Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

Not all USB thumbdrives are created equal and I've noticed that some places are having 'fire sales' on known slow USB thumbdrives now that Vista has launched. One thing I can recommend is getting a thumbdrive that is large enough to move your profile onto and use for ReadyBoost. You could also go one step further by moving your user TMP and TEMP environment variables to your thumbdrive.

Pros:
Faster program launches
Less chance of profile corruption because it is solid state technology
Less hard drive fragmentation, due to temp files offloaded to another drive
Less power consumption on laptop, due to less hard drive head seeks

Cons:
If you forget your thumbdrive, you will be forced to log onto a temporary profile on your hard drive.
If you unplug the thumbdrive before properly logging off, you might end up with a very upset OS.
Premature 'wear-out' of the thumbdrive. Typically by the time you get bad sectors on flash memory, you have already retired the device.
Local profile size is limited by the size of the thumbdrive. This is normally not a problem unless you have a bad habit of saving downloads and files to your desktop. I used to be guilty as charged until I changed my ways.

So far, the pros have outweighed the cons and I'm enjoying the experience so far. I will document the process later this month, hopefully.

I had seen this a few months ago and promptly lost the link on accident – now that I’ve found it again, I’m spreading the word of the usefulness of this “grand overview” of Active Directory.

Believe it or not, Microsoft actually published an Adobe PDF onto their website, and it’s meant to be printed out on a large format printer. I would have expected it in some type of Office format.

You can download a copy of it here.

ADMX files are 'the new way' to do Group Policies in Vista and Longhorn. Thankfully a large part of the group policy engine was reworked and rewritten for Vista and Longhorn. You can now create a centrally located repository inside of SYSVOL to store all the newer style policies.

If you want to convert older style ADM files to ADMX, or create new ones within a MMC session, download this program here.

Many bugs fixed and hopefully not much broken.
You can read about it here.

By default, Compound TCP is disabled on Vista, but enabled on Longhorn server, unless this changes before Longhorn server ships.
CTCP is a technology that came out of the Microsoft Research group as a way to deal with connections that have a large bandwidth-delay product.
A good example of this kind of connection would be satellite internet (DirectPC / Starband) or wireless technology like EVDO or WiMax.

To enable CTCP on Vista, run 'netsh interface tcp set global congestionprovider=ctcp'.
To disable CTCP on Vista, run 'netsh interface tcp set global congestionprovider=none'.

If you are going to use CTCP on a lossy connection that might have packets come back out of order, you might also want to enable RFC 1323 timestamps, unless you are on a very low bandwidth connection. You can do that by running 'netsh interface tcp set global timestamps=enabled'.

For a list of the global TCP settings under Vista (and Longhorn), launch a command prompt and then run 'netsh interface tcp show global'.

You could almost think of the tunable settings in 'netsh interface tcp' much like the tunable settings under /proc/net/ipv4 in Linux.

A good writeup on CTCP can be found here.

Information about the new TCP/IP stack in Vista/Longhorn can be found here.

For a real world example, with CTCP enabled, I can saturate a cellphone data connection (1xRTT or EVDO) and have smoother performance overall. I suspect I'd notice a bigger change if the connection was EVDO Rev A compared to EVDO Rev 0.

Who knew downtime would be measured in weeks instead of minutes?

Who knew that the server this site was previously hosted on would die the night before the Vista consumer launch?

Normally, downtime of this site would not matter much overall, except that this website was featured in the Detroit Free Press article on the consumer Vista launch! I had my 15 minutes of fame in the paper for 2007, but a dead web link on print.

The primary reason for the downtime was a massive hardware failure of the original server.

I had backups of the database and webpage from January 19th and earlier, which meant I was missing 2 blog entries.

I could either travel a couple hundred miles and perform hardware necromancy on the old server or I could exploit the internet and grab cached versions of my webpage. I chose to manually recreate the entries in the the database, based off of versions that were found on Google's cache of the site.

