Technology for Mortals

I’ve been a Windows user since version 3.0. That’s a pretty long time. Indeed, I even used Windows NT 3.1, which was a fairly rare product “in the wild”. Over the years, I have watched the bug count drop dramatically. Not just the true “bugs”, but the stuff that the programmers joke about and say, “that’s not a ‘bug’, it’s a ‘feature’”. Still, Vista still has a few of these quirks (and a few new ones), and they drive me nuts.

Re-arranging the Start Menu
UAC is great, in my mind. I love the fact that if something serious is happening, I need to sign off on it. I think that UAC is probably something that most people get “Click-Yes-Itis” very quickly to, but I don’t. Now that being said, it drives me absolutely nuts that re-arranging the Start Menu involves signing off on so many things per drag/drop operation. First, it needs administrator approval. Then, UAC comes up. Then I need to confirmt he move. And if the destination folder already exists (like if a service pack re-created the Start Menu entry in the original location), I need to merge the folders together. Argh! Luckily, I only need to put up with this on an occassional basis.

When things on the Start Menu get moved…
This has been a problem with Windows since Day 1. The OS simply has zero awareness of the Start Menu, other than it being a standard directory tree. This is fine, and I am sure that it saved them a ton of programmer hours. The problem is, if the user re-arranges the Start Menu in any way, it causes pure chaos. For example, I create, at the top level, functional categories such as “Multimedia”, “Communications”, and “Programming” on my Start Menu, and then move the entries for installed applications as needed. Very few applications (on most installs for me, only Microsoft Office) still warrant their own top level entry. This works great for me, until the application gets updated. Service packs and patches re-create the original top-level entry. Uninstall does not remove the entry because it is not where the uninstaller thinks it should be. The answer is for someone at Microsoft to spend a week or two writing some code to make this smarter.

Lack of a proper “Shadows” file type
OS/2 had a great file type called a “Shadow”. *Nix has a similar idea in the form of a file link. The idea is that a file has 1 physical entry, but you can have other files which appear in other directories (or in the same directory) which “point to” the file. No, not like Window’s useless shortcuts. The problem with shortcuts is that they are too much of a hybrid model; you have a 50/50 short of working with the shortcut file itself, not its target. With a “shadow” file, operations always act upon the target, with a few rare exceptions. Ask a shadow where it is, and it gives you the shadow’s directory path, not the target’s. Deletion always removes the shadow, not the target. And so on. But the idea is that when you act upon the shadow’s metadata (say, right-clicking on it), you get the target’s information, not the shadow’s. That’s what I really hate about shortcuts, you need to follow them to the original file to do a lot of useful things. Bleh.

Recyle Bin Navigation
It is still a pain in the neck to get around the Recycle Bin. I go in there about twice a year, but when I do, I would like to be able to find what I am looking for. Am I being picky? Maybe. But I would still like to see this improved.

The Registry
I remember back to 1994-1995 when Microsoft hailed the Registry as being this awesome thing that would prevent people from needing to work hard to find INI files, and to make managing these things more uniform. It did that. Now, it is uniformly difficult to find what you need in the Registry. Unless you are a Registry magician familiar with all of the odd hierarchies, it is nealry impossible to find what you are looking for in there.

Regedit
On that note, why has Regedit remained unchanged since 1995? Would a proper “Find All/Replace All” hurt? Given the level of knowledge of the average person running Regedit, would a regular expression Find/Replace be too high level of a feature? Why is Regedit more primitive than Notepad?

Backups
Why does Vista Backup consider backing up to a directly attached drive to be the Holy Grail of backing up, and treat backups to network locations as second class citizens, particular for the full system state backups? Why does Vista Backup not have a way of smartly rotating my backups and “folding” them together in a way so that I don’t have to wipe out all of my backups every few months and restart them? Why do both Vista Backup and Windows Server 2008 Backup feel like a massive step backwards from the capable but feature poor backup in previous versions?

What Windows quirks drive you nuts?

J.Ja

In July, we put up our first Windows Server 2008 server. Since then, I have migrated the domain from NT 4 to the new domain (which was upgraded from 2003 to 2008 too), put in Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), Exchange 2007, SharePoint 2007, and I am in the process of getting Dynamics CRM 4.0 in place. After all of this, I think I can fairly report on Windows Server 2008.

