Archive for February, 2010

Microsoft UK TechDays……yipee !!

Friday, February 26th, 2010

I just signed up for a couple of the Microsoft UK tech.days events being held in London during April.

Am really hoping to get to see Chris Jackson live as I have only previously seen him online on Channel 9 and on the 2008 TechEd recordings (2nd page, first row, far right video). He really seems to know his stuff and have a sense of humour and presentation charisma.

Is quite a big deal for me as I don’t think I will ever work in the sort of company who send their staff out to the big official MS TechEd events held globally (at least I haven’t been sent to any so far, and never having been to one, have not been able to ask the attendees what sort of company they are working for that send them to MS Tech events).

In fact, I think the last formal IT training I was sent on was over 10 years ago when I was sent on a course to learn Exchange server 5.5 administration.

Admittedly I seem to have done ok without any training, getting by using books, online examples and demos and so on. But some systems (ones from Microsoft in particular) are getting so large and so complex with so many features and capabilities built right into them that I wonder if I am doing some things inefficiently or even incorrectly.

Take desktop deployment. My current employer are using Windows Vista. One of the earlier tasks I did (after the massive mail migration I wrote about on here previously) was to replace the mix of XP and Vista will a few standardised builds of Vista using WDS. The learning process was pretty steep, and very confusing.

I could not get the answer files to work correctly for unattended installs, I gave up on trying to figure the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT). In the end I simply installed a box *eaxctly* how I wanted it to be, and then sysprep’d it with an answer file. I then used ImageX to capture the system to a .WIM file and this is what I used to deploy to new systems. Even though it works pretty well (the only bits I could not automate were the machine naming, joining the domain and Windows activation) I am still not sure I am doing it the way Microsoft intended.

Now in 2010, the office here are looking to replace Vista with Windows 7 (not just to be fashionable you understand, but there do seem to be too many issues with Vista for our liking). I downloaded with Windows Automated Installer Kit (WAIK) for Windows 7 to have a look, and it bigger and even more complex that the one for Vista was.

So I have high hopes that some bright Microsoft chappie (maybe even Chris Jackson himself) will take to the stage and say “here’s how you do it” and show me the bits I’m missing, and the bits I’m doing wrong. I am taking my laptop and will be furiously trying to record everything they say and do :oO

p.s. If you work for a company that sends you to tech events (not just the MS ones) please let me know who you are and what you do, cause I really wanna go to them too :o/

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/techdays/dayitp.aspx

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Posted in microsoft, windows, windows 7 | No Comments »

Sorry, I Want A Swimming Pool You See ?…….,

Friday, February 19th, 2010

I came across a random blog by Erik Van Slyke today while skimming the www.wordpress.com website. I was actually looking into the story about the 2 hour outage they had (which seems to have been routing based and nothing much they could have done about it, their systems were fine, the paths into and out from them were knacked).

The blog post Erik had written was about layoffs, or as we know them in the UK, redundancies. I have been fortunate in my life so far to have never been made redundant from a company, or been out of work for any period of time. But, I had always been a little confused as to why companies let people go (unless they were really small companies and keeping someone on meant going bust and closing shop !).

Erik recounts a story whereby an exec level team have a meeting and annouce that the company is doing ok, but to kepp 100% of their bonuses, they need to reduce headcount by 5% !! Sack people doing their jobs perfectly well in order to futher line their pockets.

Are these people wrong ? Are they simply ambitious ? Are they just greedy ?

I wonder if I ever got to that level of corporate structure and was asked to do the same to protect my own bonus and those of other staff if I could go along with it ? Can’t really see it myself, I tend to have apathy towards those less fortunate than myself. I even feel guilty every time I pass a homeless person that I have a job, a home and a reasonably regular life.

I have to say I found the article both enlightening and depressing, especially in the current situation with so many people out of work everywhere. I will now worry that, no matter the quality and volume of work I produce for any given employer, I could be axed through no fault of my own at any time just so someone higher up the corporate ladder can have a swimming pool installed at their home.

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Family Clark…….

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Big congratulations to Matt and Tiki for adding Mia Edith and Dylan William to the family Clark.

Well done to you both, look forward to coming to see you all very soon hopefully ;o)

Awwwww....bless

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Posted in celebrations, friends | No Comments »

My Career Broken Down…….

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Not quite sure who created this, but it pretty much sums what I do from day to day.

In fact, this process had led to the creation of some of the posts here on this very site :o)

Thanks XKCD

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IIS7 AppPool user account causes HTTP 503 error

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

I don’t profess to be any kind of IIS expert, in fact, I would say I’m more of an Apache man myself. I just find it easier dealing with flat text file for application configs, frankly while I’m sure there are benefits to having the IIS config all sorted in metadata and stuff, I just find it confusing and overwhelming, gimme httpd.conf any day.

While trying to configure an IIS7 AppPool to use a not evelvated logon to run as, I recieved a HTTP 503 error and the following was logged in Appilcation area of the event viewer.

The identity of application pool user.www.somedomain.com is invalid. The user name or password that is specified for the identity may be incorrect, or the user may not have batch logon rights. If the identity is not corrected, the application pool will be disabled when the application pool receives its first request. If batch logon rights are causing the problem, the identity in the IIS configuration store must be changed after rights have been granted before Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) can retry the logon. If the identity remains invalid after the first request for the application pool is processed, the application pool will be disabled. The data field contains the error number.

Quite a few possibilities mentioned there, so I started with the first one, incorrect user. I deleted the user logon, recreated it, set the password and then re-configured the IIS AppPool to use the newly created account. But still the page gave me a 503 error.

So I looked at the new possibility, ‘Batch Logon Rights’. Comparing the local security policy MMC for the server I was having trouble with and one that was working ok I found that the group ‘IIS_IUSRS’ had been granted the ‘Logon As Batch’ right on the standalone server, but not on the server that was part of a domain ?!

Local Security Policy MMC

As the domained server was controlled by group policies I could not just add the group directly to the permission, I had to create a group policy to grant ‘IIS_IUSRS’ the ‘Logon As Batch’ right and the run a ‘gpupdate /force’ on the domain server.

Restarting IIS and testing the site again showed everything now working correctly. It seems that the ‘IUSR_USRS’ group gets granted the ‘Logon As Batch’ right automatically on standalone servers, but not ones that are part of a domain, you have to grant the rights by adding them via a group policy.

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