Sometimes you have to get creative to restore your "hobby website". It had to take the backseat for a while due to everything else going on lately.

I'll be posting a backlog of entries soon when things settle down a bit. We're now a 4 cat household too.

If you are testing/installing Forefront Client Security on XP, you need to install the filter rollup documented here.

It looks like the KB article hasn't been updated because it still says you have to call MS to get the hotfix, but you can actually download the hotfix from here.

As a nice side effect, you'll get an updated XP kernel too.

Some places have been suggesting to use 'enablecredsspsupport:i:0' as a way to avoid getting prompted for username and password on RDP connections. The side effect is that it also disables Network Level Authentication support in Vista and Longhorn, which is a bad thing.

A great post and FAQ about RDP 6.0 auth issues can be found here.

PCMCIA Compact Flash adapters won't cut it due to the interface limitations. Most laptops you will run Vista on come with a Cardbus port (or 2) and due to all the devices built into these laptops, 9 times out of 10, you never use the port. You can slap it into the laptop and forget that it is even there for the most part, except for the speed increase, ESPECIALLY if you are doing anything that would typically cause a SWAP FRENZY like running many virtual machines on a laptop.

USB keys are handy when they aren't too slow for ReadyBoost (remember, not all USB keys are created equal). The only downside is that they typically will stick out like a sore thumb drive.

I've had the best performance with formatting my Lexar Lightning 4GB stick with FAT16 with 64K clusters. Why? ReadyBoost.sfcache is just one big file and there is no need for all the features of FAT32 or NTFS. I'm still curious why they didn't do ReadyBoost at the block level instead of the file level.

Either way, one thing that most people do not know is that ReadyBoost compresses all the content and typically gets really good compression ratios. It is almost like "Stacker"-on-the-fly for virtual ram. Sort of.

Another trick, now that VMWare Workstation 6.0 supports USB 2.0 in guest devices: Dedicated ReadyBoost devices for your guest machines. I am still working on trying out that idea but it should make Vista guests and Longhorn guests run faster overall. You can also get around the limit of one ReadyBoost device overall this way.

2007 has been crazy busy but it is a good busy. Some bad things have happened already but I am hoping it isn't the shape of things to come.

#1. I spent New Years Eve chasing a mouse in the house with the cats which there are a few differing accounts on what actually happened:

My wife recounts that night like this:

"I have to say, bar none, this was THE best way to wake up to 2007. I'm still laughing at the girlish screams coming from behind the closed closet door, trying to imagine Aaron dancing about with this mouse jumping at his feet."

Here is the actual account of the events, which I've edited for her:

"I have to say, bar none, this was THE best way to wake up to 2007. I'm still in awe of the warrior battle cries coming from behind the closed closet door, trying to imagine Aaron crushing this mouse jumping at his feet. "

#2. I've been on the road a lot working on Vista training, Citrix training and in March, Exchange 2007 training.

#3. Somewhat related to #2, a coworker passed on a promo code for the 71-236 (70-236) beta Exchange 2007 Configuration certification test, which I took last Friday, while sandwiched between 2 onsites. I have been doing a lot of Exchange 2007 labs on my laptop lately so I am hoping that I passed the test. It means one less certification test to take when the final version comes out.

#4. The cats chewed through the the air pump for the fish tank which promptly emptied the 20 gallon tank into our living room. The fish didn't make it but thankfully the carpet did.

#5. We're working on adopting a white Maine Coon cat in the upcoming weeks.

#6. My mom broke her foot due to years of being on prednizone (most likely) so she is on a different medicine for her Lupus which makes her severely immunosuppressed which is not good with 2 grandkids around.

#7. Lots of other stuff I am sure I am forgetting.

I'm not a big fan of this. The strangest part of it all is that people recently went from having an AT+T branded cell phone on a Cingular network service, and now in the upcoming weeks, they will have a Cingular brnaded cell phone on an AT+T network service.

Someone on the SA forums summed it up best by saying, "Remember that part in Terminator 2 when the T-1000 was frozen and smashed apart, only to reform a few minutes later? Yeah, that pretty much describes the fall and rebirth of Ma Bell."

