- Posted by ploft on July 21, 2009
Tiered of people bugging you, for the simplest questions they could figure out in seconds using google.com ?
This is the solution to stop that.
So for answering the person bugging you, you just pass out the following URL like the following, just replace with his or her question instead.
Here is an example:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Peter+Loft+Jensen+blog
Or the company (Vertica) where I work:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=vertica+commerce+integration+sharepoint
Setting up you own Let Me Google That For You (LMGTFY) go visit www.lmgtfy.com
It's genius.
- Posted by ploft on June 23, 2009
If you have a Discussion Board in SharePoint 2007, and have successfully deployed a workflow which triggers when new items is added or created in the list, and decides to switch on "E-mail enabled list", you normally (unfortunate) see that the workflow isn't firing.
To make this work, you have to apply what must be somewhat of a long operationcommand via stsadm-tool:
"stsadm -o setproperty -pn declarativeworkflowautostartonemailenabled -pv true"
Note that I've only tested this on WSS 3.0 with SP2 installed, and didn't need to install the kb953749 fix.
If you have WSS 3.0 or WSS 3.0 SP1 you might need to install this fixes before the above command works.
Battle plan:
Install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Infrastructure Update:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953749/
Run the very-long-command as described above and in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953289/
Happy e-mail-enabled-discussion-board-workflow'ing, and my you have a lovely summer =)
- Posted by ploft on May 1, 2009
While everyone is falling on their bum now that Windows 7 has been released in a Release Candidate version, it's worth mentioning that the Client and Server editions for now goes hand in hand, meaning that the Windows Server R2 Release Candidate is also available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers.
Windows 7 will be available for public May 5.
For those of you who fancy servers above clients, here is a kick on to what the Windows Server 2008 R2 will bring.
Interview with Wald Ralston:
http://edge.technet.com/Media/Windows-Server-2008-R2-RC-Interview/
More resources about Windows 2008 R2 here:
http://edge.technet.com/Media/Announcing-Windows-Server-2008-R2-Release-Candidate-RC/
Some of the notable key elements in the R2 edition:
- Hyper-V 2.0
- PowerShell 2.0
- Branch Office
- Power Management
- Posted by ploft on April 21, 2009
Next version of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 is "surprisingly" enough called R2, just like it's big brother Windows Server 2008 R2
One of the major news it that the smaller and simpler standalone Hyper-V Server is going to support:
Failover Clustering and Live migration
Making this product a lot more interesting for the majority of small and midsized companies, making it possible for high availability and flexible migration of VM guest's across VM hosts.
Along with this, I should also mention that the Hyper-V configuration command-prompt utility has been updated accordingly allowing administrator to setup following items:
- Remote Management Configuration
- Failover Clustering Configuration
- Additional options for updates
Some tech updates too:
More CPU and memory support. Supporting up to 32 cores and 1 TB of physical memory on the host system.
Tryout the R2 beta, download here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e464e255-cdd5-44b2-84e6-3233eae3f356
- Posted by ploft on March 31, 2009
Admitted, this is not my favorite solution to this problem, but if the alternative is no backup at all, this is without doubt a workable resolution.
In our setup I've experienced backup problems when using DPM 2007 to backup some of my VM's running on our Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 host. More specific these the errors appearing:
DPM 2007 reported:
The replica of vm-client-001 on vm-host-xxx.local is inconsistent with the protected data source. All protection activities for this data source will fail until the replica is synchronized with consistency check.
DPM encountered a retryable VSS error.
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 host reported:
(Both visible in Event log and Virtual Server 2005 R2 master status webpage)
The VSS writer for Virtual Server failed during the PostBackup phase, during the mounting of disk \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy290\Virtual Servers\vm-client-001.vhd for virtual machine vm-client-001. The disk did not come online within 5 minutes. Confirm that the vhd mount driver in installed correctly and is able to mount virtual hard disks.
It's worth mentioning the VM, DPM has been failing to backup of the type: Online backups. I have several other VM's setup on the VM-host, without backup problems, both Online and Offline backups.
My way of fixing the issue with DPM continuing to fail when backup is initiated is solved by changing the backup-mode from Online backup to Offline backup. This is done by the registry on the physical/host machine running the VMs.
1. Open Registry Editor/regedit
2. Navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Virtual Server\1.0\Backup\BackupType"
3. Either change the existing REG_DWORD-record if your VM is located here, or create a new REG_DWORD with the same name as your VM appears in Virtual Server 2005 R2 web-interface.
4. Set the value of appropriate record to: 1 This would changes the Backup mode to Offline backups.
Just for the kicks, here is the value definitions:
0/1: Offline backup
2: Online backup
Beware that DPM still reports it's as a Online Backup, but underneath the bonnet, it is Offline backup, and your DPM should no longer experience the mentioned problem. It's by the way not necessary to reboot any of the machines involved for the changes to take effect.
