I'm currently in the process of upgrading Dark, my workstation at work, from Vista RC1 to RC2. It's been at it for about an hour now and it's nowhere near done. Part of it might be that my web browsing and other work related activities continue as it goes, but...
I've heard from several sources that the upgrade process takes forever, but it's hard to really fathom until you've run it. Damn. It's slow. To quote the installer, "Your upgrade may take several hours to complete."
From the little bit I was able to play with RC2 on Wraith last night, I've decided it seems to run smoother than RC1, which is expected. Part of it may be the difference in processors, but we'll see after the upgrade is done. The other difference may be that Dark has a much newer video card and is using the Aero interface, which is prettier but has a higher overhead in performance cost.
Update: Total installation time was approximately 3 hours. Damn.
For the last few months at work, I had been trying to figure out an easier way to correct some problems with our servers. A few weeks ago, I had an epiphany while drivng in my car. The only problem is that it meant I had to recreate our Active Directory. That's never a fun chore.
I spent the next couple of days moving all of the server functions off of Janus so that I could reinstall Windows Server 2003 and set up a new Active Directory Forest. The process normally wouldn't have taken as long as it did, but I was also busy with other things, like the big sale we were having at the time.
After all was said and done, I had a new server, now named FN. I installed the server programs that needed to be there, like Exchange, Sharepoint Portal Services, and a few other things, and was ready to use it. Then I made a mistake somewhere. I believe my mistake was running the Security Confiuration Wizard prematurely.
Shortly after running the SCW for the first time, I discovered that I was no longer able to access any of the file sharing services on the computer. It would access shares from other computers, but none could access it. I even ran a portscan on it to verify and it showed all of the associated ports, and several others, were filtered.
My first reaction was, "Oh, it must be the built-in firewall's fault." However, that wasn't even installed at the time. After about five days of beating my head on the keyboard, I finally discovered a vague mention of a similar problem on the web somewhere that had to do with IPSec.
Once I finally figured out that it might be IPSec, I started poking around. To my suprise, none of the IPSec functions are easily accessible. To get to the IPSec configuration in Windows Server 2003, you have to open up the Microsoft Management Console and add the IPSec snap-ins yourself.
Lo and behold, IPSec, probably set by the SCW, had blocked all of the ports for file sharing and for accessing the computer as a Domain Controller. The whole thing nearly drove me (more?) insane, but it is working now. I've gotten the whole building switched over to the new domain and it's running smoothly. I've also reinstalled the other server, but I still have some programs I need to install on it to make it do what I want to do with it now.
I'm still not quite sure what to make of the new UI features. They have merit, but I think it'll take a bit of geting used to before I decide if I really like it or not. Things are starting to flow better though.
Overall, I'm intrigued...
I've built myself an HTPC from spare parts the other day. I don't remember if I mentioned that before or not. I've named the machine Satyr because I enjoy the pun. I'd originally though about installing XP Media Center Edition, but I didn't have it when I built the machine. Instead, I installed Fedora Core 4. My idea was to create a MythTV box.
After playing with it for awhile, I decided that wasn't a good idea. The main reason is that the tv-out support on the video cards I have was horrible. I finally got a copy of XP MCE 2005 and went to install it last night. That's when I discovered that you can't upgrade to XP from Linux. Granted, it took me awhile to figure that out.
When I went to install XP (all versions exhibited the same behavior), it would tell me that setup was inspecting my computer's hardware configuration, and then the screen would go blank. I verified the disk worked on another box. I also tried Windows 2000 which loaded setup fine.
My next thought was hardware compatibility. I removed everything that was nonessential piece by piece, and it continued to fail. Eventually (a few hours later), I gave up and decided to try and install 2000 and run a full install afterward from inside it. On a whim, I swapped install disks on the first reboot of 2000, before the graphical installation section. It worked.
Apparently, there's something in the boot sector that the XP install just despises. I had repartitioned the drive from the Windows 2000 recovery console previously, so it wasn't the Linux data. It had to be the master boot record. Totally bizarre.
On a side note, I'm currently listening to an inteview between Jon Udell (one of my favorite columnists at Infowolrd) and Bill Gates. It's pretty informative, but it's largely techincal. They're discussing the future direction of software development ala Office 12 and .NET 2.0.
>So this week, my email server which is also the domain controller has failed twice. It's a weird little problem that I've never seen before. Has something to do with the network card, but it's all on the software side. Rebooting fixes it.
I've finally decided that Windows 2003 Server's Clustering Service may be the solution to my redundancy needs. The problem though is that I've got to get the second server set up first and move over all of the server tasks to it, then reinstall on the first machine and tell it to be a cluster with the first. It sounds easy, until I think about how much work that'll be moving over all of the Exchange data and everything else. I'm not looking forward to this.
