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QuickStart PowerShell Remoting

2011-02-14T23:29:20Z

Just created a new Wiki page on the PowerShell Survival Guide that is a quick guide to getting started with PowerShell remoting. I focused strictly on PSSession, since I find that the simplest way to get started. Let me know what you think, or better yet, update the content to improve it. That, after all, is what a Wiki is all about!...(read more)

Blog Retirement

2011-02-05T17:55:00Z

I and several Microsoft employees and other MVPs started this blog many years ago, at the dawn of the Microsoft x64 era, with the intent of providing a place to find solutions and information around 64-bit Windows computing. And, over the years, I think we did a good job of providing a place for those solutions that the community discovered to reside. After the initial flurry of activity, the rest of the folks who were part of that original group pretty much dropped off, and it became my personal...(read more)

Customizing PowerShell–Using $Profile

2010-12-22T22:16:00Z

Probably one of the first scripts any new Windows PowerShell user writes is a custom profile. Your PowerShell profile ($profile in PowerShell speak), is run every time you open a PowerShell window, and it allows you to do a lot of different things to set up your environment the way you want it. Actually, though, there are four profiles that affect your PowerShell window, as described in this MSDN article . There are arguments for which profile you should be editing, but my personal preference is...(read more)

Recovering an HP Disk Array

2010-12-06T20:56:41Z

As I reported earlier , my HP ML350 G5 died, and it was clearly a motherboard failure. Now that was bad enough, but worse was that I had VHD files on the P400 RAID5 array that were not as recently backed up as was desirable. Given that the ML350 wouldn’t boot at all, how to recover the important information on the array? Well, thanks to a suggestion from Greg Starks, a friend at HP, I was able to completely and easily recover all the content of that array. The key requirement was to have a second...(read more)

HP Abandons Windows Home Server

2010-12-01T15:52:33Z

Well, we seem to have had a bunch of HP related posts lately. This one is pure bad news, however. HP has decided to stop supporting Windows Home server. As reported on WeGotServed.com , HP has stopped selling or developing any servers for the WHS market, effective immediately. HP, of course, claims this has nothing whatsoever to do with the announcement from Microsoft that they were abandoning Drive Extender in the next version of Windows Home Server , code-named Vail. Yup, sure. I believe that....(read more)

HP ProLiant ML350 G5 Server– RIP

2010-11-22T16:54:13Z

Well, it’s been an interesting time with this ML350 . It has done yeoman duty as my primary Hyper-V server for 3 1/2 years now. We’ve had good experiences, and bad experiences. Especially during the Power Supply mess three years ago, but it’s also been prone to misbehaving in any sort of power event, even though it’s been sitting behind a pretty decent UPS. And it eats SAS drives – I’ve had 4 or 5 of them fail. Now in fairness to everyone, this machine was completely maxed out. It had 16 GB of very...(read more)

New HP in the House

2010-11-20T19:42:07Z

A new HP Proliant MicroServer just arrived in the office. And it is a sweet little gem. Small, square, and light in weight, this little server packs a decent punch. And is completely quiet. Mine came with 2 GB of RAM, and 2x 1TB hard disks, but it can hold 8 GB of RAM (2 slots only), and 4 internal 3.5” SATA hard disks. Plus an eSATA slot and 6 USB2 slots, so we’re not likely to run out of hard disk space very quickly. The first thing I did was slot in a couple more 1TB hard disks I had available...(read more)

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials Announced

2010-11-17T15:46:48Z

Those folks at Microsoft who bring us Windows Small Business Server and Windows Home Server have a new product coming out soon – Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. This is based on the same code as Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2011 Essentials, but focused on providing client backup and network storage for existing business networks. See Sean Daniel’s blog post for pictures and details. Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials can be joined to a regular Active Directory domain, and...(read more)

MVP Award Again

2010-10-01T15:14:18Z

I just received my notice that I’ve been awarded MVP status for the 11th straight year, this year as a Windows PowerShell MVP again. And while I’ve seen a lot of changes in the MVP program over that time, not all of them ones that I like or approve of, I continue to value the award for the company it puts me in—that of people I respect who truly care about the community we all are part of, and who give of their time and expertise to help that community prosper and grow. I believe in that, and my...(read more)

Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Releases

2010-09-23T17:23:44Z

According to the Windows Storage Server blog , Windows Storage Server (WSS) 2008 R2 has released. This now includes three SKUs – Workgroup, Standard and Enterprise. At the lower end, the Workgroup product is limited to 25 users, and won’t do clustering. But does do iSCSI support, and would be ideal in a small Hyper-V environment. We’re also hearing reports of new “cluster in a box” implementations that leverage the new high availability bits built in to WSS 2008 R2. I’m hoping to get my hands on...(read more)

