SeanDaniel.com - Home, Small Business Server and Related Technology

Start your day with sip of coffee and byte of technology

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:08:00 +0000

Microsoft and HP have been bringing technology solutions to small business customers since before most people ever heard of a latte. Things change fast in our industry. Coffee Coaching’s Mission is to help you stay on top of current technologies. If you’re already in the habit of checking your Facebook page over coffee in the morning, now you can use it to stay on top of your business as well.

We’ve created a place where you can easily find video overviews of products and technologies, information on opportunities for prospecting, interact with Microsoft and HP product managers, and talk with your peers in the Coffee Coaching community.

Go to the source! Hear about Windows Small Business Server 2008 directly from the product group at Microsoft. Learn about HP’s Small business offerings directly from the engineers at HP. We have a collection of short videos on all of the Windows Server family of products and HP hardware solutions.

Click here to become a Fan of Microsoft and HP Coffee Coaching!

· Throughout the day on March 8th, as you explore the site, we will have Microsoft and HP experts available for online discussions.

Grab a cup of coffee and join us for a session of Coffee Coaching.

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MVPs are Dressing my dog – that’s just weird.

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:12:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, Microsoft hosted the worlds MVP’s at our 2010 Summit. SBS and Home Server MVPs are the best MVPs at Microsoft (I may be biased, but that’s what I think), followed of course only by EBS MVPs (who are mostly ex-SBS MVPs anyways!). Ok, who am I kidding. All MVPs are awesome, I just happen to have many of the SBS and Home Server ones as my buddies.

Microsoft does it’s best to make the MVPs welcome in the Seattle area, which includes dinners, parties, get-togethers, lunches, coffee breaks, etc. All in the name of geek speak between MVPs and Microsoft!

If you’re not familiar with what a Microsoft MVP is, they are community voted professionals that go above and beyond the normal to help out the general public with their issues with specific products. Most MVPs dedicated a lot of time and energy to this cause, and as such we reward them.

In this particular instance, the tables were turned. The MVPs rewarded us!! Taking advantage of the fact they were on campus they decided to dress up my mascot in appropriate attire.

Now, I’m not normally into dressing my dog, primarily because we are both men and we don’t do that. In addition to that fact, if you put anything on Chico, he freezes. But, for this blog, he’s willing to don the clothing and answer your questions. Simply click in the search box and type your search. I’m sure Chico will have a blog post for you. If you don’t find it here, you can also check over at the official SBS blog. If you don’t find it there, shoot me an email and I’ll see what I can do to write one up for you (no promises on timing though, Steve Balmer keeps us pretty busy over here.

Last and most importantly, I want to publicly thank all of the MVPs for their support and the wonderful gift they gave me. I don’t have to email this to them, because being MVPs, they are so plugged in, they will find it.

Online Backup using CloudBerry Labs for Windows Home Server

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:13:00 +0000

Being a photographer, I get pretty worried about losing my photos. Not only the ones that I publish to my website, but the family photos that are never made public, they are priceless to me. I naturally have a built in backup set up to back up to a 1TB USB hard drive. And I’m super diligent about manually running this at least once or twice per month. This of course covers me against any hardware failure in my Media Smart server. Thankfully I haven’t had any yet, even though hard drive failure is the leading cause of data loss:

So, as it turns out, I’m not at all worried about disk failure, I’m totally covered there with duplicate through Home Server’s Drive Extender, and my bi-monthly backup. What I am worried about is natural disaster and theft (not that I live in a scary neighborhood in New York City or anything). The idea of natural disaster protection was made even more prevalent when my uncle’s home burnt to the ground early January, 2010 and he lost all of his memories in the fire. Sure insurance is taking care of the house and replaceable items, but what about the photos, or the trophy’s my cousin’s won on his mantel?

Luckily for digital data, it’s easy to move around and easy to store. Cloud based backup and storage can provide peace of mind and insurance against such loss. While I’m not an expert in cloud storage, I was looking for a few key things:

Global replication – what good is a backup solution if it’s in a single data center around the corner? You want geo-located, so a natural disaster that strikes and entire area, doesn’t affect your data at your storage location. This usually means bigger the better.
Encryption – I certainly don’t want owners of storage facility browsing my pictures. This usually comes with some component of the encryption that you own, like a password, which prevents the cloud storage owners from knowing this. (Although you won’t want to forget your password!)
Simplicity and Automation – I don’t want to be spending a lot of time figuring out how to use the software, and I certainly don’t want any human factor in remembering to do the actual backup! Automation was key for me.
Price – Hey, everyone’s looking for the best deal right?

Enter CloudBerry Labs Backup. CloudBerry is an interesting solution to the cloud backup story. They provide the software that adds the simplicity, automation and client-side piece, while Amazon S3 provides the back-end storage. This means you pay a 1-time up-front cost for CloudBerry, and the recurring cost goes directly to Amazon S3. Amazon brings #1 to the game, global replication and they are BIG (so big that discounts are given in TB instead of GB!). Amazon EXPECTS a LOT of data! I can’t say that AmazonS3 is the cheapest solution, at $0.15/GB (until you get to 10TB), they end up costing me about $20/month (~130GB of data). That’s a total of $240/year. There are cheaper solutions out there, but are they as functional as Amazon S3? Will they be in business in 2 months or 2 years? Also, Amazon has a lot of bandwidth so your uploads and downloads are fast. I’ve seen some backup solutions take upwards of 2-3 months to get a photo collection similar to mine uploaded. My 130GB of data took little over 1 week to upload, and my recovery’s are even faster. The limitation as far as I can tell, is my own bandwidth.

