Where I store my tech stuff

As you can tell, I’m pretty enamored with Windows Home Server. I got a better demo today of the remote access features. You can access the shared resources of the Home Server via a browser using HTTPS. According to a rep at the HP booth, the end user will have to be sophisticated enough to figure out how to configure their home network so that the Home Server is visible from the Internet. Also, if the home doesn’t have a static IP address (and I don’t think many do), then you’ll have to use some kind of Dynamic DNS solution. The HP rep seemed to think that a “service” of some kind would be available to assist the home user with this task.

Because remote access uses HTTPS, there’s no support for WebDAV and Web Folders. This means you can’t access files remotely using File | Open in your favorite Windows application. You have to go through the browser. The remote access features include the ability to use Remote Desktop in the browser to remote control clients PCs on the home network.

Speaking of Remote Desktop, you can access the Windows Home Server desktop console using Remote Desktop. Most home users won’t use this feature, but if you want to use your Home Server to serve up something like a custom Web application, then presumably you could do that. You can see some screen shots of Windows Home Server at these sites:

• Inside Microsoft
• Paul Thurrott’s site

Microsoft Home Server is a new network operating system from Microsoft that’s intended for use with home networks. Home Server won’t be offered as a stand-alone operating system. Instead, you’ll have to buy it already installed on an appliance. The first of these devices is the HP MediaSmart server. The HP appliance should be available by the second half of 2007, but no price point has been announced yet. Other manufacturers have designs in the works, but no products have been announced yet.

The HP MediaSmart server along with other servers running Microsoft Home Server is intended to be used as a headless appliance that resides in an out-of-the-way place such as a closet. The box is called headless because there’s no monitor attached to it. You interact with the device using client PCs. The HP box is a small black box slightly taller and skinnier than a Shuttle PC. It has bays for four SATA drives, four USB ports in the back, plus two SATA ports in the back. There’s an ethernet port in the back to attach the device to the home network. The server is a networked attached storage (NAS) device with no hardware management capabilities. You just slide or plug in your SATA or USB drives and the device creates a giant pool of storage with no drive letters.

Home users interact with the server using shared folders, similar to a file server. The OS, even though it’s based on Windows Server 2003, doesn’t support centralized authentication. There’s no Active Directory to manage. Instead, the OS has a feature called Users and Accounts which is conceptually similar to user management in Windows XP. The OS synchronizes the usernames and passwords from client PCs with the Home Server. From what I could tell, there doesn’t appear to be any centralized account management. This seems akin to the classic security mode that people are using currently with peer to peer to networks. In a peer to peer network of Windows XP computers, each computer has its own set of local accounts. By creating accounts on each computer with the same username and password, you can authenticate on all your computers. For example, I have a Windows XP machine that I utilize as a file server. I have a user account with the same username and password on my laptop and the file server. I can access file shares on my file server without entering a username and password. Windows Home Server seems to work similar to this.

Home Server supports remote access to file shares via the Internet. Each Home Server gets a unique Web address that users can use to access the content from their server via the Web. I’m not sure if you can use Web Folders or if you’re restricted to using the browser only.

A big feature of the Home Server is the ability to perform centralized backup and restore. The server performs a full backup of the entire client PC. Their new backup technology can perform a full backup of an 80GB hard drive in about 25 minutes. Incremental backups only backs up the blocks that have changed across the entire network. In other words, if two client PCs have the same movie, it only gets backed up once. You can restore an entire PC or select individual files to restore. The server automatically supports disk mirroring. When a user places a file on the server, the file is automatically copied to two hard disks. There’s no user configuration required for mirroring, and the disks don’t have to be the same size.

The administrator experience on Home Server consists of a single console application that’s installed on a client PC. It’s used to monitor the health of the network and the server and to manage file shares. The console application is extensible which means that third parties could add additional features to the server.

You can find more information about Windows Home Server at these sites:

• Microsoft at CES
• Channel 9
• Charlie Kindel’s blog

I attended Bill Gates’ keynote speech last night at the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The speech droned on for one and a half hours about all the seemingly wonderful things Microsoft is doing in the consumer electronics space. There were several good product announcements, but to me all those take a back seat to what’s really exciting about Microsoft technologies. Essentially, all the new products that Microsoft is releasing are mashups of existing technologies.

