Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

The improvements that SP1 offers include:

1. Support for Windows Server 2008.

2. New Client Servicing API: Supports client registration, filters updates by category and classification, provides applicability rule extension mechanism and obtains package metadata and reports update status for each client.

3. Improvements for local publishing: supports publishing of drivers within the enterprise by using vendor provided catalogs. API includes support for bundles and prerequisites.

4. All hotfixes: WSUS 3.0 SP1 includes all the changes and hotfixes that have been issued since the release of WSUS 3.0.

5. Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005: WSUS 3.0 SP1 lets you use SQL Server 2005.

You can grab it here.

Originally spotted here.

The Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack, Version 1.0 (XPS Essentials Pack) contains components that enable you to view, generate and index XPS Documents.

With the XPS Essentials Pack you can quickly begin reading and generating XPS Documents. It contains XPS Viewer EP to read XPS Documents and the Microsoft XPS Document Writer to output files to the XPS Document format.

Additionally, the XPS Essentials Pack download includes providers to enable the iPreview and iFilter capabilities found in many Windows applications. Windows shell handlers are also included to enable thumbnail views and file properties for XPS Documents.

Read more about it and download it here.

Noteworthy for Windows Desktop Search and Sharepoint users:
Because it comes with iPreview and iFilters for XPS, you can install these on your SPS 200x indexing server and the contents of the XPS documents will be searchable. Ditto for users using Windows Desktop Search or Vista's built-in search.

If you are running VMWare Workstation/Server and want working audio for your Windows Server 2008 and Vista virtual machines, you should use the drivers located here.

Unfortunately, they aren't the easiest to locate because they are no longer on Windows Update, and they seem to be well hidden on Creative's site.

Who knows how long Creative Labs will keep these online, so I would grab them and archive them as soon as possible, because they do work well for Vista and Server 2008 VMWare instances.

Download the RTM bits here. Very handy for Microsoft Deployment/SCCM.

It doesn't always give you a performance boost, especially if there is a router that is not RFC compliant somewhere in the 'chain' between your machine and the "series of tubes" (Internet).

Set the following DWORD registry key to "1":
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\InternetSettings\TcpAutotuning

After restarting, Tcp autotuning (RFC 1323) will be applied to HTTP traffic.

You can read more about this here - "Description of the Receive Window Auto-Tuning feature for HTTP traffic on Windows Vista-based computers"

Sharepoint superstar Tom Dietz pointed out a helpful hotfix if your Sharepoint/WSS Timer Service keeps throwing errors in the event log. Even though it might seem like bad memory in the server, it is most likely related to KB 946517.

Symptoms include:
Event IDs with 6398, or 6432, or 7076 are logged.
Tasks that are scheduled with the Sharepoint Timer service do not run.

You can read more about it here too.

Yes, ZeroCool refers to "hacking the Gibson" in the movie Hackers. Very campy movie overall.

Most 3 year olds aren't interested in computers, or as she puts it, "puters". Juliana, my daughter, has been playing XBox and Wii since she has been able to walk, so I guess she is a bit of an oddball in that respect.

This past Christmas she finally got her own computer, which strangely enough due to Moore's law and how outdated my home desktop machine is, runs circles around my computer. I plan on "fixing" that sometime in 2008.

Anyway, up until last night she had administrator rights on her XP Pro installation that came with the computer. She has done various things to 'disable' and 'break' the system in the past few months, like disabling the Ethernet interface on accident and renaming desktop icons. Nothing too troublesome and nothing malicious.

One time while playing a game, her video card driver went into an infinite loop and blue screened the computer. I've never heard a kid so upset over something. She was screaming "THE BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH! WAAAAAAH!!!" The fact that she knew what it was told me that she had been paying attention to all my crazy antics at home with my beta operating systems and other mad scientist computer experiments.

Last night, she reset the permissions on all of Drive C: to lock out the SYSTEM account and Administrators at the root level. I figured this would be a good time to set up her system the right way.

I formatted her hard drive and put Vista on her computer with the latest SP1 beta build. Every device installed correctly without having to go find driver, except that the built in SoundMax HD Audio was muted on her ThinkCentre M55. A few visits to Intel's site and Lenovo's site and her system had all the latest drivers.

Windows Live OneCare Family Safety went on next. Both kids have a very short list of white-listed sites they can go to. Unfortunately, the Explorer crashing bug happened again, so I installed the workaround. Crashing problem went away.

I reset her IE7 homepage to iCarly.com, because the site seems to be very IE-centric. I installed the Firefox 3 nightly build, set the homepage to Playhouse Disney and restored a few other of her bookmarks. AdBlock Plus, NoScript, and Nightly Tester Tool extensions went on next.

Now came the fun part - I made an administrator account for me on her computer and demoted her account to standard user. I enabled the parental controls built into some versions of Vista. You can set time limits for computer use, control what programs can be launched, and restrict games to certain ratings. You can view what programs have been used, and for how long, and what sites were accessed.

For now, I haven't set time limits on computer use. Each kid has their own access point that their computer is wired into that connects into our "Fort Knox" wireless network. Every AP in the house is using DD-WRT v2.4, which allows setting the times when the wireless radios are active. If I wanted, I could do finer grained control of network access so each kid could still connect to their wired devices plugged into the network switch on the AP but can't go online due to the radio being off. Eventually every system in the house will also be a NAP client.

I limited the programs she could run to Windows Media Player, her games, and a few other applications. Anything that could be potentially damaging was left off the white-list.

