Admin Arsenal Blog

I was watching an interesting video produced by Microsoft where a statistic jumped out at me. To date there have been 2,278 Windows 7 compatible logo applications submitted, a number which is 40% higher than logo apps under Vista.

This is great news for businesses who will rely on some of the over 10,000 commercial applications that run on Windows 7.

Sometimes you miss the most useful features of a program for a long time just because, well... you're human. That's how it was with me and the Windows command line pushd & popd commands.

It was many years into their existence before I heard of them, and I was ecstatic. I was constantly writing batch files for building and deploying my projects and it involved a lot of switching between directories. These commands really were a godsend.

The way they work is you call pushd to change a directory (like you would use cd). Then, you would later call popd to return to the directory where you had called pushd. These can be nested, so that you can pop a bunch of directories off in the order that they were pushed. Push and pop come from the programming terms for working with a stack, which is how these commands work. They're like working with a stack of directories, where you push one onto the top and then pop it off revealing the one below to be popped off itself.

It turned annoying commands like this:
cd SetupLib\bin\x86\Release
_do  some stuff_
cd ..\..\..\
into this
pushd SetupLib\bin\x86\Release
_do some stuff_
popd
All those little .. identifiers are prone to bugs, especially when the directory structure changes, trying to remember how many you need.

Now, if only a batch file would return to the original directory when you cancel in the middle (like they typically do on UNIX) then I'd be a really happy camper.

    Photo by EverJean

Last week I was watching RiffTrax (if you're a geek who hasn't yet discovered them, you owe it to yourself to check them out.) The particular RiffTrax I was watching was the classic, Gene Wilder version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It brought back a number of childhood memories, mostly painful ones.

When I was about 8 or 9 I watched this show with my family on T.V. and it scared the living hell out of me. It wasn't the Oompa Loompas, though they did happen to traumatize another friend of mine in his childhood. No, it was the children disappearing from the tour group one at a time. For some reason I thought the children were dying or being permanently disfigured. When the little Gloop boy got sucked up into the chocolate tube I was certain he was being chopped up and packaged in candy bars. Veruca Salt and her dad were undoubtedly burned up in the incinerator (though this was left a little ambiguous, they may have been.)

Watching the movie now as an adult I can see how silly that was. It was made very clear that they weren't dying, but it would have been nice if the movie ended like the book with the children and their parents emerging from the factory (relatively) unharmed. And even if the effects to them were permanent, it's satirical fiction and not something to be afraid of. It got me thinking about how different things look through someone else's eyes. It's not possible for me to look through my own childhood eyes and see why I was so scared. I can scratch the surface and begin to see what was scary at an intellectual level, but I've changed so much in the intervening years that all I can wonder is "what in Wonka's name was I thinking?"

This relates to us as system administrators in the way that we don't have the eyes of our users. Things like mysterious error messages, menus that change suddenly, and network connection properties are just normal things to us, but to non-specialists these things can be very unnerving. When clicking on a button can turn you into a giant blueberry, even if the IT staff's magic incantations can bring you back, you're still not going to be working with much confidence.

The fact of the matter is that we will never be able to see computers as our users' see them.  They have been permanently changed in our psyche (or, more accurately, our psyches have been permanently altered to understand and not fear them.) It is why we sometimes end up looking like Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy. There's just a big disconnect and the fault isn't the users', but ours for not understanding how they see technology. Unfortunately, we can't actually use their eyes, all we can do is simulate them. Good sys admins are able to simulate them better.

Next time a user is freaked out by a missing file, try to remember the skinny kid sitting in front of the 18-inch T.V. worried that little (very little) Mike Teevee is going to have to spend the rest of his life in his mother's purse.

    Photo by myuibe

Some of our clients are using only laptops while others are clinging to the desktop PC. Here are some reasons to consider the laptop strategy.

7. Mobility - Beyond the obvious on-the-road aspect, the mobility makes it easier for users to group together for impromptu meetings at someone elses workspace not to mention conference rooms.

6. Fewer wires - Many have lived with the tangled wires for so long that they cannot imagine a workspace without them. It is achievable, and you don't have to move to Macs to get there.

5. Battery life improvements - True, you want to drain your battery occasionally, however battery strength will keep you going through approx. 2,000 charges. For real mobile users a battery swap during the life of the laptop shouldn't be a show stopper.

4. Mobile broadband cards - Work on the subway, train, bus, or carpool. With air cards from Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T, your company WAN is almost always within reach.

3. More floor space  - Once you have this space cleared your users will wonder how they ever lived with the obstructions, and your janitorial help will love it too. No more partial vacuuming under desks for fear of bumping into your systems.

