Sam has been working in the IT industry for nearly 20 years now, and is currently working for VMware as a Senior Technical Marketing Manger in the Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) focussed on Automation. Previously, he has worked as consultant for VMware PSO, specializing in cloud automation and network virtualization. His technical experience includes design, development and implementation of cloud solutions, network function virtualisation and the software defined datacentre. Sam specialises in automation of network virtualisation for cloud infrastructure, enabling public cloud solutions for service providers and private or hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise.
Sam holds multiple high level industry certifications, including the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) for Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2013-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert NSX, vExpert VSAN and vExpert Cloud sub-programs.
Recently I found the need to retrieve the key from an existing Exchange Server for a reinstall - the software is legally licensed but the key was somehow lost. A trawl through my registry revealed that the key is stored in an obscure place:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Integration\{GUID}\PID3.0 This was the case on a Windows Server 2000 install with Exchange Server 2003 installed, when I get the chance I will test this on Server 2003.
I’ve just removed a domain controller (DC) from my root domain, the very first server not only in the domain, but the forest. The roles were migrating to a newer server, far more up to the job, but it isn’t a job to be taken lightly. If you mess up the root domain, you’ve potentially got problems all the way down your domain hierarchy.
Let me explain; the primary domain controller in a domain (normally the first domain controller) hosts all the FSMO roles.
Incredibly irritating error when you go to install under your user account when you’re using mapped drives for your documents. All our domain users have a userfolder on the server, it’s mapped as z:\ and there is a folder redirection set up. It’s pretty standard in a corporate/domain environment, so why does it cause so many Vista installations to fail?
This is something I’ve run into time and time again and There are a couple of things you can try…sometimes they work individually, sometimes not!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, that’s for various reasons, one of which was that I have been preparing for, and taking, my MCSA exams. So here it is…
MCTS Windows Vista, Configuring (70-620) MCP Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment (70-290) MCP Implementing, Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure (70-291) CompTIA Security+ (SYO-101) Which all add up to an MCSA Windows Server 2003 Security+.
I had an odd problem today, I logged on to begin my day’s work and plugged in my iPod as per normal. iTunes crashes, Vista tries to recover. iTunes closes. iTunes opens. iTunes crashes. Vista tries to recover. As you can imagine that gets tiresome, so I tried repairing iTunes, reinstalling iTunes, installing older versions of iTunes, all to no avail. The solution in the end was to remove Quicktime and do a fresh install.
I’ve finally cracked the installation problems with VS 2003 SP1 on Vista. The problem seems to be that the SP must be installed under the same credentials that Visual Studio was installed. I.e. I installed Visual Studio under the domain administrator credentials, but I run my day-to-day under a standard user credential. When installing the SP1 I was elevating my standard user credential rather than running as the domain admin. I don’t know what difference that makes to anything, but it’s worked!
I’ve recently had to upgrade my VM Server due to an increase in load. I had 2 virtual servers running off of the same hard disk, with 768mb of RAM split between the lot. After jamming 2 new 1GB sticks of DDR in, and a new 120GB hard drive it was time to re-allocate some of these resources…here’s how: WARNING! You should always perform a backup on a server you can’t afford to lose BEFORE any operation that could potentially destroy the disk (think what would happen if you had a power cut while resizing…) Step 1 - Moving the Virtual Server.
I’m not going to go into the rights and wrongs of DRM, I will say that I’m strongly against piracy and if your intention is to strip DRM for those kind of reasons, kindly go somewhere else for your info. If you’re wanting to strip DRM for a legitimate personal use, such as playing in another media player or an MP3 player other than an iPod - read on! QuickTimeFairUse is a great little application that takes your .
Just a quick post today about trust levels for .NET assemblies that are hosted remotely. My current set up at work means that I am maintaining one version of our web site while working on developing a new one - not uncommon. I have 2 virtual servers running Server 2003, IIS and SQL Server, each an identical copy of our production server. Each solution and it’s projects are stored on each virtual server, with the project folders shared and mapped as drives on my laptop.
If, like me, you want to administrate your Windows 2003 servers from your Vista workstation, you may find that you recieve an “MMC could not create snap in” error when you open one of the admin tools, it also manifests as corrupted graphics within some MMC Add-ins. It appears that the dlls are not registered correctly, there’s a KB article from Microsoft that contains a script to reregister the dlls. It’s a simple fix: Copy and paste the following script into a text document, save it as RegisterAdminPack.
