Enable LightScribe Disc Labelling In Windows 7 for CDBurnerXP And Others

We use the free utility CDBurnerXP for pretty much all of our burning and ISO needs.

We created a couple of videos that we would like to have a formal label set into the disk using LightScribe.

Out of the box, Windows does not support LightScribe. CDBurnerXP has the ability, but we need to install the drivers first.

• LightScribe.com: LightScribe Optical Drive Drivers

We downloaded the Windows version of the LightScribe System Software and installed it.

Once installed we had a new System tray icon as well as a desktop icon:

Once the drivers have been properly installed, we end up with the LightScribe button in CDBurnerXP:

In our case, a reboot was not required to seat the drivers. Though we did make sure to close CDBurnerXP prior to installing the drivers.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

What a TSGrinder Grind Against an SBS Looks Like

On some of our older SBS 2003 installs where we have no out-of-band remote management setup in place, we open up port 3389 on the router to the server to run our updates.

Once we are finished, we normally close the port back up. Now, this particular evening we had run a series of updates across more than half of the servers that we manage one Saturday.

It seems that one of the firewall ports did not get closed and someone took an interest in that particular server:

• Logon attempts: 3,282
• IP: 64.46.44.76

Now, the IP may not be relevant since the machine behind it may be a zombie.

Things were relatively quite until a few days later:

• Logon attempts: 5
• IP: 113.53.231.2

Then this one kept at it for a number of days:

• Logon attempts: 1,906
• IP: 84.53.64.91

The above IP kept after the server until this day:

• Logon attempts: 2,414
• IP: 84.53.64.91

And another shot of a report that was taken manually in the SBS Console not long after the above:

• Logon attempts: 4,545
• IP: 84.53.64.91

Note the different numbers between the automatically generated report and the one manually created by us. The disparity may be due to the fact that the TS service was being hammered so frequently.

While the grind was happening we could not log on to the server via a direct TS connection. We were almost instantly bumped out as soon as we saw the logon screen.

Fortunately, we could log onto RWW and TS via the RWW RDP connection that uses a proxy port of 4125. If that had failed, then we would have connected to a workstation and ran:

• mstsc /v:servername /admin

From there we would have had console access and could do what needed to be done which was to close the 3389 publishing rule in ISA.

TS Client help screenshot:

As a rule, we do not allow port 3389 to be opened to the Internet by default.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Creating a Non-Mail Enabled User in SBS 2008

In SBS 2003 if we left the e-mail alias field empty in the Add User wizard we would end up with a user account with no mailbox.

In SBS 2008 if we try the same thing we get an error asking us to fill out the e-mail alias field.

When we head into the Exchange Management Console found in SBS Native Tools Management we need to stop and consider what the various commands mean when we right click on the user’s mailbox account:

In the SBS 2003 days, Remove would mean the removal of the user’s mailbox. But, this actually goes through and removes the user’s AD account as well _without warning_.

In SBS 2008 with Exchange 2007 we actually need to Disable the user’s mailbox which effectively removes the AD account’s mailbox.

Occasionally there is a need for a user account with domain resource access without the need for a mailbox.

This is how we get to that point by creating the user in the SBS Console and subsequently disabling that mailbox.

There is one thing to consider though, if we run the Change User Role wizard in the SBS 2008 Console the wizard _will_ add a mailbox back to the user account.

This is what the user account looks like in the SBS Console after the mailbox has been disabled:

Note the absence of an e-mail address.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

On a Deployment

We have been on-site since last Friday deploying three new servers.

• Small Business Server 2008
• Windows Server 2008 x64
• Two instances of Microsoft SQL Standard for Small Business x64
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Terminal Services serving RemoteApps via the Remote Web Workplace

This particular solution replaced the existing SBS 2003 and Windows Server 2003 TS box.

We did not migrate because the source domain was too messed up.

Posting will probably remain light for the rest of the week and into next due to the volume of client work that we are dealing with both with this deployment and other client needs.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Installing Office 2010 RTM Requires Prerelease Uninstall First And 64bit From 32bit Rule

Just as has been the case in previous Release To Market products, Office 2010 will require that the Release Candidate or Beta versions of the product be uninstalled prior to running the install:

Setup Errors

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of Microsoft Office 2010. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of Microsoft Office 2010 products and associated technologies.

Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

Fortunately we do not have a lot of workstations with the Release Candidate installed so the time required to “correct the issues” will not be too consuming.

One more thing to keep in mind too:

If there is a plan to use the 64bit version of Office 2010, then any installed 32bit of Office will need to be removed prior to the install too.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Office Professional Plus 2010 RTM Available Via TechNet/MSDN

Yes, we are a bit behind on things. We have been _that_ busy lately.