CloudBerry backup homepage

CloudBerry backup has a Winodws Home Server add-in, which makes management very very simple. Loading the add-in shows CloudBerry in a new tab; which opens with an extremely simple design for start-up. However, after using CloudBerry for a month, I’d like to see more status on the home page: meaning I have my backup plans in place, I’d rather see some status on the last backup(s) to ensure that I’m safe. But no one can argue the design is simple, and targeted towards backup and the most important piece, the restore. Additionally, you can get to status with a simple click on the Backup Plans sub-tab. I do enjoy a big bold number of how many GB I’m using, as it helps me understand what my monthly bill would be. A dollar value would be nice to see here too, but that would depend on querying Amazon, as I’m sure Amazon reserves the right to adjust prices as they see fit (hopefully down!)

Once setup, CloudBerry is a totally simple solution. Unfortunately, much of the complexity for the setup comes from AmazonS3 requirements. Before even using the CloudBerry software, you must setup your AmazonS3 service. CloudBerry has provided a handy instruction set exactly for that, clearly indicating they know it’s a troublesome point and are probably working on it, given the simplicity seen through the rest of the product. The setup involves creating an AmazonS3 account, and identifying your personal access Key, so Amazon can bucket the data in your personal storage space up on their service.

Because of the cost of the AmazonS3 service, CloudBerry has allowed you to be as specific as you want for backup of your data. The Windows Home Server version can even handle drive extender and show you just the data that you care about.

Further filtering on what you chose allows you to choose what TYPES of files to backup… so you can get to the heart of the data. This means you can choose your photo directory, but only backup your negatives (ie. RAW files) simply by choosing to backup .raw or .cr2, if that’s what you want to do.

One of the nice features was a compression feature. CloudBerry will compress your data, again, focusing on saving you coin with Amazon S3, as well as choose the type of encryption you want. Notice how you get to choose the password and encryption type. If you do end up using encryption CloudBerry will be pretty CPU intensive as encrypting files takes some time and CPU. It does happen in the background seemingly at a lower priority as I noticed minimal slow-downs across the rest of the product.

Finally, the wizard lets you choose your backup schedule (yes! There is that automation!) and you can setup CloudBerry to email you when the backups complete, successfully and/or with failure! Once you’re finished setting up the backup, and you launch it, you get some nice progress when viewing the backup plans sub-tab:

The plan page provides a lot of the detail that I would have expected to see on the home page, but the data is all readily available for you to see. The plans first appear compressed, so you have to expand them. I’m happy to report that they do remember that you wish to have the plans expanded, and that’s not something you have to do every time to view the details of each plan. As you can also see, I have multiple plans running. Right now I have them both backing up weekly, but I could easily sku that to be monthly for music, and daily for photos. You’ll have to assess your own comfort for data loss (more often backups tend to lead to less data loss as the deltas between backups are smaller).

The backups are incremental, meaning CloudBerry does the work to figure out what’s up at Amazon and what’s not, and sends only the new stuff and what’s changed since the last backup. Thus minimizing the bandwidth usage for your home and your storage usage up at Amazon!

Recovery

The most important part of the backup is actually the recovery. Because of the size, I didn’t recover all of my data, but I did a few spot checks here and there with some music and some photos. Simply launching the restore wizard allows you to choose when in time you want to recover your files. Naturally the default is the latest, but if you managed to mess up one of your photos, you can jump back to a space in time, provided that the backup of that file is there of course.

CloudBerry again shows you what you have on Amazon and allowing you to pick and choose entire directories, or individual files, allowing you to recover these files to the same location, or choose a new location if you don’t want to overwrite the original. Additionally, to prevent overwrites, you have to explicitly choose to overwrite the files if you’re going to the original location. Nice safety feature there.

The page that threw me for a loop was the password page. The default is of course not to require a password. If you skip over this page, and you had set a password on the backup, you’re recovery will fail, and you’ll have to start over. I wish CloudBerry was smart enough here to know that I set passwords beforehand and default this to checked, at least prompting you for a password before you continue. It would be great if they validated that password against Amazon prior to continuing as well, to prevent you going through the rest of the wizard, only to have it fail on restore.

The recovery is much the same as the backup, you get a progress bar, and the files slowly pop onto the server (dependent of course on your own bandwidth).

As a final note, the history sub-tab of CloudBerry will show you exactly what’s going on, backups and restores. As you can see, here is a test recovery that I did, where I messed up the password dialog I called out before. Running the restore again, with the password, it succeeded with no problems

All in all, CloudBerry provides a solid backup solution. There are very few bumps on the road, mostly imposed by AmazonS3, including the cumbersome setup process, and the actual cost of storing the data. However, don’t forget that you *can* do wonderful things with AmazonS3, such as (if your data is not encrypted, and your account is setup this way), you can send links to your data around, saving your home bandwidth for your family to see your data. And because Amazon is so huge, you know that one day, they aren’t going to up and disappear.

Online backup is an insurance policy, think of it as such. $240/year is a small price to pay if you’re my uncle and your house burned down.

Download CloudBerry backup for Windows Home Server

Get to know Windows Home Server Team Lead: Mark Vayman

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:11:00 +0000

Mark is not only a Lead Program Manager on the Windows Home Server team, he works on the drive extender technology and is also my manager! Mark has been on the Windows Home Server team for close to 4 years. Mark is a big user of the drive extender technology with an 8TB home server at his house!! That puts my 2TB home server to shame!

Let’s cut to the interview:

Find the full post over at the Windows Home Server blog.

Understanding SSL Certificates

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:32:00 +0000

I get a lot of questions on understanding certificates in general, this post is intended to answer those general questions and is not specific to any product. Although I plan on using Windows Home Server and Windows Small Business Server 2008 as examples here. I do have a previous post on understanding the self-issued certificate in SBS 2003 and SBS 2008, as this post will focus on understanding trusted certificates, and what makes them trusted.

Certificates provide two purposes:

Authenticating the server to the client
Providing encryption between the server and the client

I will cover the authenticating the server to the client in this part 1 post, and will write a part 2 post that handles the second part of encryption.

Part 1 – Authenticating the Server to the Client

Think of a certificate like a drivers license; a United States drivers license as that’s what I’m most familiar with. The drivers license has three key components that makes it what it is.

