Christmas Lights ....

Just a fun bit of trivia for you. The awesome Christmas Light Show to the Song of Wizards of Winter, was actually orchestrated using Windows! The software and hardware used is available at Light-o-Rama (although apparently there are others D-Light and Animated Lighting).

Instructions and the how-to and details of what he did are available at A website his friend runs.

Windows Rocks!

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Taking Group Photos?

If you don't know, I'm a big photography enthusiast. I carry a camera at all times, and have a larger more effective camera that I take to places I know I'll be taking good photos.

Anyways, over the holiday, I was taking photos of all my cousins kids, who don't have the time or patience to help me capture a great photo of them. A new tool from Microsoft Research called Group Shot is now available for such problems. I'm going to be checking it out soon on those photos I took of my cousins kids to see if I can't get a good composite!

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XBOX Support Rules!!

Ok, I know that I posted already today (hopefully you don't consider this overwelming), and I know that I work for Microsoft, but I gotta give these guys credit.

Stepping back for a second, let me start at the beginning. I didn't pre-order my XBOX 360, I thought perhaps from the first launch of the original XBOX, there were plenty left over, why pre-order? Well, come November 22nd, 2005, I was outside CompUSA at 3am in the dark with some other keen fellows. I was pretty happy with myself, I had gotten some sleep, and I was #22 in line! Sweet!

Five hours later, I was discouraged to find that only 16 XBOXes had arrived at this location and I was, for lack of better terms, SOL. My desperate hunt for a 360 (no we can't just buy them at the company store) managed to land me an XBOX on December 21st. I thought I had one from Gamestop, but it turns out they were hacked, and someone put their 360 webpage online without their knowledge. Finally, Circuit City came through. Then Fed-Ex lost the package, only managing to find it one day before I left for the holidays! I was done!

However, on the holiday's I started to quickly realize that there was a problem. Any 360 game I placed in the console reported a very nice animated graphic "Place this game into an xbox 360 in order to play it". Hrm, it was reading the games as a DVD, not a game.

Let me explain the process here, this is where I get REALLY impressed! I call 1-800-4-MY-XBOX, I get the tech after two or three pushes of buttons, the tech asked if I had a discrepancy between PAL and NTSC games and console. I did not.

Two days later, I had a box at my doorstep, with pre-paid shipping & packing instructions, I dropped it off at the local DHL and over-nighted to Microsoft (and no, it wasn't the Microsoft in my same state). This was Wednesady of last week. Tonight I was going to call to find out the status, but instead, I was greeted by a box on my doorstep and a note that says "Because we know you love your xbox, we've replaced it so you can get to playing it!" Sweet! I put it back in its place fire it up and bingo! I'm up and running again. Even the content I purchased from XBOX Live is readily available for me to download again!!!

Naturally, you're going to ask what about my saved games? I managed to transfer everything but my Perfect Dark Zero to my memory card, so I barely lost anything, and I was planning on finishing PDZ again anyways.

Well, you can call this gloating, but this post is meant to the folks at XBOX support, and Microsoft support in general. You guys Rock! Keep up the good work!

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Windows Mobile 5.0 and Self-Signed Certificates

Happy New Year. I know, I know, the posting isn't as often these days, but when you're heads down on things that you can't speak about, it's a little hard to have other time to investigate cool stuff. And yes, for those of you interested, I'm still working on the steps for hosting multiple websites via ISA, I think that's my only outstanding request.

Anyways, now that Windows Mobile 5.0 is available, I'm allowed to discuss this particular topic. It's becoming known that the self-signed certificate that is created as part of running the CEICW (Configure E-Mail and Internet Connection Wizard) doesn't install on devices running the latest version of Windows Mobile. Well, the good news is, that's because we've made the device much more secure. As a result, your device is much more robust to threats from the outside world. However, it does unfortunately cause a slight headache for our SBS customers.

If you have an i-mate (typically the Audiovox SMT5600) you might not be completely out of luck, as over at Club I-Mate once you register your device (which yes, requires making an account) there is a device that can install such certificates on your device. Depending on how locked down your provider makes your phone this could be an option.

The quickest, most efficient way to get Over the Air Synch against the Exchange server to happen is to install a trusted certificate. But be careful! Not all certificates are created equal. Windows, and by the transitive property, Internet Explorer, trust far more root certificates than Windows Mobile based devices. When you're purchasing your certificate, if you plan to use a Windows Mobile based device against your SBS server, make sure the certificate chains up to one of the core root certificates: VeriSign, Cybertrust, Thawte, Entrust, GlobalSign and Equifax. Without this, to the mobile device, it just looks like a self-signed certificate...