SBS 7 Preview Release Available

2010-09-21T20:04:00Z

As posted on the official SBS Blog , the Preview build of SBS7 is now publicly available. SBS7 is a refresh of the SBS 2008 that we've been running our business on for a couple of years now, and I think this new release is a solid update. It updates to the latest releases including Exchange 2010, SharePoint Foundation 2010, and Windows Server 2008 R2. All three of these updates are definite enhancements, and I think this will be a compelling release. Please download it and try it out. But not...(read more)

Two Factor Authentication Revisited

2010-08-11T18:41:28Z

Several years ago, I wrote a blog post about Two Factor Authentication (2FA), and since then I’ve been using and living with it on a daily basis. Having just gotten a couple of questions posted to me from that blog post, I thought it might be time to update things a bit. First, if you haven’t read the earlier post , or don’t know much about 2FA, start by reading that so we’re all on the same page. So, what’s changed? Well, for one, although I still carry around that keyfob token, I rarely use it...(read more)

A Little PowerShell to Get Windows Information

2010-07-27T21:06:00Z

I have to work on many different machines, and many different versions of Windows. Often, not just the version, but the specific product I'm working on will be important, and that's not always easy to find. The difference between Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise doesn't much matter for most things, but makes a big difference if you're trying to decide if you can improve the performance by adding another 32 GB of RAM to it. So, I've created...(read more)

HowTo: Make a Bootable USB Disk

2010-03-03T17:17:00Z

UPDATE: OK, this all still works, but given that MS has made a GUI tool available that does the whole thing, why bother. A free download from the Microsoft Store is the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool . Grab a copy, and keep it available on your general tools USB stick. Of course, if you haven’t got that with you, then the following procedure is still valuable. I’ve used it innumerable times. There are lots of ways to make a bootable USB flash disk (Pendrive, USB stick, Flashdrive, or whatever you...(read more)

SBS 2008 Backup in Hyper-V Server R2

2009-11-26T18:11:25Z

Windows SBS 2008 prefers to back up to a removable USB drive, which is a problem if your SBS is virtualized in Hyper-V, which doesn’t support USB. There are workarounds, such as FabulaTech’s USB over Network , which I’ve used, and like. But the current version (4.2) has issues , as I posted a few days ago. I expect them to resolve those, but in the meantime, here is a purely Microsoft solution – use Hyper-V R2’s new dynamic storage capabilities! Dynamic storage? Yup. Hyper-V R2, whether as a role...(read more)

FabulaTech USB over Network v4.x

2009-11-24T18:40:00Z

Given what I’ve been seeing since the release of version 4.2 (and now 4.3) of FabulaTech’s USB over Network software, I’m recommending that users stick with version 4.1 or even earlier. I’ve had multiple unexplained hard crashes that have no other apparent explanation. When FabulaTech releases a new version, I’ll do some serious load testing before I implement it in production. Stay tuned. Charlie. UPDATE: I’ve been running version 4.3 for a while now, and haven’t experienced the level of crash version...(read more)

New StarWind iSCSI – High Availability for SMBs

2009-10-16T00:06:21Z

The new version of StarWind’s iSCSI SAN software is coming soon, and promises to add full high-availability clustering, with fail-over and fail-back support. While I’ve had a look at their video demo , I haven’t had a chance to actually install it or play with it yet, so no full review, obviously. What I like about StarWind has always been that it’s an affordable solution in the small to mid-sized business space, where paying 10’s of thousands for a SAN just isn’t in the cards for most of us, but...(read more)

Moving (and we lost our "skin")

2009-10-12T17:44:00Z

If you noticed that the blog suddenly went back to basic ugly, that was an unfortunate and unanticipated side effect of preparing to move my blogging to a new location . We'll be moving to http://msMVPs.com/blogs/russel shortly, but in the process of getting things configured for that move, we appear to have lost our look and feel a bit. Susan has enough to worry about handling the move, so I'll just wait until she's done before trying to fix the look. So, why am I moving? Because, frankly...(read more)

SBS 2008 – a 64-bit OS to Love

2009-09-10T17:53:17Z

As many of you know, I wrote the book on Windows Small Business Server 2008, as well as earlier editions. It’s an operating system and a good deal more, giving most small businesses (up to 75 users or devices) pretty much all the infrastructure and enterprise environment they need. We’ve run our writing business on SBS for years, and we recently moved our production environment over to SBS 2008. This was the last piece of the puzzle, and we’re fully 64-bit here except for two old workstations that...(read more)

HVRemote Updated

2009-08-09T23:27:20Z

In case you missed it, John Howard has updated his HVRemote utility. This little gem, which keeps getting better and better, can completely configure both the client and the server to enable you to connect to a Hyper-V server from your Vista or Windows 7 desktop. You’ll still need some way to actually manage the server, and that could be the RSAT tools or the PSHyperV project on Codeplex. IAC, grab the new version of HVRemote. John has added even more intelligence and troubleshooting in this...(read more)