A name that identifies what you are called, in my case, “Sean Daniel”
An expiry date, that identifies when the license is valid from. This ensures data doesn’t get stale, like your picture, or hair colour, or if you need glasses or not to drive
An issuing authority, such as Washington State

This is the same as a computer SSL certificate. It has a valid URL, an expiry date, and an issuing authority. When the client gets to the intended URL such as https://remote.contoso.com, it asks the server for proof that it is remote.contoso.com, and the server presents it’s certificate. The client validates the 3 checks. Does the URL in the certificate match (ie. are you “Sean Daniel”). Is this certificate valid (is the expiry date past today’s current date and time). Those are the two easy to understand checks. The final check is “do I trust the issuing authority”. In the case of a drivers license, you’d bend it, look at it under a black light to make sure it’s authentic, and then you’d see Washington state issued it and be. Sure, I trust the state government.

With certificates, it’s slightly different. The computer follows the certificate chain outlined in the certificate path (IE view):

In the above example for Home Server, the client will check if it trusts foo.homeserver.com. It looks into it’s trusted certificate store for a matching certificate, none would exist of course, so it would then look for the “GoDaddy Secure Certification Authority” in the same store. Because the “GoDaddy Secure Certification Authority” trusts foo.homeserver.com, the client can base it’s trust on that. Again, it won’t find that certificate, so it bounces up to the root certificate and looks for “Go Daddy Class 2 Certification Authority” in the trusted root store:

As you can see from a view on my Windows 7 box, Windows 7 by default trusts this certificate, so since I trust that certificate, and that certificate trusts the “Go Daddy Secure Certification Authority”, then my Windows 7 machine also trusts this authority, and since the “Go Daddy Secure Certification Authority” trusts foo.homeserver.com, then My Windows 7 client also trusts foo.homeserver.com, and a trusted certificate connection is established.

In the non-computer world, think of it this way. When I try to get on a plane, and I present my drivers license (domestic flights only!), they trust WA state and allow me on the plane. If I were to present my Microsoft Identification, they would probably look at me sideways and ask for another ID, because the airlines don’t trust the Microsoft employee issuing authority. However, if I go to my companies Christmas party I can present EITHER my drivers license, or my Microsoft ID, and they trust both, since they trust WA state, and the Microsoft employee issuing authority.

In Windows SBS 2003/2008 and the use of self issued certificates. You install the leaf cert (sbs 2003) or the root cert (sbs 2008) into your client trusted root store, and now your client will trust that issuing authority as mentioned above. This is outlined in my old post.

On Mobile devices, such as Windows Mobile, you need to ensure the certificate is in that root store as well, which is why some certs work and some don’t on older Windows Mobile devices. Additionally it’s important to call out that browsers on clients behave differently too. For example, Firefox has it’s own certificate store and doesn’t use the one in Windows. The certificates in Windows and also on later mobile devices are updated and maintained through the secure connection of Windows Update.

Hopefully this clears up the server to client authentication. Of course we know the client authenticates to the server by providing your username and password to prove you are indeed the user the server should give access to.

Last important thing to remember, is NEVER install a certificate over an unsecure or un-trusted internet connection, you should always use a SECURE method of installing certificates. That means you download a cert over an already trusted and secure connection, or you bring it home in your pocket on a USB key. You never know if there is going to be a malicious server giving you a bad certificate for the wrong server on the Internet. Then you will just be giving your username and password to the wrong server on the Internet, and that would be disaster.

How to Lock Down a Windows 7 Kiosk or shared PC

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:39:00 +0000

Browsing my one of my favorite RSS feeds: LifeHacker. I came across something that might be useful to a bunch of Small Business Server VAPs configuring your network. In many cases, some companies like to provide a courtesy kiosk for visiting folks or perhaps they have a single computer for the break room.

Over at How-To Geek is where they outline the steps. Basically it leverages local Group Policy (although there is no reason you can’t do this in global group policy on your Windows Small Business Server 2008 machine) to allow users to only run certain applications. Thus preventing users from getting into trouble and lowering your total cost of ownership on that client PC (or your whole network).

I’m copying the steps here for convenience. Thanks How-To Geek!

If you have a shared or public computer you might want to allow users to use only specified programs. Today we take a look at a setting in Local Group Policy that allows you to set only specified programs to run.

Note: This process uses Local Group Policy Editor which is not available in Home versions of Windows 7.

First click on Start and enter gpedit.msc into the search box and hit Enter.

Navigate to User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ System. Then under Setting scroll down and double click on Run only specified Windows applications.

Set it to Enabled, then under the Options section click on the Show button next to List of allowed applications.

A Show Contents dialog comes up where you can type in the apps you want to allow users to run. When finished with the list, click OK then close out of Local Group Policy Editor.

If a user tries to access an application that is not on the specified list they will receive the following error message.

This is a nice feature for limiting what programs users can or cannot access on the computer.

How to enable “GodMode” in Windows 7

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:29:00 +0000

Ever wish you could just get to all the configuration changes in Windows with one folder, instead of going back and forth in the Control Panel? Well, now you can. Elegant Code has a blog post on how to do this. Here’s how:

Create a new folder on your desktop
Name the new folder:
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

This gives you a new folder with a nice icon:

Opening this folder gives you the giant list of configuration items that span across all of the control panel and such. Giving you ultimate access to configuration aspects. I only have tried this running as an Administrator on the system.

And just as a reminder, “God” is not considered a strong password to protect your system, so don’t let this go to your head. ;o)

UPDATE: Looks like ZDNet gets to the bottom of all the GUID mode shortcuts. Their post is here, including:

Windows Home Server Remote Access - Understanding ISP Blocking Ports

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:01:00 +0000

Oddly enough, over the holiday’s I was working to figure out the remote access for my friend who just recently got a home server. For all intents and purposes, his router stated the ports were open, yet Home Server would not show that remote access is available. A quick Bing search lead me to believe from forums that the ISP (Telus in Canada) blocks the required ports for Windows Home Server

Those ports, 80 & 443 used for HTTP and HTTPS access to the server means that you are in a double-NAT environment that your ISP provides for you. Unfortunately you have no control over the external most NAT device and as a result, remote access won’t work for you. Here is a video from HomeServerLand that will help you understand this scenario

WHS Remote Access: ISP Blocking Ports from HomeServerLand.