First of all, it works, it works better than any other Microsoft OS I have encountered. They significantly cleaned up and reorganized the interface so that logically related tasks are “closer” to each other and are sometimes in the same tool now, as opposed to using 4 separate tools with wildly different interfaces to get things done. PowerShell is suddenly a “big deal”, and many of the GUI management tools really are just wizards to construct & run PowerShell scripts on the fly (Exchange 2007 Management Console is a great example, it even shows you the PowerShell command it is about to run). Now that I’ve had to use PowerShell, I like it, but only because I am familiar with *Nix; it’s like someone took the *Nix model of pipes and indirection, and instead of letting all of the commands be developed hodgepodge by different people with no common naming conventions, format conventions, etc., it was all centrally managed and therefore, logical.

Things I don’t like? Application incompatability. A lot of apps (ISA, Office Communication Server) don’t work on it. Others require odd modifications (Exchange 2007, pre-rollup 4, needed some bizarre hacks to disable IPv6 in some common scenarios) because the applications don’t work “right” with it. I’m unhappy that Microsoft is pushing some products to 64-bit only (like Exchange 2007), while others refuse to run under 64-bit (Office Communication Server). This mandates that you have at least a 64-bit and a 32-bit install, and possibly (probably) a 32-bit Windows Server 2003 machine around too. I’m furious that many of the updated products are 64-bit only, which means that instead of a simple upgrade, you need to bring the new version into the “pool”, transfer responsibility to it, then gracefully disable the old 32-bit server from the pool, and then uninstall it; this is the “upgrade” path for OCS 2007 R2, in a nutshell. And Exchange 2007, for that matter. Not a nice thing to do. Personally, I find that it is easier to see what my options are when they are in a GUI than a command line, I just walk the menu tree and go into every dialog. But that is a personal thing. At the same time, many tasks can only be done in PowerShell, so if you don’t like the command line… tough.

Hyper-V ROCKS. I can’t compare it to VMWare ESX server, but I can tell you that it beats VMWare Server, Virtual PC 2007, and Virtual Server 2005 with the ugly end of the ugly stick, and leaves them half dead in a Moscow alleyway. The biggest gripe I have, is that its missing features are in the (just RTMed) System Center Virtual Machine Manager product. Granted, much, if not most of that functionality is already available via PowerShell (once again, the idea that GUI tools are now just PowerShell script construction wizards). But still, it would have been nice to easily get P2V and V2V conversions up front with a GUI tool.

J.Ja

Today I was trying to export an Exchange 2007 mailbox to a PST file. The command gave me an error:

Cannot open the log file ‘C:Program FilesMicrosoftExchange ServerLoggingMigrationLogsexport-Mailbox20081019-110212-4778281.log’.
At line:1 char:1

This error is because I am on Vista; you need to run the Exchange Command Shell as Administrator to have the rights to that directory. To fix the problem, right-click the Exchange Command Shell and choose “Run as Administrator” and try again.

J.Ja

I’ve been slaving away over a hot Exchange 2007 server on Windows 2008 for a week now. Great product, except for the Outlook Anywhere component, which does not install itself properly. The issues are well documented by everyone except for Microsoft, it seems like. In any event, over the course of my work, I started seeing event ID 4001 in the logs a lot, with a message that said, “A transient failure has occured. The problem may resolve itself in a while. The service will retry in 56 seconds.”

Another symptom I saw was that OWA (Outlook Web Access) would state that there was a transient failure as well when people tried to access it. The diagnostic information mumbled some stuff about not being able to open a mailbox. This is caused by an inability for the OWA server to communicate properly with the CAS, usually itself. In this case, while following some troubleshooting documents, I had added lines like:

192.168.1.XYZ   NETBIOSNAME
192.168.1.XYZ   FQDN

to my hosts file. Taking those out and running “ipconfig /flushdns” corrected the issue. I did not see any information on the Web about this, so I figured I should post some.