- Posted by ploft on March 20, 2009
I've been running with Windows 2008 for quite some time now, and at the time where DPM 2007 was released I guess Windows 2008 still was kind' a new to people, so no resolution or scenario of this issue was right at hand at the time.
System:
HP ProLiant ML 110 powered by Intel Xeon CPU with 8 Gb memory running 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise (Hyper-V role enabled) with SP1 and all latest updates.
Used quite some time searching the web for a resolution to this problem, and most people a who I "ran into" suggested that I should wait for the SP1 for DPM 2007. Doing some more digging it turns out that the Virtual Disk Service (VDS) on the older 2000 and 2003 system had some memory leaks, and kb-articles referring to these scenarios looked a lot like the problems I have on my Windows 2008 system. Chances for an error reoccurring could therefore be somewhat expected. Not key on manually overwriting important system files on a semi-working system which handles backup, I first of all turn to my patience willing to give the SP1 a chance to might fix this issue since Microsoft at this time doesn't have any fixes ready yet.
SP1 came and a lot of improvement in speed generally, but I still see the VDS service consume way to much memory most of the time, but the applications is more responsive and therefore gives a better user experience speed-wise.
In the lack of better suggestions I turn to the physical hardware and installs further 4 Gb memory, maxing out the total memory possible for this machine 8 Gb. Once again it helps - but only for some time. Hence the amount of backup jobs and data being stored, the system slowly grinds back to the same sluggish state that it had in the beginning.
Getting more and more errors and failed backup messages, and I'm guessing the VDS memory leak is affecting the DPM and its ability to successfully backup things.
Today I stumbled over this kb-article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958387
"On a computer that is running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008, a memory leak may occur in the Virtual Disk Service. This problem may occur in the following scenarios.
A memory leak occurs in the Virtual Disk Service when an application uses the Virtual Disk Service to enumerate disk resources. In this scenario, you notice that the memory consumption of the Virtual Disk Service (Vds.exe) increases continually."
Once again - sounds exactly like what I'm experiencing, and this time it's for Windows 2008 - yes baby!
Installed the fix (kb958387) and have been running with this update for a week now, backup jobs are hitting a much higher successful rate than before, and whereas the machine often was slow after just one day in companionship with memory-leaking-VDS. VDS and DPM seems to be better friends now and I don't see any huge unexpected memory usage anymore.
I've been running a couple of weeks with this fix, and yes no more memory slaughtering from the VDS service. Thought I'd just share this with you, so none of you should experience the same annoying scenario with a sluggish DPM server or other backup products using Volume Shadow Service (VSS).
- Posted by ploft on March 18, 2009
Lately a couple of my friends has asked into how my Google Calendar setup works, since I'm driving this as a central element in my daily planning. It's evolved a bit since I first started to use Google Calendar to be used across multiple devices and systems.
My girlfriend is also a happy user of this setup, allowing here to control her working schedule, since she's working with changing work hours. This has been an issue for a quite some time, since I never knew when she was home because my memory often gets flushed or reset every time I sleep.
My current setup:
4 main calendars:
- My own
- My girlfriend
- Our shared calendar (my girlfriend and me, for stuff where we both attends)
- Building/estate (this is used for registering worktasks, and/or different numbers for stat on electric and water usage)
3 special calendar, for some features that the Google Calendar sadly doesn't have embedded yet:
- Weather (Feature added from calendar settings)
- Holydays (in this case the Danish holydays, feature added from Google calendar "inventory")
- Week numbers (http://recover89.googlepages.com/googlecalendarweeknumbers)
The 4 main calendars are synced with:
- My Apple Iphone 3G (all four, changes are pushed)
- My personal pc, main Outlook calendar (all four, syncs every 15 min)
- My workstation pc, secondary/shared Outlook calendar (only my personal and shared calendar, syncs every 15 min)
- My workstation pc, as a Vista Gadget (my own and shared calendar)
- Girlfriends Nokia 6500 (her own and shared calendar, syncs once every day)
Now you might think that would build up events every day, and displays on some devices is almost impossible to get a good overview of your appointments, but luckily the different calendars are color coded.
The Google Calendar is the primary calendar, and to keep this simple we decided it would be the best (and easiest) that additions and changes has to be made though the Google Calendar webpage.
For syncing the Nokia phone with Google Calendar I use, I would guess Ericsson could use this as well:
www.goosync.com
Iphone setup for Google Calendar:
I'm currently using www.nuevasync.com, but I've heard that Google now supports push technology and thereby allowing you to skip nuevasync as a gateway/pass-through service, and connect directly to your data in Google Calendar, but haven't tried it yet.