The options if you find yourself in this situation are:

Contact your ISP and see if they will allow these ports through for you. In many cases, they will, although in this case, Telus required we purchased a monthly static IP address, or a business class DSL line, both rather expensive.
Use Home Server on non-standard ports, which is not that easy to do and potentially some of the updates you receive from Microsoft may or may not break this functionality. Additionally, the ISP may still block these ports.
Change ISPs.

Good luck with your ISP, you’ll need it!

Windows Home Server Remote Access - Understanding Double-NAT

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:13:00 +0000

Are you having troubles with remote access? Could it be because you have a Double-NAT configuration on your network? HomeServerLand has a video that explains what a double-NAT is and how you can avoid it. It’s a great 2 minute video that will help you understand this configuration and how to avoid it.

WHS Remote Access: Double NAT from HomeServerLand.

This great video talks about how to determine if you have a double NAT either on your local network, or from your Internet Service Provider.

If you haven’t already, make sure you check out HomeServerLand’s very valuable router configuration support wiki.

Troubleshooting Remote Access on the Home Server Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:41:00 +0000

In a follow up to last weeks blog on Understanding and set up of Remote Access to Windows Home Server, Sean Daniel, Program Manager for Windows Home Server, has provided further information on potential issues that you may experience when setting up your Remote Access, and how to solve the problem.

Once you finish setting up your remote access through Windows Home Server’s Wizard, a final screen will be shown. In a perfect world, when you click on Details you’ll see all green checks once you have finished this wizard. However, because there are three components (the home server, the ISP and the router), sometimes there is a snag in the setup. Here is an example of a working domain name with sample data:

The first check-box will actually check to make sure you have an outbound connection. This will ensure it can connect to the specific …

Understanding and Set Up of Remote Access to your Windows Home Server

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:19:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Sean Daniel, and I’m a Program Manager who works on Windows Home Server and Windows Small Business Server. I am one of the team members that works on Remote Access, and I wanted to blog today about setting up and understanding remote access in Windows Home Server, as well as call out a few “gotchas” to be careful of.

Let’s start with the basics.

Windows Home Server provides so many functions for the local network, it’s easy to overlook that it also provides an extended set of features for when you’re not at home. While Windows Home Server attempts to make this set up process as easy as possible, but some users still hit issues that the Home Server can’t predict. I’ll address those issues at the end of this post.

Understanding Remote Access

Before we set up remote access, let’s take a second to understand what’s going on. Think, for a second, as the Internet as … Read more at the Windows Home Server Team Blog.

Get to know the Windows Home Server Team Product Manager – Mark Pendergrast

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:48:00 +0000

Over on the Windows Home Server Official Blog, they have a great video from Mark, who is the senior product manager on the team. Mark is an awesome guy and it’s worth a moment to get to know him.

You can view the Windows Home Server post here.

Get Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 on November 24th!

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:42:00 +0000

According to the Official Windows Home Server blog, Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 will be available for install on November 24th!

The Windows Home Server Team is pleased to announce that Power Pack 3 will be available in all shipping languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish) on November 24^th, 2009. Power Pack 3 will be made available to existing users via Windows Update. Users need to have Windows Home Server with Power Pack 2 already installed on their home server. Power Pack 3 will automatically install as part of Windows Update if Automatic Updates is enabled on the home server.

Details on what’s new:

Windows 7 Backup & Recovery

While backup of Windows 7 clients worked prior to Power Pack 3, there were definitely some noticeable problems, such as when a Windows 7 PC was sleeping, when it woke up, there was no guarantee it would do the backup or not. Having run Power Pack 3 for the past week, my two Windows 7 PCs haven’t missed a backup yet! Additionally it suppresses that pesky Windows 7 backup warning designed for single PC homes!

Windows 7 Libraries

If you haven’t used Windows 7 Libraries yet, you’re missing out. On my Netbook I added the Home Server shares in myself, since there is no data there. I was happy to discover this is done automatically for me on my other PCs now and I can access all my data with a simple CTRL+E without having to use the handy Share Master gadget.

Windows Search

Windows Search 4 is included, which drastically increases the speed at which you can search shares from Windows 7 clients (and other clients with Windows Search 4 installed). Additionally, EFS encrypted files are supported!

Windows Media Center TV Archiving

If you have a Windows Media Center in your home (which I don’t), then you’ll be easily able to Archive your TV to your home server. Did you like that episode of “How I met your Mother”? Save it without using valuable recording space on your MCE! Additionally, you can get statistics such as storage space, backup status, etc right from your Media Center

So, Tuesday night when you get home from work, you might want to check out Microsoft Update and get this little gem of free upgrade software for your Home Server.

Here’s what the MVPs are saying:

If you've recently upgraded to Windows 7, Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 is an essential download providing enhanced integration between the two platforms and a number of cool new features. Combine library support with enhanced features for Windows Media Center, and we're really starting to see Microsoft bring together the Windows Home Server and Windows 7 client experience so that your media can be stored on your home server and enjoyed seamlessly on TV, PC and Mobile devices with little effort from the user. The bad old days of copy, paste, convert and transcode may well be behind us,” says Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) Terry Walsh of We Got Served.

Microsoft MVP Alex Kuretz of MediaSmartServer.net says “Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 makes storing and accessing your media easier by bringing all the content contained on your Home Server smoothly into your Windows 7 libraries. TV Archive is also a very nice feature that has allowed me to record TV shows and move them to my Home Server to be watched at a later time.”