J.Ja

Today I set about installing Exchange 2007 in our organization. As a little bit of background, we had initially had a windows 2003 SBS Server in place, which means that our Active Directory had the Exchange changes made to it. When we moved off of that system, I manually uninstalled Exchange before wiping the server, but in my ignorance I did not remove Exchange from Active Directory. Today, I found a way to do that, despite errors from trying “update /removeOrg” in the Exchange SP2 system.

In a nutshell, the proper way to get Exchange out of Active Directory is to run “update /removeOrg” from an SP2 installer. Sometimes it doesn’t work. For me, it was spewing errors about trying to prepare the forest (why, when I’m trying to unprepare the forest?). After a day of search, it seemed like I was the only one ever to need to manually extract Exchange from Active Directory. What I ended up doing was quite simple. I ran ADSI, and removed the Microsoft Exchange OU in the default schema. That’s the obvious one. But that wasn’t enough. I also needed to switch to the “Configuration” schema (right click the domain name in ADSI on the left-hand tree and choose “Settings”, and change the “Select a well known naming context” dropdown to “Configuration”), drill down to “Services” and remove the “Microsoft Exchange” CN there as well.

Presto, no more Exchange!

If you want/need to, you should also remove the groups in Active Directory, but this appears to be unnecessary for moving to Exchange 2007.

J.Ja

The monster project on my plate (I’ve been building up to it since around March) is to migrate our existing NT 4 domain to Windows 2008. This project has been joy and pain, and it is finally nearly done.

For the last few months, I’ve been getting the new domain ready, like upgrading the domain controller to server 2008, getting a new SQL Server install in place, SharePoint, and so on. I still need to do Exchange, CRM 4,0, and Office Communications Server, but we agreed that those items need to wait until after the migration.

When I went to do the initial batch of migrations, though, I hit a snag. The Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) version 3.0 supports migrating from NT 4, but not migrating to 2008. The newest version 3.1, supports 2008 as a target but not NT 4 as a source. So we needed to get the NT 4 server upgraded to 2000 or higher. For safety’s sake, we decided to use a VMWare image of the server for this.

The VMWare conversion process worked fine, but when we fired up the VM, it claimed that there was no system disk. This wasn’t a huge surprise – the original machine is an ancient Compaq Proliant with an EISA SCSI controller in it; the MBR points to a tiny 36 MB partition on the RAID 1, which contains the SCSI tools to get into the card’s firmware, and then boot off of the true C drive. Gotta love 1990′s technology. After contacting VMWare, we decided that the best route was to do the following:

1. Take a drive image of the original server, and copy it to the VMWare computer’s local drive.
2. Create a new VM with disks of the appropriate size (I made the C drive 20 GB larger than the original, to provide ample space for the upgrade to take place), and also mount the local drive with the image file as a disk in the VM.
3. Start the VM and boot off of the imaging software’s CD.
4. Blast the image onto the virtual drives.
5. Copy the VM back to the NT 4 server (to ensure the same version of NTFS) and run the virtual machine conversion wizard.

This worked great, except for when it didn’t work. Why not? Well, we still didn’t have an MBR pointing to the right place, since we weren’t going to get the EISA SCISI tool partition (we tried it once on a drive image, it complained about jumpers…). So what did we do? We made floppy images of the NT 4 install floppies, and a floppy image of a fresh NT 4 Emergency Repair Disk, and ran the NT 4 recovery mode, to “Inspect Boot Sector”. That fixed the MBR issue!

Now, we got NTLDR issues. So we brought the VM back to the NT 4 server, and tried to run the conversion utility. It groused about not being able to identify the OS. Huh? Looking at the VMWare converter logs, we found the problem. It turns out that the VM was still set to mount the local drive of the VMWare workstation; removing that virtual drive solved that problem, and the conversion continued.

And lo and behold, it worked! We actually managed to virtualize a server that I originally built when I was (I beleive) a sophomore in college. This machine was my introduction to SCSI, TCP/IP, NT 4 (I had experience with NT 3.51, 3.5, and 3.1 before that, as well as NetWare), multi-CPU machines (it had 2 CPUs, amazing for the time), and a lot of other technologies (DNS and DHCP come to mind immediately). This machine really got me started hardcore in systems administration. And now it is a VMWare VM.