Office Pro Plus 2010 is available in both 64bit and 32bit flavours on the TechNet and MSDN download sites for subscribers.

We have our 64bit version coming down now with the 32bit version to follow later.

It will be interesting to see what bugs we encountered that were addressed and those that were not.

All in all, Office 2010 is a big step in the right direction for productivity here in our shop.

The Word 2010 Navigation Pane is awesome for jumping around our client audits to get to certain pieces of info quickly. When we open the same document in Word 2007 we end up taking a bit more time to either jump down by page or search.

The changes to the ribbon seemingly take what was really good about the Office 2003 GUI and blended it into the Office 2007/2010 ribbon structures. We like the changes there.

We _really_ appreciate the ability to get more than one Exchange account into Outlook 2010. That feature request has been around for _a long_ time!

Congratulations to the Office Team for what looks to be a great product version! Good job folks!

Now to figure out how to tweak our Group Policy scripts to look for both 64bit and 32bit versions when delivering Office via GP settings!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

SATA Drives in Dell And HP Servers Only Have 1 Year Warranty

As of March 24, 2009, Dell changed their warranty policies for entry level servers. Essentially, no matter what the length of the warranty is with that new Dell PowerEdge server that has SATA drives, those drives are only covered for one year from the date of purchase.

• Dell Limited Warranties

Check out the last bullet under the “How long does this limited hardware warranty last?” section.

SATA hard drives in PowerEdge^TM , PowerEdge SC^TM  and PowerVault^TM  systems launched on or after March 24, 2009 (e.g. PowerEdge T110, PowerEdge T310, PowerEdge T410, PowerEdge T610, PowerEdge T710, PowerEdge R210, PowerEdge R410, PowerEdge R510, PowerEdge R610, PowerEdge R710, PowerEdge M610, PowerEdge M710 and PowerVault NX300) carry the lesser of either a 1-year limited hardware warranty or the length of the limited hardware warranty for the Dell system with which the SATA hard drive is shipped. Service offerings may be available to extend the SATA hard drive warranty period on these systems for an additional fee.

Note the last line. An extended warranty for those drives can be obtained for a fee.

Apparently HP has also been doing this too.

• HP Q&A: What is the warranty period for a SATA drive?

A1. SATA hard drives have a one year warranty regardless of the warranty period for the system in which they are installed. Please see the below information for additional services.

Be prepared to not be surprised by this situation and make the client aware that this is the case so they are not surprised if a drive fails and they need to pay for it.

The other possibility is to look into the manufacturer’s extended warranty and support options before purchasing.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Here is a picture of the inside of an Intel Server System SR1630HGP looking from the front of the unit towards the back:

On the left side of the picture is the Intel RAID Controller RS2BL040 that drives the three 450GB 15K SAS drives in a RAID 5 array.

There is a black plastic air duct that runs from the blower pair near the front of the server to the CPU heat sink that we see here and also the memory DIMMs near the top right of the image.

After a closer look, it became clear that there would be an air flow problem for the CPU heat sink! 8|

Yes, it is 90 degrees in the _wrong_ direction.

Fortunately, one of the habits we have before we fire up a server for the first time is to double check all of the settings, connections, cables, and other components.

A sort of pre-flight check if you will.

We do that because we never know and we can not assume that we will get things right every time.

To boot, there are just too many distractions happening at the same time when we are as busy as we are. Even when the day is quiet and we may not be fully attentive to what we are doing and miss even a small thing such as the right port to plug a cable into.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Exchange 2007 SP2 via TSGateway RDP on SBS 2008 = No Go

While running Exchange 2007 SP2 on one of our local client’s SBS 2008 boxes remotely we were disconnected from our TSGateway based RDP session.

When we tried to get reconnected we received a TSGateway error on the SSL certificate. Click on the certificate and it turned out that the GoDaddy certificate was no longer there. The one that was there was not the original self-issued certificate either as we had that installed on our management system.

So, the moral of this story is pretty clear. Have RDP port 3389 opened and directed to SBS 2008 and use a direct RDP connection to run Exchange 2007 SP2 via the SBS Wrapper.

An even better solution is to have an out-of-band remote management device such as Intel’s RMM, Dell’s DRAC, and HP’s iLO (with Advanced KVM activated) to run this particular update.

We were fortunate that the client was only 5 minutes away so we could pop by their shop and run the SBS Wrapper’s clean-up steps which reseats the GoDaddy certificate among other things. We did not experience this situation prior to this because the previous Exchange 2007 SP2 installs were done via RMM or DRAC.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Posted Via ZuneHD!