Trackback: Windows Home Server Blog.

Windows SBS 2008 Hands-On-Labs available for download from MS Connect

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:57:00 +0000

Have you been wanting to get some hands-on experience with Windows Small Business Server 2008 but weren’t sure how to get started? We have just the thing! Four hands-on-labs for SBS 2008 are available for download from Microsoft Connect: Administration, Managing Clients, Installation, and Migration from SBS 2003. To take advantage of these labs, you will need a test server with at least 4GB of RAM running Microsoft Hyper-V Server or Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role installed.

To download the labs, use your Live ID to login to Microsoft Connect, select Connection Directory, and enter the invitation code SBSP-62B6-K3TH, which will give you access via the SBS 2008 Downloads page. In addition to gaining access to these labs, joining the MS Connect community is a great way to stay informed and up-to-date about the latest developments with SBS 2008 and interact with some our most active and knowledgeable partners.

Managing Hyper-V servers from Windows 7

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:23:00 +0000

Hyper-V and virtualization seems to be one of the most versatile ways to run servers and clients these days. Single piece of hardware, many different machines. For me, Hyper-V is really my primary test environment for building Windows Small Business Server and Windows Home Server.

To date I constantly am using Remote Desktop to connect to my virtual server, at which point I can connect to all my different machines. While I could connect via remote desktop to all the machines, they are on a separate, network connection behind a router, and it’s just been easier to connect to one machine to get access to them all.

Well, I have recently discovered the Hyper-V Management tool, which is a part of the Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7. This manually installed Windows Update package enables the server administration tools to be installed via the turning Windows Features on or off in the Control Panel.

Once you’ve installed the MSI, simply click on this section of the control panel and choose the remote administration tools you want, I chose the Hyper-V tools

Once this is finished installing, you get the familiar Hyper-V console, and you can open the machines on your client, and make changes directly.

My only caution is to make sure you continue to keep the host patched and up to date from Windows Update.

The Big Easy Offer is back – Limited time

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:39:00 +0000

Woa, just received the U.S Partner newsletter and noticed that the Big Easy Offer is back! This means that for a limited time (until January 2010), the Big Easy gives customers a choice when purchasing Microsoft products and solutions.

They get the right solution, and earn money back in the form of partner subsidy funds which can be used to implement their Microsoft solution.

Check it out at the Microsoft Partner Network.

Java With John – Windows Home Server Chat

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:53:00 +0000

Windows Home Server had some air time on Java with John. John takes the time to interview Jonas (A community program manager) and Steven (a marketing manager).

Launch the interview here

This show can be found in the Archives of Java wit John, for October 2009.

The talk covers a bit of how-to, and an overview of Windows Home Server with Jonas.

How to Import your Facebook Events Calendar into your Personal Calendar

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:04:00 +0000

Facebook has really taken off these days, especially for keeping in touch with friends, family and things you Like. I’ve been invited to Halloween parties, Soccer matches, Work events, pretty much any invite these days comes in through Facebook. It’s taken over as the new social scheduling calendar.

Unfortunately for many of us, that means copying the details out of the Facebook calendar and into the one we use most primarily. As you probably guess, I use Outlook/Exchange for my work functions, but for my home and personal events, I use Windows Live Calendar..

Recently I stumbled across a post from Sean Bonner on how to import your Facebook events into Google Calendar, discovered through one of my favorite blogs, LifeHacker. All Sean is using is the iCal format, and not only Google Calendar supports this format. In fact, most things do! So I’m going to expand on his instructions, and provide you the same instructions for Outlook 2007/2010 and Windows Live. Additionally I copied his steps for Google to have them all in one place.

Here’s how I did it. First we need to get the iCAL internet link from Facebook:

In Facebook, Go to your Events page
At the top of this page, click Export Events, Facebook will give you a URL for the iCAL of your private events function.
Don’t click and save the ICAL file, simply copy the link to your clipboard

At this point you’re ready to import this link into a number of different calendar programs, choose the one that you use:

Windows Live Calendar

Windows Live Calendar is where I keep all my personal events, so I’m going to show this one first.

Open your Live Calendar
Click the Subscribe button at the very top of the page

Paste the Facebook iCAL link from above into the Calendar URL
Give it a calendar name, I called it “Facebook Calendar”
Click subscribe, and then Done on the next page

The Windows Live Calendar will refresh every 24-hours from the Facebook feed. Mine refreshed around midnight PST and then took another day to update.

Outlook 2007

Flip to the Calendar mode and choose File and Import and Export…
Select to Import an iCalendar (.ics) or vCalendar file (.vcs) and click Next.
A familiar dialog will open asking you for a file name. Paste in the Facebook iCAL URL from above and click Open
The next dialog offers you a choice to import as a new or into your current calendar. If you import into your current calendar, you can’t quickly remove it. So I choose as Open as New.
Outlook then names your calendar in the “Other Calendars” section based on the URL, To fix that, I right-clicked on this and choose Properties.
I just chose a name and typed that in, such as “Facebook”
Chose OK

Now you’ll see your Facebook calendar next to your other calendar and you can drag and drop the ones you want into your actual calendar (if you want it on your Windows Mobile phone for example). You can also turn this calendar on and off.

The challenge here is I don’t think that Outlook 2007 will auto-refresh this one, at least I can’t figure out why mine won’t refresh. Seems to me like an area the Office team has improved on (given the Beta of 2010).

Outlook 2010

Outlook 2010 is still in Beta, so these steps might change slightly. This is much simpler than Outlook 2007

Change to the Calendar mode and select the down arrow next to Open Calendar, then select From the Internet

Paste in the Facebook iCAL URL from above and choose OK.
Click the Advanced… button, given the folder name the name of the calendar like “Facebook” and click OK.
Click Yes to subscribe to updates

I’ve noticed that Outlook 2010 takes about 30 mins to 1 hour to obtain any new items that appear in the Facebook calendar, this is the fastest of the lot. I guess I’d suspect this since you’re doing it for yourself, where the other hosted services are doing it for millions of people.