But I digress.

We then performed the upgrade to Windows Server 2003 R2. This went extremely well; the only hiccups we had were remembering to make a floppy image containing the VMWare SCSI controller driver to feed to the Windows setup program, and then remembering to disconnect the floppy image before the next reboot (we got another scary NTLDR error… woops!).

On a side note, we needed to make the Active Directory install post-upgrade be in a completely separate forest, since the 2003 domain can’t participate in the 2008 forest.

But we are now finally ready to migrate this domain, and I can’t wait. If our NT 4 domain could last from 1997 to 2008, I shouldn’t have to upgrade this domain until around 2019.

J.Ja

I tried to install the new Service Pack for Team Foundation Server 2008 today. Not surprisingly, it failed. It failed for the same reason that it took me quite a number of days to get it installed in the first place, which is the integration with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS).

UPDATE (8/12/2008 2:00 PM EST): To resolve this problem, I logged into the SQL Server machine, and in the Resporting Services Configuration Tool, I exported the encryption keys, then on the TFS server, I imported the same encryption keys.

Microsoft, I really hope that you are listening. You cannot go anywhere with TFS while it has this wretched dependency on SSRS. My employer has lost about a week’s worth of my time doing something that should have taken a few hours, because SSRS is such a steaming pile of manure. With all of the problems that I have had with TFS and SSRS, I promise that I will not be likely to build anything involving SSRS for a very long time, and I would not recommend that anyone have SSRS as a dependency for any product they ship. It simply does not work.

I really don’t know what value SSRS brings to the table, but I doubt that it is substantially beter than, say, Crystal Reports. And Crystal Reports actually works. So does Cognos (I can’t speak to the Cognos install process, just developing for it). The number of posts around the Web regarding the problems with TFS and SSRS are astounding. Even more frustrating, the most common error (error code 29112) has a huge number of potential resolutions, ranging from deleting the encrypted content in your database (sounds risky to me), to verifying that the SSRS installation was from the same SQL Server edition (Enterprise, Workgroup, etc.) as the actual SQL Server installation. It is pure madness.

I like TFS, a lot. I think that it is a really good product. But if you have any hopes of installing it, particularly in a dual server configuration (I didn’t see SSRS problems on a single server install), set aside a lot of time for yourself, and don’t plan on any particular project completion date. And stock up on tranquilizers so you don’t rip your server out of the rack in frustration and burn it with a blowtorch.

J.Ja

Last week I wrapped up the installation of our new Team Foundation Server 2008 setup. I had previously installed it in a single-server archtecture, but we decided to go to the dual-server configuration. Why? Because I am trying to consolidate everything by purpose into different VMs on our new app server. This means that I have 1 VM for SQL server, another one for SharePoint and other collaborative applications, and so on. When I went to install TFS into this, it was an incredible headache.

For one thing, TFS requires 32 bit Windows; since this is TFS 2008, and because so many of the 2007 and 2008 Microsoft server products (Exchange, for example) require 64 bit Windows, I think that this is going to be a real problem, especially for small shops. So now I have a 32 bit Windows 2008 VM just for TFS.

The installation took forever. I went through all of the checklists, but there was always something wrong. Oddly enough, the #1 offender was SQL Server Reporting Services. The TFS installer is supposed to configure the unconfigured SSRS install, but the default install in broken. I had to delete the encryption keys (for whatever reason) to make it work, which could bite me in the rear down the road.

I then had further problems with installing the SharePoint extensions on my 64 bit SharePoint install. Apparently, the TFS disk doesn’t ship with a 64 bit version of this, and the error message doesn’t say anything about it, just throws a dumb, useless error message. Luckily, they made a 64 bit version a few months ago.

Over all, I must say that this install was one of the most miserable installations that I ahve ever done of a Microsoft product. I know that TFS is supposed to be “enterprise class”, but many of their other “enterprise class” products are smooth sailing. I can’t see what makes TFS so special that it can’t be an easier installation. If Microsoft wants more shops to use it, they need to make it easy to deploy. No one can evaluate it in its current state, it requires too much work.

