An earlier article on using Windows Server disk quotas received a shocking number of readers. There are a lot more admins paying attention to these making-life-easier tasks than I expected, asking about disk quotas is one of those simple questions that many sysadmin interviewees somehow missed. I’ve always figured Microsoft should require one extra exam completion per year to maintain an MCSE certification. The extra test might actually reduce the number of “paper MCSE’s”, instead of the IT field having to deal with a constantly growing number of them. Although, none of my interviewers at my current employer knew that Microsoft certification transcripts can be verified online.

Getting back to disk quotas, some readers may be interested to know that it’s possible to backup and restore Windows disk quota settings. That linked article references Windows XP, but the same steps also apply to Windows Server 2000 and 2003. Refer to the Microsoft KB article for details; here’s my summary:

Open the quota tab on a disk where quota managment has been enabled.

Select the “Quota Entries…” button at the bottom.

From the Quota Manager, choose the Quota menu > Export > enter a file name and save the settings. Or, drag a quota setting or settings from the Quota Manager to a folder and they will be saved there automatically.

Import by choosing that option from the Quota menu and then navigate to the correct export file.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Microsoft has released AntiSpyware, beta 1.0.701 which extends the AntiSpyware beta period to July 31st, 2006. The new version is noteworthy for including the ability to remove the half-witted Sony rootkit and for probably being the last version of AntiSpyware before the name is officially changed to “Windows Defender” - <insert bad superhero joke here>.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Anyone with a fancy new laptop having trouble connecting a wired network connection when out in the field? If it’s a new Dell laptop, they’ve added a power-saving feature that doesn’t work right.

The new “feature” is supposed to turn off the NIC when the laptop power & a network cable aren’t plugged in. It turns out that it shuts down the wired ethernet port completely when the laptop is on battery power - even if a cable is plugged in at startup. Who cares anyway, why should I have to reboot my laptop just to get reconnected after I restart a switch or redock the laptop?

BTW, Dell (and it’s $billions) should build something like Sony’s SmartWi technology and its ability to automatically toggle between WiFi, Bluetooth and WWAN connectivity - but Dell prefers to follow once someone else has done some development and marketing.

The affected Dell laptops have a Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx gigabit NIC. Unless you always have a wireless connection available, here’s how to enable the wired ethernet connection, and you can do it without a reboot so you don’t have to leave the NIC on alll the time:

1. Open the Windows Control Panels and then open the Internal NIC Configuration control panel
2. Check the Always activate on battery option and then Apply

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Are emails sent from a Smartphone taking several days to be delivered?

Several settings need to be just right - but it’s an Exchange 2003 error and not a Smartphone problem. An email sent from a Smartphone and addressed to a domain outside the organization via Exchange 2003, with an SMTP connector configured to send SMTP messages to an external domain, will delay a message without Enter pressed at the end.

Microsoft has a patch for Exchange 2003 to correctly recognize the end of these messages and correct the delays.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

As I’ve griped about before: two databases on one server is a bad idea. Virtualization and watered-down heavy iron hardware make for exceptions to this, but it’s a setup to use tons of RAM and throttle specific OS systems if you run multiple instances on one server.

All that being said - Microsoft has a new upgrade path for SQL Server 2005. MSDN says we can “install SQL Server 2005 side by side with SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 7.0″ and then synchronize the data between the two instances. Users can then be switched to the new database or gradually transferred to it during testing and backup processes.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

The MSDE, Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine, is a stripped down version of SQL Server used as a backend in a number of software packages (some major examples: Symantec Backup Exec, McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator management console, and Microsoft’s own Small Business Accounting package). With a license for free re-distribution and the data storage and T-SQL power of SQL Server the MSDE 2000 is likely to be increasingly common as applications manage increasing amounts of data and with development cycles leaving a good amount of time before SQL Server Express 2005, the MSDE 2000 replacement, will be included. Unfortunately the MSDE is so stripped down that there isn’t either a managment or programming interface included - not a good thing with a complex Microsoft program that wasn’t originally built with a command line interface.

Previous recommendations for managing MSDE used Access as a programming front-end and the Osql command line utility to configure users, permissions, and light management. Now, with SQL Express 2005 and SQL Server Management Studio Express available for free download, all you need to manage MSDE is the instance-name of your MSDE engine and these connection instructions for the SQL Management Studio. To find the MSDE instance name, open the Services control panel on your workstatoin or server and find a service starting with “MSSQL$” - everything after the “$” is the instance name.

Using SQL Express saves you from the limitations of Osql, but here is information on managing MSDE via the Osql utility.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Windows DFS is supposed to do all sorts of useful things in a domain, like reducing mapped drives, acting as an online backup in the event of downed servers, and caching files locally so WAN usage doesn’t spike (see Microsoft’s DFS Infrastructure marketing info). for Windows DFS basics and setup information: WindowsNetworking.com has a good article explaining Microsoft’s DFS terminology and function, plus I don’t feel like explaining everything and creating the screenshots like they offer.

Like all “infrastructure” tools it adds complexity to the system and requires extra resources to function correctly. In particular, Windows DFS buffers all files that are changed locally before it copies them over the other replicas. Unfortunately, since DFS (as of Windows 2003 SP1) copies entire files and not just the changes it uses a lot of drive space as a buffer - and it can’t even replicate files that may exceed the buffer size. The default buffer size on windows 2000 and 2003 Server is 4GB, so consider not replicating the files causing this problem. After all, pushing 4GB+ files around the WAN isn’t exactly efficient for DFS or any system.

To bump up the DFS buffer size, first make sure you have enough disk space locally to allocate it to the buffer and enough disk space remotely to accommodate the multi-GB mile you’re about to send. Then open regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NtFrs\Parameters\. Change the value of the DWORD “Staging Space Limit in KB” to accommodate your largest files (remember MS still uses binary KB and MB based on multiples of 1024, instead of digital 1000x units).

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.