Microsoft creates great platforms. Whether it’s desktop or server operating systems, game consoles, information technology (IT) infrastructure, development environments and runtime engines, or business productivity suites, Microsoft’s platforms have matured to the point where they now create an ecosystem of platforms. By decoupling features from specific products and creating engines to host those features, products and platforms no longer exist in silos. Take a look at some of the product announcements made last night and think about these how products are enabled by platforms:

• Xbox Live on Vista – Vista includes a user interface that looks and behaves very similar to the Xbox dashboard. A Vista user can connect to Xbox live and invite other people in their social network to play online games.
• Flight simulation of 3D maps on Windows Live using an Xbox 360 controller – The demonstration of 3D maps on Windows Live was a big yawner until the demonstrator picked up an Xbox 360 controller and started “driving” down the virtual Las Vegas strip. That’s just cool.
• TV, movies, and other entertainment offerings on Xbox Live – Not only can you get movies and music from Xbox Live, Microsoft plans to offer IP TV – streaming television over broadband – via Xbox Live. This bullet is only news to me because I’m probably the only person in the world who thinks a media PC is a custom built home theatre PC (HTPC). RIP All-in-Wonder!
• Windows Home Server – Microsoft has been quietly working on a Windows Home Server appliance that will be used for centralized storage and backup for all the PCs and digital media that folks are now managing in their homes. The lead partner is HP, but several other partners have designs in the works. I’m fairly certain this is Vista-based, not Windows Server-based. I’m excited about this because I believe there’s a need for it. I personally probably won’t buy something like this, but I recognize that most home users aren’t sophisticated enough to demote their old HTPCs to media servers.

Of course, the product/platform that I really care about is SharePoint. I’m happy to say that when Gates talked about the biggest releases for Microsoft, he said Vista, Office 2007, and SharePoint all in one breath. While most people in that audience have no idea what SharePoint is, I’m pleased to hear Gates dropping the SharePoint name every chance he gets.

What is it with tv listing sites? I don’t understand what’s so hard about listing television shows. TV Guide is slower than molasses. Yahoo! TV used to work just fine. Now they’ve completely revamped their TV site, and it flat doesn’t work. There’s either no listings, or the listings are plain wrong, or you can only see what’s showing tomorrow, not right at this moment when I want to watch TV.

It’s a beta version. So, shouldn’t I have the choice to use or not use the beta version? Apparently it doesn’t work that way with Web apps. It’s either Yahoo! TV beta or not at all. Well, I choose not at all. I’ll just save the listings from the Sunday paper.

I’ve been feverishly working to finish up a new title on SharePoint 2007, which is why this blog has been mostly silent and my Web site is in desperate need of updating. I’ll get to it, I promise.

Since installing the RTM (release to manufacturing) versions of Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, I’ve had nothing but server troubles. I quickly realized that all my server clocks were set to January 5, 2005, which I suspected could be part to blame. No problem. I updated the clocks. They reverted back to January 5. So I stopped the time service, thinking something must be wonky with it. No help there. I removed my servers from the domain and synchronized with external time servers. The time updated, until I closed the time applet.

So I started thinking about what else these servers shared in common that would make them behave this way. I finally realized that they’re all virtual servers, and they must be getting their time cues from the host server. Sure enough. Six days ago we had a massive wind storm that took out our power six times. After the first time, I powered everything down and waited patiently. My host server must have screwed up its time when it lost power.

Now that the time is correct, I’m no longer getting error messages from the crawler in SharePoint search, which means I can finish up my chapter on search.

It has been interesting to watch the evolution of Ted Haggard’s and New Life Church’s Web sites as the Haggard scandal unfolds. Initially, New Life’s site made no reference to the scandal. Yesterday they added links to letters from Ted Haggard and his wife. Other than that, there’s not much information on their site about the scandal. Ted Haggard’s site hasn’t been updated, but the links in the first page’s footer of his site to organizations that he’s associated with don’t work. The footer links work from other pages in the site. It appears the National Association of Evangelicals is in the process of updating their site, because I encountered some dead links and error messages.

Scandals like this bring to the forefront how important it is for organizations to include their Web sites in their communications planning. I’m sure all these organizations have plans for how they address the media during a scandal, but I’m guessing their Web sites aren’t included. Instead, they’re probably waiting for a technical person to come in and update the sites. The sad thing is that the technical person can only remove links and delete paragraphs. It’s not up to the technical person to decide what stays and what goes.

The New Life Church’s Web site essentially reflects the co-branding of “Pastor Ted” with New Life Church. There’s no way a technical person can or should decide how the site’s branding should change as a result of the scandal and Haggard’s subsequent termination. When I went to the site last night I was surprised to see that I could still download the latest podcast from Pastor Ted. The page eventually blew up on me so I guess I’m not the only one who’s curious to know the extent to which New Life will erase Pastor Ted from their site.