Good luck!

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Happy Holiday's & a Wonderful New Year from the SBS Product Team!

This is a note to all of our OEMs, Partners, customers, Value Adding folk, business owners, information workers, and pretty much anyone who touches SBS or walks, talks and balks in the SBS communities.

Here at Microsoft, the Small Business Server product team want to wish you the warmest of holiday's and a very happy new year!

All the Best!

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Live Meeting for Support?

Trump knows where it's at. Two weeks ago, "The Donald" aired the episode of The Apprentice which showed Live Meeting as a great place to save time on travel, and have virtual meetings in which to collaborate and work together on digital documents.

What they didn't tell you is what you can use it for! Every techy should have an account with Live Meeting. Just the other day, my father was having issues with his XP client. Apparently some pop-up was happening saying that he should pay for the use of some videos. My father didn't know what they were talking about, and couldn't find the "I didn't watch any videos" button. Lucky for him, he didn't have his credit card handy. :)

For some reason, I could not get TS or Remote Assistance to work on his PC to help him clear up his spyware. Instead, I started a live meeting session, invited him into it, made him the presenter and then took asked for control of his desktop. With just the two of us in the meeting, I was able to control his PC through Live Meeting. I of course, removed the spyware, and installed the handy-dandy Microsoft AntiSpyware application to prevent this sort of thing happening in the future.

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File Synchronization Technologies...

So a friend of mine would define this technology as "hot". Microsoft just aquired the FolderShare company. I just installed the trial version of Foldershare. You should read up on the features. It's pretty impressive.

The highlights are you can synch file changes between computers while they are running, over the Internet. Then you can go to this webpage and search all your computers from a single webpage! A nice side effect is that you can go to the website, login and browse the file structures on your computers. As long as they are running.

Might want to choose a strong password for this one, but it's a great service!!

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Where are you?

Having trouble finding out where to go? Check out Local.live.com. It's pretty cool, once you find where you're headed to, switch it into "Birds Eye View". Once you switch to that view, you get the 3/4 satellite view. It's great for seeing where you're headed before you get there!

Check out the Seahawks Sadium!

Never be lost again...

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Finding what's open

Yesterday I was deleting WSUS, not uninstalling it, but rather deleting it. I know this is bad practice, but on the particular machine, the drive that the WSUS version of MSDE was on was lost and was not replaceable. I'll probably post that here sometime soon too.

Anyways, as part of the instruction, I needed to delete a directory, but for one single file, it was apparently in use. GRRR I hate that! You never know which process is using a particular file.

Well, yes you can, you just need the tools!

Windows has a command line tool called "TaskList". Simply running the command TaskList /M {exe/dll} you can see what processes are using certain files.

In addition, if you're more of a GUI guy or gal, you can check out the handy tool called Process Explorer from SysInternals.

Just becareful what you kill. :)

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How to increase the Exchange SP2 storage limit to 75 GB

I had a question last night on how to increase the Exchange Storage limit for Exchange 2003 SP2. The You Had Me at EHLO blog has the details. The short form is:

1. Figure out how big you can make your store on your server based on hard drive size


2. Browse to HKLM\ SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Services\ MSExchangeIS\ {SERVER NAME}\ Private-013e2e46-2cd7-4a8e-bfec-0e4652b94b00
   
3. Create a REG_DWORD called "Database Size Limit in GB" and enter the DECIMAL value (ie switch the input to DECIMAL) in GB you want to use from 1-75

Restart the Exchange Store service

You should read the actual blog posting by the Exchange team, it's much more complete and provides more configurable options.

Then what I did, was divide the amount you alloted for the whole store, by 75 max users to find your new quota/user. If you're never going to go that high, then do the math differently, just don't forget the quotas when you're adding new users.

From experience, a corupted Exchange store is not fun, especially when it happens on Thanks Giving Day at 5pm.

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Have You Sorted Out Your Power?

Just the other day, my router died because of a slight power outtage. I'm not too bent out of shape over it, because it was on the fritz anyways, but it got me thinking, I should have better power management setup in my house. I dropped by Circuit City and got me a relatively cheap UPS from APC. Boy was I impressed when I plugged the USB connection into my server.


It just showed up as a battery for my system! Just like my laptop!

So while that was cool, I noticed I could run apps as things died. Wouldn't it be great to get notified of a power outage? and have the server shut itself down?. Well, you have this handy tool called Microsoft Exchange Server on the server, which just so happens to excel at sending mail!

So, I decided I wanted to have the server send me mail when it dropped onto battery power, and again, just before it shut down, so I toyed with the alert bars, and built some VBScripts to get just that working!