Vista Gadget, Google Calendar:
http://www.eelkespaak.nl/2008/08/windows-vista-sidebar-gadget-for-google-calendar/
- Posted by ploft on November 4, 2008
Windows Server 2008 R2 Overview
The next version of Windows Server is the R2 of Windows 2008, internally called Windows 7 Server. For now Microsoft expect shipping R2 Q1 of 2010. Some of the new features worth mentioning:
- New active directory level (a lot of changes and improvement since the 2003 that didn’t bring that much to the table – the 2008 R2 does, with Recycle Bin functionality a much richer interface for administrating active directories in larger enterprises.)
- PowerShell v2.0
- Second release of the Hyper-V engine, now real supporting multimonitor RDP’s, and live migration from server to server without any downtime or impact on the guest system.
- Along with Hyper-V, Microsoft had made a lot of effort into making RemoteApp better at supporting video/audio, 2D/3D graphics, and the overall view of software running remotely, making the remote experience a lot more transparent for the users.
- Branch Office caching feature, lowering the traffic between office branches by providing a usage-aware kind-of-proxy.
- Core editions now support the .NET framework (apparently not the complete framework, but the most of it)
- Easier administrating web-application leveraging most of the administration to the IIS-manager, and also allowing you to control SQL databases directly from the manager.
- Support for 64 physical cores (that’s 256 logical cores for a single operating system instance)
Windows 2008 Server R2 offers a lot on the connectivity part, aiming at trouble-free connectivity nevertheless our location, by using Direct Access without the usage of VPN’s.
It’s also worth mentioning the 2008 Server was the last server system from Microsoft shipped with 32bit support. The Windows 2008 R2 Server is only shipped in a 64 bit version.
- Posted by ploft on November 4, 2008
What’s new in OCS 2007 R2:
So I attended this sessions because of my involvement in at Vertica implementing the OCS 2007 for some time now – mainly scratching my head trying to figure out how to get the enterprise VOIP part working properly. Therefore this session had my attention in addition to features and manageability, hoping there would be abit more “help” on with the parts that I’ve been struggling with.
Some of the new cool features I could mention:
- Call Routing rules
- Call queuing
- Use of IVR/Text to speech treatment of calls (For you Danes who have used the DSB voice order system, I could imagine some skepticism – I would too)
- Direct support for ITSP access to PSTN and mobile phone network without the use of Session Border Controller
- Voice quality is even better
- Built in Desktop sharing in the Communicator
- Communicator software for most phones out there, even phones not running Windows Mobile or Symbian (wee hu, they actually had a picture of my Nokia 6300 up on the slide of supported phones – who would have guessed my old plain mobile phone would be supported)
- OCS can now host a conference call outside the network, making the OCS call the outside-party
One of the more exciting new features was the OCS Attendant for receptionists and people handling a lot of calls. The application is built on top of the public API of OCS and gives the user an overview of incoming calls, user’s free/busy/on-the-phone status in the enterprise and possibility to manage people on hold. Another great feature here is the ability to forward/transfer calls using the normal procedure of giving the receiver a voice-message over the phone, before transferring or transfer the call, along with a instant message. I would guess this tool offer great help and flexibility to enterprises today, and making the switch for the “old” IP-phone system to mainly using the OCS as a phone platform.
Eric Swift (senior director of Microsoft's Unified Communications Group) also showed example of using the API for making bots for and auto-messaging, which also sounds very interesting. Not the example itself, but possibilities in the open API and opportunity to make very customized software solutions pulling and showing info from the OCS system. Consider this scenario, the bot sends a message to you: “Hi Peter, are you able to participate in a customer meeting, Thursday, 3rd this month.” You answer, and depending on the logic you’ve made in the bot, it parses it – and in this example, adds an event to your calendar.
- Posted by ploft on November 2, 2008
Attending the
Microsoft TechEd EMEA 2008.
I’ll be blogging about the TechEd sessions, and the overall journey.
After almost 4 hours waiting in between flights in Frankfurt airport (
yawn...) I grabbed a taxi from the Airport to my hotel. The ride included some new interesting insight to the local people – or at least the taxi drivers. Along with a lot of singing, yelling at the pedestrians, signaling other drivers on the road - and what sounded like Spanish cursing (because of all the one-way streets leading to my hotel), the chauffeur finally made it to the
Confortel Barcelona hotel.
The hotel is somewhat futuristic compared to all the other hotels I’ve stayed in. A very stylish and minimalistic look dominates the place along with a snazzy looking room too. Note that the minibar
IS free – that gives points in my book.
20:30
foooood! Incarcerated in the Frankfurt airport, the selection of nutrition is fairly limited. Looking forward to enjoying a real meal, I checking the area not far from the hotel, and found a small place called La Emperatriz, where I ordered a well proportioned steak (since it’s my birthday :-), enjoyed the feast to the fullest.
I’ll be checking up on the TechEd sessions tomorrow morning – it’s my understanding, a lot of new sessions has been added – among sessions about
Windows 7, which could be very interesting to attend to.
Enough for me today, see you tomorrow.