So far it is working very well. If she is anything like me at the age, and all the indicators are pointing in that direction, it is only a matter of time until she figures out a way out of all the restrictions. She's too smart for her own good at times. I'll just end up filing bug reports to the OneCare Family Safety and Vista teams at Microsoft at that point.

"My 3 year old hacked your Gibson."

There are many different ASPI layers out there, and Frog ASPI is a great little ASPI layer "shim" that translates ASPI calls into SPTI (native) calls.

If this doesn't make sense to you, you're probably not looking for an ASPI layer DLL.

Many programs still use (or attempt to use) ASPI to do CD/DVD read/writing functions, even though it was originally written for SCSI host adapters.

A short list of programs that use ASPI: Alcohol 120, CDEx, Drive Image 2002, DVD Decrypter, Exact Audio Copy, Ghost 8.0, and many others.

Thankfully most new programs use SPTI for all their needs, but it is always handy to have a working ASPI layer.

A reader named Mark left an excellent link in the comments page of my 64-bit iTunes blog entry that shows how to install iTunes and iPhone support on Windows XP 64-bit. I really wish Windows XP 64-bit had better support when it was launched because I suspect we'd have more Vista and Windows 2008 64-bit drivers by now. Read about how to get things going in XP x64 here.

It might be surprising with the amount of music entries I post in here from time to time, but I do not own an iPod, or Zune or any other type of music player. The closest thing I have is my Motorola Q with 3rd party audio software.

A very handy hotfix for those people lucky enough to own an ASUS EEE PC. I will own one eventually, I am sure. Probably when they adopt the newer die-shrunk powersaving Intel chips.

In the meantime, if you have applied KB 923293 and/or KB 934428 (for SDHC support), and still have trouble with your SD cards, give KB 946629 a try. It looks like the files were built on Christmas Eve, 2007.

Based on build numbers, it looks like you can safely use this KB in place of the other two previously released.

As always, please don't e-mail me for the hotfix - use the handy link on the right side of this blog to request the hotfix from Microsoft directly.

Typically I always associated Microsoft Transporter with Lotus Notes migrations to Exchange.

Coworker Britt Baubie pointed out that Microsoft updated the suite a few days ago and they now support migrating non-Lotus POP3 and IMAP servers to Exchange 2007.

As seen in the release notes here, here are the details:

Transporter Suite for Internet Mailboxes
A whole new console and tools for migrating POP/IMAP Mailboxes

Migration of mailbox content from generic servers through POP or IMAP to Exchange 2007.
Preserves all messages and folder structures.
Preserves rich content including formatting, message flags and even calendaring through iCAL.
Exposed through GUI and a rich set of PowerShell tasks

It looks like migrating to Exchange 2007 just got easier for a lot of software packages.

FCS uses the MOM infrastructure for event and alert gathering. The version of MOM 2005 included with Forefront Client Security is stripped down and customized quite a bit during the installation of the collection server role. This is part of the reason why you cannot use your existing MOM 2005 infrastructure for FCS v1.

A few important notes:
1. If you have an existing MOM infrastructure, you cannot use it for FCS. Your existing MOM infrastructure and FCS's use of MOM are completely separate.

2. If you do have MOM, you cannot share the One Point (Operations DB) or SystemCenterReporting (Data warehouse DB) with FCS. The two pairs of DB's must always remain separate!

3. If you have an existing MOM infrastructure, you can still monitor those machines using FCS (MOM supports multi-homing the agents).

It may be easier to not think about MOM as a separate prerequisite (like SQL), as the FCS setup handles all the MOM configuration details. If you already have MOM, just remember that you can't use it for FCS and if you don't have MOM, you don't have to worry about installing it, as the setup handles that for you.

Originally gleamed from here, with some of my own notes added.

Due to the way the packages are handled, and due to their exclusion from Windows XP SP3, it is typically a good idea to install the Universal Audio Architecture (UAA) High Definition Audio class driver version 1.0a hotfix (KB 888111) if you are using a newer HD audio chipset. If you are in a pinch to download this hotfix, you can find it on Lenovo's site here.

If you want to enable LLTD (Link Layer Topology Discovery) responder support, install KB 922120, and then install SP3.

This blog entry is due to me trying to install both of these hotfixes after installing one of the latest XP SP3 builds and discovering that their install routine blocked their installation after I put SP3 on the machine. I simply uninstalled the SP3 build, installed the hotfixes in question, and then reinstalled the new SP3 build. Time consuming, but at least I know it works. I am hoping at some point that Microsoft will release updated versions of these hotfixes that can be applied to SP3.

I am actually a little surprised that they are not included with SP3.

... but I'm still alive and well.

Just buried in real life and work life - figuratively and to a certain extent, literally, due to the ice storm/snow storm we had last night.

I'll be posting again soon.

Sometimes I forgot what roles does what with FCS v1, especially if I haven't touched it for a few weeks. Based on a post in the Forefront forums here, I've developed this little cheat sheet.

Management role
This hosts the MOM, FCS consoles and signature service. Populates the console drop downs with the latest malware threats.

Collection role
This hosts the customized/specialized MOM 2005 installation and is the collection point for data coming up from machines and for sending tasks to machines.

Collection DB role
This hosts the OnePoint database used by the MOM service.

Reporting role
This hosts the SQL Reporting Services/MOM reporting and generates all the FCS reports.

Reporting DB role
This hosts the SystemCenterReporting database. Used by MOM reporting and stores all the long-term data.

Distribution role
Hosts WSUS and is used to distribute signatures and the FCS client package. For small installations, Windows Update can be used instead for updates.