Google Mail

As I mentioned earlier, this section is courtesy of Sean Bonner.

In Google Calendar, you’ll see Other Calendars on the left, click the Add link and choose Add by URL

Paste in the Facebook iCAL link you copied earlier

The Google Calendar will refresh every 12-24-hours from the Facebook iCal feed. Everything I can find online says it’s 24-hours, but from my experience it’s twice/day

Once you set this up, Facebook becomes just a little bit more powerful, and you become just a little bit more in the know.

Meet Jonas Svensson – Community Program Manager for Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Home Server

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:36:00 +0000

Many of the products that you use everyday are faceless and may be hard to identify with. We thought it would be interesting to put a face behind Windows Home Server and give you a chance meet some of the people that work on Windows Home Server day in and day out. I will be introducing you to different areas of the team, but we will start with our Community Program Manager, Jonas Svensson.

Jonas is someone that you may have already met. As our Community Program Manager, he participates in multiple events event throughout the year that you have possibly attended including SMB Nation and PDC. In this interview, you will find out how he contributes to the team and how Windows Home Server is a part of his daily life. Enjoy!

Trackback to The Windows Home Server Blog

How to make a USB Thumb-drive bootable

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:55:00 +0000

With the impending general availability of Windows 7 tomorrow. I thought I’d share a Windows 7 trick (although I have heard it works on Vista too, I have not done it.

One of the handy tricks I have used for installing Windows 7 on all my machines in my house is to boot off a USB Thumb-drive (also known as flashdisk). Not only is the Thumb-drive faster than the DVD drives in many of my computer, it helps me load Win7 on my Netbook as well!

The requirement on the target computer is that the BIOS is new enough to support booting from USB devices, usually there is a specific option for flash disk.

Just a warning that this procedure will wipe all the data on the thumb-drive to setup the bootable partition.

So here is how you do it:

Insert your USB thumb-drive into your machine, preferably a Windows 7 machine
Open the command prompt (Start, then run, then cmd.exe if you need that)
type in diskpart
Inside diskpart you’ll want to do the following

list disk (remember the disk number for they key, we’ll call this X)
select disk X
clean (WARNING: this will erase the whole thumb-drive)
create part pri (this creates a new primary partition)
select part 1
format fs=ntfs quick
active
exit

Close the command prompt window

At this point you can copy over ANY bootable DVD into the root of the thumb-drive, insert it into the target machine and then select to boot from the USB key (note, this requires the BIOS to support it). Also, do not set your BIOS to boot from the thumb-drive first, otherwise you’ll get into an endless loop. It’s best to use that “F12” ontime boot menu.

I use this not only to install Windows 7 on all my clients, but I also use it to install builds of Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Builds of Windows Home Server for testing. It cuts down on wasted DVDs, being a little greener.

A visual guide is also over on dotnetwizrd.net – How to boot/install Vista from a USB flash drive

UPDATE: If you own a Netbook, Microsoft will help you create a USB flash-drive to make it Windows 7.

Top Mac OS (OS X) Security Myths

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:52:00 +0000

CRN, a pretty active magazine in the small business space has a great article on what to watch out for when installing MACs into your business, or that connect to your business. Most of it boils down to protecting the end-user from themselves. I’m copying the article below, but here is the original article.

Mac OS X = Security?
You've heard the rumors: Macs are safer than PCs. Macs don't need separate antivirus software. Snow Leopard is the safest OS in existence. The list goes on and on. But how many of those claims are the truth and how many are just, well, myths? We explored fact vs. fiction, and here is what we came up with.

Myth 1: Macs Are Safer Than PCs
Thanks to aggressive marketing from Apple, Mac users often think they are impervious to the viruses, Trojans and numerous other assaults that have plagued Windows users for decades. Security experts say that if Mac users are less susceptible to attack, it's simply due to the fact that there are fewer viruses written for Macs than for Windows. That is rapidly changing, however, as Macs gain market share. Meanwhile, users who have the unfortunate experience of being attacked by information-stealing Trojans will likely have their systems compromised and their data stolen ... just like every other PC user out there.

Myth 2: Macs Have Fewer Vulnerabilities Than Windows
Not true. In fact, studies have shown that Macs actually have MORE vulnerabilities than their Windows counterparts, experts say. The reason? Constituting a "seek and ye shall find" phenomenon, it was simply a matter of attention, experts say. Some maintain that Apple's credibility in the security community increased as it gained traction in the marketplace. Others contend that a disproportionate amount of researchers in the field prefer Apple, and subsequently put their efforts into finding Windows' vulnerabilities instead. But once security experts began to seriously research Apple, the number of vulnerabilities increased exponentially, experts say. However, whether exploits target those vulnerabilities is another question.

"We can compare it to the situation with Internet Explorer and Firefox. Lots of people were saying that [Firefox] was so much more secure than IE," said Roel Schouwenberg, senior antivirus researcher for Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab. "It actually gained in popularity. Now all of a sudden a lot of vulnerabilities were being found in Firefox. I don't think you can underestimate the importance of market share."

Myth 3: Mac OS X Users Don't Need A Separate Antivirus Solution
Not so. Not even Apple says that anymore, even if it has downplayed the fact that users also should equip themselves with third-party antivirus software. There are just too many Mac Trojans and viruses out there that can evade Mac's built-in security systems -- and the numbers are growing.

"If you look at the Apple consumer base, and how they generally tend to think about security, the vast majority of Apple users will assume this is all they need," Schouwenberg said. "It's really nothing fancy and it can be easily bypassed."

Fortunately, there also are a number of antivirus offerings specifically designed for the Mac OS X platform.