This post is written via the ZuneHD's built-in Web browser.

I am at the Microsoft offices for an MVP Day.

So, I had a bit of time to check out the ZuneHD's Internet capabilities while in between presentations.

This browser is phenomenal! It blows away Opera on my WM 6.5 HTC. This post was written via the native Blotter editor too, so it leaves the iPad Safari browser behind.

Neat!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Clustering SBS with Hyper-V Server 2008 r2 on the Intel Modular Server Slides

The following are the slides used for my presentation this evening at the Edmonton Microsoft User Group.

10 04-20 Clustering SBS with Hyper-V Server 2008 r2 on the Intel Modular Server

View more presentations from Philip Elder.

SBS and Clustering In-Person This Evening!

It is almost time for my presentation on building a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 cluster for hosting SBS and other OS VMs.

• Event Code: 147718
  04/20/2010
  06:30 PM - 09:00 PM
  Welcome Time: 06:00 PM
  Time Zone: Mountain
• NAIT Main Campus : HP Center (Bing Map) 
  10504 Princess Elizabeth Avenue
  Room WB114
  Edmonton, AB T5G 3H1
  Canada

If you have some time, come and check it out!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Happiness Is...

No, not a warm gun! :)

Though we are having some of the nicest weather of the year.

We had an amazing week with absolutely crazy hours, all kinds of client requests, lots of new clients coming on board, and then the struggle to try and fit some family time in to boot.

So, the happiness is that after packaging the IMS demo box up for shipping last weekend, we were able to find some time to unpackage it, toss our drives back into it, and have the four node cluster come back online without too much trouble today.

This means that the Tuesday evening presentation for EMUG will have a live cluster to work with and ease some of the stress over the presentation in general.

Philip

Sent from my SBS Integrated Windows Mobile® phone.

Some iPad Thoughts

Yesterday’s iPad post was a bit mixed up due to the struggles to get things to behave while editing in the native Blogger Web page plus being quite tired due to the long days lately.

Check out the multiple corrections made to my butchered hunt and peck typing skills!

I will keep using the iPad over the next few days. But, one thing has become quite clear. If Apple had packaged the guts of a MacBook Pro in the iPad and made it a bit bigger _I_ would have flown to New York to get in line before everyone else to buy one.

A tablet Mac OS X device would kill.

And one as sexy as the iPad is would _absolutely kill_!

I think I have some leads on a blogging platform that can be used to post to Blogger on the iPad.

Next up, word processing.

Posted from my desk. :)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Post From An iPad

Kevin Atkey of Atkey Tech, a friend that I collaborate with on various network projects brought it over to the shop today for me to try out for a few days.

The first thing that I noticed is that I am truly keyboard bound! hHow is that you might say? Where are those very handy arrow keys to move the cursor?

Okay, so this is a touch based device and I need to get used to the idea that I need to zoom in on a word to place the cursor where I want to. Oops, I see now, there is a zooming thing that comes up if I hold my finger down long enough in one spot! With that on I am able to move the cursor in a precise manner.

Anyone know how to delete the character in _front_ of the blinking cursor without needing to jump ahead of the character or charters characters that need to be deleted?

Just like it's larger Mac cousins, the Safari browser on the iPad Does not play too well with the bBlogger interface so there is no way to get screenshots into this post without mucking about with manual uploads and links. So, I will figure out how to get the screenshots off of the device tomorrow.

Screenshot Method

To screenshot on the iPad, press and hold the power button then hit the iPad button on the front bottom of the IiPad and Rrelease both simultaneously.

A camera shutter snap sound will happen and the screen will go momentarily white.

Tap the iPad button to bring up the desktop and the screenshot will be found in the Photo app.

After moving the cursor up to the top of this post to make some changes there, it became a real challenge to figure out how to get the cursor back to this line to continue the post.

I had to zoom right in near the bottom of the Blogger HTML editor, hold my finger till the zoomed zoom thing came up, and drag down slowly until the text started to move up. But there was some sort of combination of movements that needed to happen before I could get it to work.

Okay, so the iPad is definitely not a native Blogger editor blogging platform. I wonder if Red Sweater will port Mars Edit to this platform? Maybe they already have, but since I have never had an iPhone and thus no App Store account, how would I know? ;)

Kevin has his App Store account set up on this iPad so I will check and see what can be found there for word processing and perhaps a blogging platform.

This iPad is a neat device and like all things Apple, it is pretty and looks to be very well made.

Model: A1219 64GB iPad. Retail is $700 I think?

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

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