As you can see, I wrote two different scripts (they were both small, and it beats trying to figure out what alert level we're at!) for each alert level. I was struggling to write the scripts, so my man Adam came through with some help. Here is what my script looks like {email address changed to de-spam the innocent}. I just have a file called PowerOut.vbs, with the following content:

Dim MyMail
Set MyMail = CreateObject("CDO.Message")
MyMail.From = "administrator@fqdn.com"
MyMail.To = "externaluser@fqdn2.com;phone#@smsaddy.com"
MyMail.Subject = "Power Outtage for YOUR DOMAIN"
MyMail.TextBody = "Power Outtage for YOUR DOMAIN"
MyMail.Fields("urn:schemas:mailheader:X-MSMail-Priority") = 0
MyMail.Send
Set MyMail = Nothing

Then, I just configure the program to run as the .vbs script. Note that it's expecting a .exe or .com file, so you'll have to change it to all files to be able to see the .vbs file when your choosing which program to run.

You'll also notice that I put in my SMS address, which works well in North America because SMS addresses are emailable directly from the Internet, some countries/providers do not offer this service. :(

Also, keep in mind that I'm not a Microsoft dev, and I've tested this on my own home server, that's it, so use at your own risk!

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Death in the Networking Family.

Thanks for all the kind words of those of you who want to drive by my house to pirate my wireless network. I appreciate the fact that I have some fans out there.

However, there are two things preventing you from doing this. (1), I haven't told you where I live, or which SSID is mine, and most importantly (2), my router got fried tonight, and as a result, I no longer have wireless at my place. My backup router is in place, and my wired connections is all I have.

Yes, this means no music downstairs and no XBOX LIVE tonight.
Disaster...

So, to those of you who are parked outside. Try another night. Sorry to disappoint. ;o)

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Securing your Wireless Network with WPA

I can't say that I have a complicated home network, it's actually really simple, but it's very wireless

When I was the backup Program Manager, I went out and dropped $300 on an external USB harddrive, when I was the client deployment PM, my network became completely managed by Group Policy (until of course, I had to take my Media Center Edition out of the domain for my externers to work). Now I'm the networking PM. I suppose you think that I should swich my machine into a dual-nic box, run premium, get to know ISA. Well, I might end up there, but I'm not there yet, I believe in simplicity, and besides, things are working now anyways, and I don't need to track my movement on the web. ;o) I know where I've been!

One thing I do want to change is my wireless security. Right now I'm using WEP encryption on my network, 64-bit. I was wondering one day what WEP actually stood for, and when the first hit that came up was Tom's Hardware Guide on how to crack WEP securitiy. Hrm, when something is as easy to crack as WEP is, it comes up on a search prior to the definition. Time to change your security algorithm.

Now if I was a business, I'd probably be installing and configuring Radius, but for me that doesn't work. I have people over all the time, and creating a domain user account for folks to just get Internet access kind of sucks.

So, I'm moving to WPA-Public Shared Key, but first I needed to make sure all my devices supported it:

• Linksys Router - firmware upgrade was needed


• Linksys Bridge - new enough that it was included


• Tablet PC - New drivers for the Wireless card were needed


• PDA - Pocket PC 2003, ok

Ok, so here goes, first step is to come up with a shared key, I picked "SBS is Cool". (haha! just kidding, I'm not going to post my shared key to the web!). So I picked a Super Secret shared key and configured my router.


Next I configured the bridge with the same shared-key, and then my laptop, then my PDA.

After upgrading the drivers on my laptop, I decided to get started. My first problem was I lost the CD to setup my wireless bridge. Lucky for me, Linksys support works on a Sunday and a typing feind named Jesse told me to set my wired LAN address to 192.168.1.2, I was able to get to the bridge (192.168.1.21) and notice that the version of the firmware that I had didn't support the "#" character. I changed my Pre-Shared Key to something else without that character and everything started working.

And for my PDA, it would seem I need to get Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition to support WPA.

At least now I can feel more confident that my neighbours aren't on my LAN ..

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Changing the Email Format in Outlook

This may seem trivial to most people, but it seems to bother me more than it should when you toss an attachment into the email and it doesn't appear at the top in the attachment window, but instead, inline, amidst all your text that you've so carefully put together.

One of our brilliant developers, Leszek, managed to point out that it was inline because I was sending in "Rich Text" instead of "HTML". Of course, Outlook (and by default Word) is defaulted to send new messages in HTML, which is great, but what happens if you reply to a message that's already in Rich Text?

You can change it with the bar at the top of the window:


I hope that gets rid of some frustration. I know it has for me. I only like to send in HTML format.

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