Myth 4: The Antivirus Feature In Snow Leopard Is Enough To Protect Users
Or not. If anything, experts say, the antivirus feature lulls users into a false sense of security -- that is to say, even more than the one they already had. Apple turned heads earlier this month with the release of its Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard, which touted that it came equipped with antivirus and additional security features. However, upon closer inspection, security experts said that the built-in antivirus feature was designed to block a whopping total of two -- yes, two -- Mac Trojans, despite the fact that researchers have detected dozens of malicious threats that target the Mac OS X platform. According to researchers at Intego, the built-in antivirus only scans files on a handful of applications, including Safari, Mail, iChat, Firefox, Entourage and a few other browsers, but fails to scan from other sources, such as BitTorrent or FTP files.

Myth 5: Most Mac Exploits Target The Operating System
No. Actually, experts maintain that most of the attacks targeting Mac OS X will exploit the Web browser, and ultimately, the user's behavior. As in any PC, the biggest threat typically starts with the user and quite often via e-mail -- falling for phishing sites, clicking on malicious links, surfing infected Web sites, etc.

And as with their PC counterparts, Mac Trojans are becoming more sophisticated and stealthy, frequently designed to steal information and evade antivirus software. This means that as Mac's market share further grows well into the double digits, users can only expect to see more Trojans, worms and other Web-based threats taking over their favorite machines.

"The main danger for Mac comes not from the operating system but it comes from the behavior of the user," said David Perry, director of global education for Trend Micro. "Falling for bad phishing Web sites, responding to ads on Craigslist -- that is enough so that the end user requires additional protection."

Myth 6: Apple Is Just Like Microsoft And Has An Army Of Security Henchmen
Er, no. In fact, the company's historic lack of emphasis on security issues has left Apple vastly underprepared to deal with the barrage of anticipated Mac malware coming down the pike. Experts contend that Apple lacks the necessary manpower to create and test patches on a monthly basis and still needs the extensive specialized team needed to develop significant changes to Mac OS X internals that would make the platform more resilient to sophisticated malware attacks. And security experts also emphasize that Cupertino needs to stay on top of security issues in its open source projects and third-party components.

However, Apple appears to be trying. In light of a groundswell of Mac OS X malware, Apple recently hired its first security guru, the former head of security architecture at One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Ivan Krstic, to oversee the security division at Apple.

Myth 7: Apple Needs To Implement A Monthly Update Cycle Like Microsoft
Not necessarily, security experts say. This is simply due to the fact that there still isn't the necessary volume of vulnerabilities to warrant a monthly update cycle. However, experts agree that Apple could definitely stand to address security bugs in a more timely manner. After all, there are more efficient ways to repair vulnerabilities than with a patch that averages 70 to 80 fixes every few months.

Meanwhile, Apple scrambled to repair a six-month-old critical Java vulnerability this spring after -- but only after -- researcher Landon Fuller published a proof of concept exploit exposing the flaw six months after it was first detected. Yowza.

However, Apple will likely consider a more frequent patch cycle as malware authors more frequently find ways to launch attacks that exploit its vulnerabilities.

Myth 8: Unlike Windows Viruses, Mac Malware Is A Recent Phenomenon
Actually, some of the first and most destructive viruses were initially written for Mac, experts say -- back in the 1980s when Mac still had sizable market share. Viruses for Macs dropped significantly in the mid 90s, along with Mac's market share and credibility in the marketplace. But the viruses have since experienced a resurgence as Mac gained popularity after 2001 with its Tiger, Leopard and now Snow Leopard operating systems.

Myth 9: There Is Only A Handful Of Mac Malware, And It's Pretty Benign
Granted, the number of Trojans and worms targeting the Mac platform does not even come close to the number for Windows platforms. That said, some of the current malware is pretty destructive. Last year a Mac Trojan swept from machine to machine, forcing users to download bogus antivirus software. Earlier this year, Mac users were pummeled with two variants of a Mac-only iServices Trojan distributed via pirated versions of Apple's productivity suite iWorks and cracked Adobe Photoshop CS4 applications. The Trojans later developed into a full-fledged global botnet that infected more than 40,000 Macs. And experts say that Mac users can expect to see more drive-by and browser attacks.

Myth 10: Mac Users Will Surely Complain When Security Issues Become A Problem
Here's the thing -- experience is always the best teacher. Unlike PC owners, Mac users are simply not used to dealing with rampant malware, experts say. As a result, Mac users are much more likely than their Windows counterparts to underprotect their machines, or not protect them at all. PC owners acknowledge, in fact expect, that their machines will be riddled with security flaws, which leaves them susceptible to all kinds of malicious code. If their PCs are a little slow or erratic, most will simply download that antivirus upgrade they had been meaning to install and go about their day. Not so Mac owners, who often assume that they're perfectly safe, even when they're not. So the upshot is, Mac owners don't know what they don't know. And that could likely be the biggest mistake of all.

Embedding Google Reader into Outlook

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:57:00 +0000

Today was I talking with Cody from EFluxDesign (A web design and search optimization company) about using RSS to follow different blogs for education, pleasure or whatever you follow blogs for.

While Cody only has one PC that he uses, following RSS feeds in Blogs is as simple as adding it to Internet Explorer, and then Outlook automatically picks those up and they show up right in the familiar Outlook interface.

However, when using multiple PCs, you can find yourself reading the same blog post PC after PC after PC. Google’s answer to this (I haven’t found one that’s run by Microsoft yet, suggestions?) is Google Reader. Simply add the RSS feed into the reader and you have a simplified view.

The best part of it, is you don’t have to abandon Outlook. You can have the Google Reader appear right inside of Outlook, here’s how:

Open Outlook and right-click on the RSS Feeds folder and choose Properties.
On the Home Page tab, choose to Show home page by default for this folder and change the address to: http://www.Google.com/reader/

Now when you simply click on the RSS feeds link, Google Reader will show up in this list and you can take advantage of only reading blogs once/PC, and all the data about what you read as well. If you’re using Exchange 2007 or greater as a back-end, this setting will replicate around all of your PCs as well!