That is how I feel about it too. Of course, if this somehow means that FiOS will reach my house, my opinion will change but I doubt that will happen any time soon.

I found out about this house fire by accident. My parents have a lot of Ocicats that came from Sandy and Mike Wagner from Three Rivers. We've been down to their house many times and always saw a lot of cute kittens. Needless to say I was devastated to go to their webpage tonight to see that they lost their home and cats in a fire in October 2006.

The only thing I can find about it is a link on Mlive.

I'm pasting the info here so that maybe it will get some more donations. Our family will be donating to this fund and attempting to contact them shortly.

THREE RIVERS -- A special fund has been established for a Three Rivers family of four who narrowly escaped their burning home early Sunday.

Michael Wagner was attempting to rescue one of his two children at the burning home at 60170 Neaman Road in Lockport Township after he had been awakened by a family dog. Wagner suffered second- and third-degree burns over 60 percent of his body.

Wagner did not know his son had earlier exited the structure.

Wagner, 38, his wife, Sandy, 39, and two children, Colin, 10 and Luca, 6, all suffered smoke inhalation during the 3:10 a.m. blaze. Mike Wagner was airlifted to Bronson Methodist Hospital in Kalamazoo, where he was listed in critical condition.

Sandy and the two children were treated at Three Rivers Health and released.

Lockport-Fabius-Park Townships Fire Chief Scott Mericle said the blaze started in the living room. The cause had not been determined, and no estimate of the loss had been calculated.

Mericle said the State Fire Marshall's Office has been called to aid in the investigation. Firefighters, including units from Centreville, battled the blaze for about four hours before it could be contained.

A trust fund has been set up at the First National bank in downtown Three Rivers. For more information on how to help, call (269) 279-7476.

If you absolutely positively can't live without Powershell on Vista [like me], go here for some unofficial guidance on how to get it installed.

It is one of the last things I was missing from my XP setup on my laptop.

I don't have any Novell servers/networks handy to test this theory but in the newly released 4.91 SP3, there is mention of a "Passive Novell login" which uses the standard MSGINA to process logins. The biggest problem I had, to date, with trying to get Novell support working under Vista revolved around the NWGINA.

To enable passive mode login, set the following registry keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Novell\NWGINA]
“PassiveMode”=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Novell\Login]
“PassiveModeNDSLogin”=dword:00000001
“PassiveModeNDSLoginSilent”=dword:00000000 or 00000001
“PassiveModeNDSLoginRequired”=dword:00000000 or 00000001

Registry Setting Descriptions
PassiveMode: (0/1) default is 0
0 = normal mode
1 = passive mode

PassiveModeNDSLogin: (0/1) default is 0
0 = don't do Novell login
1 = do Novell login

PassiveModeNDSLoginSilent: (0/1) default is 0
0 = report Novell login errors
1 = don't report Novell login errors

PassiveModeNDSLoginRequired: (0/1) default is 0
0 = don't require Novell login
1 = require Novell login

If someone out there could force the install of this new version and enables PassiveMode, please let me know if that gives you Novell access. You will have to run any Novell scripts manually in PassiveMode and you might need to boot with signed driver checking disabled. Basically, hit [F8] when Vista is booting and disable signed driver checking.

Update: 4.91 will not work for sure, but there is a Novell client for Vista available now here.

From the beta newsgroups:

Changes since last Beta:

This build includes new features as well as key bug fixes as below,
. PXE boot support
. Installation is now supported on older platforms like Win 2K3 (std), Win XP(Home) etc
. Keyboard stuttering on laptops with 915 based chipsets is fixed
. Memory leak for folder sharing is fixed
. Audio stuttering inside Vista guest is fixed
. Fixes for DVD support
. LUA fixes
. Fixes for Virtual Machine Network Services Driver to bind to wireless cards
. Fix for installing Virtual Machine Network Services after host upgrade