J.Ja

For a long time now, I have been looking for a quality, affordable photo/image editor. This weekend I gave Microsoft Expression Design 2 a try. The upshot? It is missing some really critical features, the UI focuses a bit too much on form and not function, and the price point is poor.

Granted, I am comparing it against Photoshop (Photoshop CS 1, at that, which is why I am in the market for a cheap Photoshop replacement). But Microsoft bought the basis of this product (“Acrylic”) ages ago; it has been in development for a long time. One of the problems that it suffers from, is that is never figured out if it wanted to be a vector tool like Illustrator, or a raster tool like Photoshop. So it ends up with some really intresting ways of doing old tasks. For example, the “paintbrush” actually constructs a vector path, and “closing” the brush generates a full shape object. I am sure that vector tools work this way (I don’t have any experience with them), but considering that I was looking for a Photoshop stand-in, this was novel. But at the same time, I can’t find a magic wand, an eraser, or a pencil tool. There is no “gradient” tool; a “gradient” is merely a type of fill that can be applied to shapes. There is no mask tool either, but my suspicion is that you are supposed to use shapes for masking as well as outright design pieces.

I really like how the “special effects” work, though. You apply them on to individual objects or layers. And you can change the order that they are applied. The end result is that what Photoshop calls a “filter” never touches the underlying pixels directly, which gives you some great flexibility. But the lack of raster editing features can’t make up for this in my mind.

The UI deserves special mention. It is gorgeous. It is pretty intuitive. But it has some odd quirks that kill me, like having a toolbox be too tall so it has scroll bars, and to make it worse, the drop down boxes in it go past the part on screen, so you need to scroll the toolbox in order to see the bottom of the drop down within it. Huh? Why not have the drop down limit itself to the visible portion of the toolbox? Another oddity is that many widgets rely upon “gestures”. To rotate a gradient, you can either type in a rotation angle, or you can “draw a circle” with the mouse while holding the left mouse button down over the angle type-in box, to adjust the angle. Again, huh? Many other numbers can be adjusted with “gestures” too, over UI elements that are actually sliders, but do not appear as such. On the other hand, the UI was very smart; “skew” is at the same level as resize or rotate, in terms of, “bring the mouse near a point on a shape and you can do it.” But the places where it was smart hardly compensated for its drawbacks. Most of the UI drawbacks come from trying to make a pretty design that tramples the standard widgets toolbox.

Finally, the price. Expression Design 2 is not available standalone, although its demo it. If you want to buy it, you need to purchase the full Expression Studio 2 product. Granted, it is part of the suite, and it is geared towards the XAML/WPF/Silverlight stuff that Microsoft is pushing. And yes, that suite costs about what a full copy of Photoshop CS 3 costs (which is a bit more than the full Corel suite). But unless your plan is to dive deep into XAML/WPF/Silverlight, this product is not worth buying the suite for just to have this one product (the suite itself is a good price, in my opinion, especially since Expression Web 2 is a great product). Compared to Photoshop, this is not a very good raster editor at all. Indeed, I think that the free Paint.Net is a much better choice for standard image/photo editing. I can’t compre it to any vector tools, but I suspect that it won’t matchup well against them either.

J.Ja

I love to read stuff from Microsoft Research. Say what you willa bout their shipping products, their research items are just plain fascinating, and I have learned a lot by reading their papers. I came across an item today, an interview with a guy there working on human/computer interfaces, Desney Tan. It was interesting; he talked about “wetworks” (merging the brain and the machine) fairly casually.

Now, I am all for technological progress, I am certainly no Luddite. But the idea of wetworks somehow bothers me in a weird way. Not really moral qualms, per se. But practical issues. Things like, “if my brain is wired up like this, what happens if I ever need an MRI?” And, “if my brain is tightly coupled to a machine, what happens when the machine crashes?” Another one: “if I am tethered to a machine, what powers it? What happens if it runs out of power?” And so on.

It’s odd, I’ve read a lot about people working on the “tough problem” which is the machine/brain interface. But no one seems to really be addressing the practical problems. I think that until these practical issues are dealt with, this will not be a serious technology except in niche markets.

J.Ja