Spotted! On Microspotting

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:12:00 +0000

Recently I’ve been talking to Ariel Stallings who works at Microsoft and realized that many preconceptions about Microsoft weren’t quite right. As a result, she’s made it her mission to meet as many ‘softies as she can and post about them up on her Microspotting blog.

This morning Ariel decided to feature me on her blog, as well as my crazy Chinhuahua, Chico. If you’re interested, you can read more about my interesting working environment at Microsoft.

Click here to read the article.

And click around if you’re interested in learning about other ‘softies who make the products you love!

How to Add more Playlists to the HP EX485 MediaSmart Server’s Web Streaming Application

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:03:00 +0000

One of the most frustrating things for me when I first used my EX 485 HP MediaSmart server’s web-streaming application for my music was my playlists that I have in the Zune software don’t automatically appear here.

In fact, I couldn’t get them to appear at all! I dropped them into the music share, I made new ones with Windows Media Player, both .wpl and .m3u and they still didn’t appear in the list. Well, I finally figured it out and I wanted to share exactly what I did so I don’t forget, and in hopes that someone else might benefit from the same (wasting a little less time!). If you have a simpler way, I’d love to hear it. Comments are open!

Let’s say I want to move my “Favourite Albums” playlist. Here is how I did it:

Browse using Windows Explorer to the location of your playlists. They are “.zpl” files. If you aren’t sure where this is, in the Zune software click Settings and then select Collection. Look at your music folders for where it might be stored.
Once you’ve found the .zpl file, copy it to a new location like your Desktop. This can be an auto-playlist, or a made playlist, it doesn’t matter.
We’re going to need to change the extension on the file to one that Windows Media Player will read. So if you haven’t already you’ll need to show the file extensions in Windows by using a Windows Explorer Window.

Press Win+E to open Explorer
Press Alt to activate the menu
Under Tools select Folder Options.
Under the View tab, uncheck Hide Extensions for known file types. (you can un-check this again after your finished if you don’t like the extensions showing)
Click OK and close Windows Explorer. You will notice your Zune playlist will now be <name>.zpl .

Rename the file either by slow-clicking or pressing F2. Select the .zpl extension and change it to .wpl .
Click Yes on the dialog that warns you about changing the extension. Notice the icon will change to one that is recognized by Windows Media Player.
Double click the playlist, and it should open in Windows Media Player. I’m using Windows 7, so these steps will be for that version of Windows Media Player
Click the icon to drop the player into library mode. I circled it in red for you:
Before we save the playlist, we have to remember that the HP MediaSmart streamer has a limit of 500 songs in a playlist. Windows Media Player will tell you how many songs are in your playlist at the bottom of the “Now Playing” list. Make sure this is < 500 before you continue.
Now we need to save the list as a .m3u file. Again press the ALT key to activate the menu, and hover over File and click on Save Now Playing List As…
Choose the same location, the Desktop, just to keep things easy. Then drop the Save as type box down and choose the .m3u one:
Change the extension on the file name to .m3u and save the file:

Now we’ve got a .m3u file. All of the above steps are to convert from either a .zpl file or a .wpl file as you see fit. If you already have .m3u files, those steps can be skipped.

Now, as I mentioned above. I dropped custom .m3u file into the music folder before, and it didn’t work. The challenge here, is since the streaming app is running in the context of IIS, it’s access to the folders on the server is limited. If you opened the .m3u file in notepad, you'd see that each music file’s location is referenced as “\\HPSERVER\Music\<Path to song>” . IIS doesn’t have access to this. So we need to reference from the directory that the playlist is going to be stored in. I keep my playlists at the root of the Music directory, so we’ll do it this way.

To make the playlist readable by the Streaming application, we need to change the path to the file location:

Open Notepad on your computer. I use Start, then Run, and type Notepad and press Enter
Drop the .m3u playlist you created into the notepad window using the mouse, you’ll see it has the path to the file as mentioned above:
Click Edit and then Replace.
In the "Find what:" box type in \\hpserver\music\ , in the Replace with: box type .\

.\ is a reference to the location of the playlist file of where you will place it on the server. If you plan to put it in a folder such as \\hpserver\music\playlists, then you should use ..\ instead. the period references the current directory, two periods represent one directory higher, three periods are 2 directories higher, etc.
Don’t forget the \ at the end of each item, otherwise you may build an invalid path to the music file!

Click Replace All and the file should change to look more like this:
Save the file now using the File and Save menu in Notepad, then close Notepad.

Now we have a perfect .m3u file that won’t work from a client inside your network, but it WILL work from inside the media streaming web UI. As the final step:

Copy the .m3u doctored file over to \\hpserver\music.
Log into your media streamer
Enjoy your familiar playlist from the Zune software, or any other application you use to create playlists.

You may have to wait for the TwonkyMedia server to recognize the new playlist and show it in the UI
Finally, the TwonkyMedia add-in periodically tests for new playlists, so it might not appear for a while. The first one I did appeared in 10 minutes, the second one took a few hours.

Phew. I think I broke a sweat on this one. It’s not pretty, but it works, I now have my familiar playlists on my EX485 HP MediaSmart server, available for media streaming.

I do want to ask, does anyone know a better way to do this? I’d love to have Zune automatic playlists automatically update on the HP MediaSmart server, but this is just a huge process to try to automate.

OEMs ratchet up the competition with SBS 2008!

noreply@blogger.com (Sean Daniel) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:53:00 +0000

it’s unusual for me to talk about prices and stuff on this blog. But I wanted to call out some new competition in the market, get you thinking about buying from an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer). When you’re purchasing Windows Small Business Server 2008, it’s always good to at least consider one of the major OEMs that offer it as a package with the hardware, such as Dell or HP. Both of them are offering a bundle for as little as $1,299. I’m sure some of you with bigger businesses will opt for some more beefy hardware, but that’s at least an amazing starting point.

The Official SBS Blog has some more information on these prices and why you should consider SBS 2008.