Last week I've been at IT-Forum, and besides other stuff I made some marketing about
The Working Network. It's a very interesting Project - basically we are trying to establish a network of trust about certain Microsoft Technologies, e.g. Blogs which cover Vista, Blogs which cover Windows Server, and so on, and try to create a single point where you can get OPML-Files (a "collection" of RSS-Feeds) about the technology. The same applies to Websites. Using tagging technologies such as
www.furl.com enables you to "mark" (aka "tag") valuable Sites and mark them as valuable source for certain technologies. You and other users can profit from the collection of Sites marked by others.
So basically those technologies could be referred to as providing a meta-community or collection of valuable sources.
I'm working on a way how to provide quick feedback for sites you find valuable - especially blogs - about Windows Server in general and Directory Services specifically. However IT-Forum and other stuff have prevented me from putting the amount of work into the project which it deserves. So until I can provide a more elegant way let me know if you have any interesting blogs or sites you prefer for those technologies by using the
Contact Form on my WebLog.
Blogs which are valuable for either the "Windows Server" or "Directory Services" technologies (or any other technologies which are in scope of the project) will make it into the
OPML-o-Matter application where you are able to select your technologies of interest together and receive a OPML-File you can import into your favorite RSS-Reader.
I'll publish a collection about Blogs and Sites as well as soon as I've got some together.
Here's another component of Windows Server 2003 R2 - specifically the Branch Office Solutions - I'm looking forward too: The new Release of the Distributed File System (DFS).
DFS is available since Windows NT 4.0 and provides the possibility to "hide all many shares behind a single share": You can build up a DFS-Root (the share the users connect to) and put Folders (DFS-Links) underneath it. Those look for the user as regular folders, but in reality they point to different shares on different servers.
Since Windows 2000 there are two different options when creating a DFS-Root: a domain DFS Root or a standalone Root. The Domain DFS-Root is integrated into Active Directory, users connect to
\\domain.com\myDfsRoot, the standalone DFS-Root is on a single server or on a clustered server and users connect to
\\servername.domain.com\myDfsRoot.
In Windows 2000 you also had the possibility to link multiple servers to a DFS-Link (Folder), and you usually were configuring replication between those shares. The big advantage is that users are connecting to the folder which is in their own site, but are able to fail over to another site if the local server is not online. For the replication of the content FRS (File Replication Services) is used, the same replication engine which takes care of replicating Sysvol (the share which the clients use to retrieve their logon-Scripts and Policies when logging on).
With Windows Server 2003 R2 DFS is split into two parts: DFS-Namespace (formerly known as DFS) and DFS-Replication (formerly provided by FRS). Those provide the following advantages (thanks to
~eric for correcting my prior statement about RDC):
- The DFS Management Console ROCKS - it's based on the Management Console (MMC) 3.0 and is just great. E.g. it provides more help and a action pane.
- With DFS-Namespace (DFS-N) you are able to configured preferred servers (preferred in the same site, preferred globally) and failback (prior you only had fail-over to other servers if one server wasn't available, but it wasn't failing back while the client was online).
- DFS-Replication (DFS-R) does not replace FRS, cause FRS is still used for replicating Sysvol.
- DFS-R provides RDC, Remote Differential Compression. RDC is providing - hold your breath - Delta Replication for Files. RDC will only replicate the changes of large files, the smalles unit to replicate is 4KB. So if you have large files where only small changes occur RDC will help you to replicate those faster with less WAN-Traffic.
- If one of the replication partners is a Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition RDC will also be able to detect delta changes between files, such as cutting two slides out of a PowerPoint-Presentation and pasting them into another one.
- DFS-R provides replication Schedules + Replication Bandwidth. So you are able to select which times replication should occur and which Bandwidth (in average) should be used during replication.
I did some testing with DFS and especially RDC - and I just love it. I kept the Replication Schedule to always, and with LAN speed I was unable to figure out the delay when accessing two different shares, it appeared as the same share, even when I made changes to large files. RDC ROCKS!!