Do you have a plan for updating your Web site when a scandal or disaster occurs? Often times I think organizations look really dumb when their Web sites reflect business as usual when the rest of us know that something really big is going on.

Update: Ted Haggard’s site and the New Life site are both updated. Ted’s site removed the navigation, but all the pages are still there. So if you have a bookmark you can still navigate to all his site’s content. It looks like New Life is on their way to erasing Ted.

My domain registration expires tomorrow, and I’ve been working on transferring my domain to a new registrar. The process is more stressful than it should be. I needed to transfer my domain and find a new place to host my Web site. Of course, e-mail is wrapped up in those services, too, so I had to make sure the transition was as seemless as possible. Needless to say, I got absolutely no support from my current service provider, Network Solutions.

I moved away from Network Solutions for two reasons: They’re too expensive, and their Web hosting packages don’t support ASP.NET 2.0. The last time I checked with them, they couldn’t give me any time frame as to when they’d support 2.0. So I decided to find a cheaper registrar (GoDaddy), and host who supports ASP.NET 2.0 (DiscountASP.net).

So here’s the basic process for transferring my domain and setting up a new hosting account:

• Open new accounts with the registrar (GoDaddy) and the hosting service (DiscountASP.net)
• Unlock my domain with Network Solutions and verify my contact information
• Enter e-mailed confirmation numbers in GoDaddy’s Web site to confirm that I do, indeed, wish to transfer my domains
• Receive e-mail notification from Network Solutions.
• Wait, wait, and wait. In the meantime, I moved my Web site files to the new host and tested everything. I’m just waiting on Network Solutions.
• Phone Network Solutions to make sure we’re good to go. They tell me they have no record of my transfer request. Panic slightly.
• Phone Network Solutions again after remembering that they sent me an email to confirm the transfer. Oh, suddenly they found the request. The rep informs that I need to click the link in the email to confirm the transfer request. Huh? The email states that I should click the link if I wish to cancel the request. The rep assures me that if I click the link that I can confirm the request, which speeds everything up.
• I click the link. Sure enough. The request goes through immediately. But wait, I’m not ready for the request to go through immediately. Had I known what would happen, I would’ve clicked the link at night after business hours.
• Scramble to update the nameservers with my new registrar and set up new email accounts.
• Test the Web site. It’s up!
• Wait for the changes to propagate throughout the DNS system.
• Test email. Doesn’t work. Wait. Test email. Doesn’t work. Wait. Test email. Works with Gmail, but not Yahoo. Wait. Test. Wait. After about an hour, I seemed to have fully functional email.

I’m up and running after many hours of fretting and testing. All this could’ve been much less stressful had Network Solution been more forthcoming about how the process works in their email. No, instead their email was all about how they don’t want to lose me as a customer – not giving me the information that I need to manage this process. They already lost me as a customer when they told me they had no idea why version 2.0 of ASP.NET was important. Now they’ve lost any chance that I would ever return.

I’ve been having trouble using XP’s remote administration features with my new computer. I checked and double checked all my settings and permissions, but I could never get a remote desktop connection or remote shutdown to work. I could make a remote desktop connection using my admin account, but not with the account I use on a regular basis. It didn’t make sense because the account is a member of the admin group. Remote shutdown never worked regardless of the account. I always received an access denied message.

After checking in Microsoft’s knowledge base, I discovered that the likely culprit was fast user switching. It’s a feature in XP where you can switch between users without logging off. It’s mostly used by home users. I never bothered to disable it because I figured it was no big deal. All my accounts were password-protected. After I disabled fast user switching, all my remote features magically worked.

Well, not exactly. I can’t use remote shutdown via Computer Management. I receive an RPC error. But I can use the shutdown command, which is what I really want to do anyway. Now I have a batch file that I can execute in the evening to shut down my machines.

I save all my manuscript-related files to a share on a file server. Everytime I needed to open a document, I had to browse to the network share. Instead of browsing each time, I added a shortcut to the network share in the My Places bar in Word 2003.

My Places is the bar that you see on the left side of the Open screen when you open a file. By default, it includes shortcuts to Desktop, My Documents, and other commonly used items. To add a shortcut to the My Places bar in Word 2003:

1. Press Ctrl+O in Word 2003 to open the Open dialog box.
2. Browse to the location you want to create a shortcut to.
3. Click the Tools drop-down list.
4. Click Add to “My Places” from the Tools drop-down list. The shortcut appears in My Places.

For more details on customizing the My Places bar, see this article on Microsoft’s Web site. The My Places bar was called the Places bar in Office 2000. You must edit the registry to add or remove items from the Places bar. See this knowledge base article for details.