desktops all over the Internet. This provides the ability to access applications on one system that might not be available on another. Better yet, Mesh incorporates mobile devices and Macs. File synchronization is great across platform, but I wish I had the ability to remote control my Mac from one of my Live Mesh PCs. Since the remote control uses an ActiveX control in the browser, this is not possible on the Mac, but bringing a Java applet into the mix might take away this barrier.

I would say that in the last 2-3 months, Microsoft has introduced some very interesting technologies like Bing and Live Mesh (beta). Bing is closing in on it’s Google competition, and I have even started using it as my primary search engine. We’ll see how the landscape changes when Google finishes their open source OS.

So, with all this being said, it’s really not about being an Apple Fanboy or a Microsoft Fanboy, but more-so about who delivers the best solution for the problems at hand.

I was looking for a creative way to be able to share my USB hard drive that I had formatted for the Mac with my PC.  HFS Explorer, worked fine, but required me to extract files instead of being able to expose the volume as a drive letter.  I decided I would search for something that would allow my Mac to not only read (which OS X does by default), but also write to an NTFS partition.  I was going to reformat my USB hard drive as NTFS since I now primarily use it with my PCs.

My search turned up an app called MacFUSE.  MacFUSE, as the website indicated, “implements a mechanism that makes it possible to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program on Mac OS X (10.4 and above). It provides multiple APIs, one of which is a superset of the FUSE (File-system in USEr space) API that originated on Linux. Therefore, many existing FUSE file systems become readily usable on Mac OS X.”

Next, my search turned up NTFS-3G, a driver that sits on top of MacFUSE and enables full read and write capabilities of NTFS under the Mac OS.  I installed MacFUSE, and then NTFS-3G.  After a reboot, I was on my way to copying files from the Mac to a USB hard drive, now formatted as NTFS.  Well, kinda.

What I figured out is that the NTFS-3G driver seemed to cause a lot of problems with my Mac OS.  Any time file access was taking place, whether it be on an HFS or NTFS file system, things seemed to “konk” out after a while.  For example, I was copying a few ISOs over, and half way through the copy would error out, but it seem to hang the entire operating system.  I tried several different files, large and smaller, with the same result.

I quickly removed MacFUSE and NTFS-3G and my problems relating to file system operations seemed to go away.  Not sure what was happening there.  For now I have decided to copy files through my virtual machine to the external drive.  It adds a layer of abstraction, and seems to hinder the performance somewhat, but the copy operations do finish successfully.

Have you used MacFUSE or NTFS-3G and had a different experience?

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the availability of IE8 RC1. A release candidate is a version of the software that has been made available to the general public while it undergoes some final testing. You can download IE8 RC1 here.

Just like about everybody else out there that is a “bleeding edge” technie like myself and doesn’t mind running some beta software downloaded the Windows 7 beta last week.  Needless to say, it definitely has a better look and feel to it than Windows Vista, and the performance even though it is a beta seems to be as good as if not better than Vista.  Here are a few other observations from some testing that I did.

Every scenario that I ran through was via a MacBook Pro with VMware Fusion 2.0 and Parallels 4.0 loaded on my machine.  Windows 7 was installed into a virtual machine for the test phase.

I had the intention of trying to run this virtual machine as my production desktop, but I found that too many of my applications had challenges running correctly under the OS.  Most notably was any Java applet in the web browser.  Trying to do so yielded me a non-responsive virtual machine in which the only way to recover was to power it off and then back on.  It locked it up solid.

This really bothered me as I already really like Java and the fact that it would lock up a machine so hard made things worse.  I went through a couple different versions of Java and figured out that running Windows 7 in safe mode would allow me to get a little further, but not all the way.  I kept thing about other factors that could impact this, so I decided to install Windows 7 on a Parallels 4.0 virtual machine, putting VMware Fusion to the side for a bit.

Sure enough, Parallels seemed to handle Java without any issues; no lockups.  Parallels did release an update that made an experimental Windows 7 configuration available.  This type of support is not available on Fusion yet.  It would appear that a video driver or something related to the machine tools that get installed on the virtual machine are causing some sort of problem.

Secondly, I am a big fan of VisionApp Remote Desktop.  I use this quite a bit at home as well as at work.  So, the next step was to get this app installed on the virtual machine.  I circled back to my Fusion instance nad installed the application.  I imported my configuration and as soon as I attempted to connect to a machine, I would get an application exception indicating a problem the the GDI interface.  More online research and I had figured out that this was because the app maintains thumbnails which it updates periodically.  It seems that the GDI calls are not compatible with Windows 7.  I tried the same process on Parallels with the same result.  I posted to VisionApp’s support forum where a few others had the same problem.  VisionApp does not support Windows 7, and their new Remote Desktop 9.0 is going to be released in early February and doesn’t contain support for Windows 7 either.  What a bummer.

So, needless to say, I had to go back to my Vista virtual machine for my day to day work.  Kind of a bummer, but I am definitely looking forward to Win 7’s pending release.