2. Hard drive & Memory upgrades - Probably the only upgrade that you'll need to make to your laptop will be hard drive or memory. These are ridiculously easy to swap out with most brands.

1. Same look 'n feel as desktop - docking stations make it easy to continue your fat keyboard and huge monitor while at home/work.

    Photo by striatic

Since I had to rebuild my workstation I decided now was a good time to rebuild my development server with Windows Server 2008. The main purpose of the server is to run virtual machines for testing, so I was very interested to try out Microsoft's Hyper-V (short forHypervisor.) Though I must say that I just don't understand the Hypervisor name. I know it dates way back to mainframe days, but does it in anyway conjure up an image of what it does? It sounds more like something the accounting department would use. But I digress...

I had been using VMWare Workstation for this purpose, which is a nice product but has some drawbacks when running on a server. It can't run in the background like the much more expensive VMWare server products, so in order to work with virtual machines I had to be logged into the console. It's only a minor inconvenience for me, though, since the machines are only for testing. A production environment wouldn't want to deal with it.

So, I was interested in trying out Hyper-V, which is based on technology Microsoft got with their purchase of Virtual PC a few years ago. It not only allows the virtual machines to start and stop with the host computer automatically, but it allows access to the machines using Server Manager on another computer. I wasn't able to get it running on my release candidate of Windows 7, but that's okay, I'm used to using Remote Desktop for this type of thing.

It's clearly designed to run a server farm of virtual machines instead of run a collection of workstations, though. VMWare has a lot more options for dealing with various types of virtual hardware and guest operating systems. For example, it's possible to install Vista but there are some features missing if Vista isn't patched to at least Service Pack 1. VMWare works just fine with unpatched Vista, so in that regard it works better for my testing usage. This wouldn't be a problem for most production uses of Hyper-V, though.

I didn't bother gathering any benchmark data, but it does seem to feel a bit faster to me. This could be the difference between Server 2003 and Server 2008 for the host, though, so I won't read much into it. It is certainly nice to have it start and stop virtual machines automatically, since rebooting is something I need to do quite a bit.

I'll be keeping my VMWare handy for those times I need to test something that isn't supported by Hyper-V, but for the most part I'm going to stick with it. It's got about 90% of what I need. If I had a need to run a production environment of virtual machines, I would certainly give it a look.

    Photo by robstephaustralia

Michael Pietroforte at 4sysops has done us all a favor by collating information about the sneak peeks into Office 2010. The videos are particularly informative. I'm one of those people who gets tingly looking at "what's new" lists (you know, a nerd.) I was particularly interested in the Access and Excel videos, since I use them quite a bit.

The information Microsoft has released so far is still a bit light on the the "sys admin" perspective, but it's still nice to see anyway.

    Photo by Michel Fillion

It's vacation time for the Anderson clan. My brother and his family will be spending three weeks with us (doesn't telecommuting rock?). While setting up his workspace and lab I was a little surprised to see that he packed his personal desktop with his two work laptops. The desktop is on its last legs and he plans on replacing it with a new laptop when it goes off with the elephants to die.

It got me thinking about who among us are still using desktops. My wife and I abandoned desktops in 2004 and we've never looked back. We currently have seven laptops in our family, four personal and three for my company. (OK, I also maintain an Admin Arsenal virtual lab in my house, which runs off of Mac Minis, but even these are a smaller foot print than laptops.)

On the professional side I see some of our clients who have moved almost entirely to laptops. Once considered a prize for the traveling few, now laptops are becoming the norm. With processing and storage power to rival their desktop counterparts it's becoming an attractive option for companies.

Even if your employees will never need to work from home or travel, using the laptop will reduce footprint on desks and on the ground.

John Morris from ZDNet recently discussed this very topic. Gizmodo John Hermann provides a pretty good comparison chart for pros/cons of laptop vs. desktop. If you're a hardcore developer or a process intensive graphic designer you may want to stay the course with beefed up desktops, while others may want to test the laptop waters.

It's interesting to see the new products being announced. You hear surprisingly little from the desktop world these days. It seems that all the cool engineering is steered in the other direction.

Signs of things to come.

If you have delayed getting into PowerShell, or if you have installed it but only piddled around a little, then please take note.

There is a PowerShell quick start guide available from Robert Sheldon. It provides six lessons which all build upon each other to get you comfortable using the tool and on the path to incorporating it into your daily tasks.

I recommend it for the beginner (don't worry, there are a lot experienced Windows admins who are new to this type of administration). The book is a bargain US$15.95 and is a quick read. It is provided as a .pdf file.

Unix-turned-Windows admins have waited a long time for a powerful cmd tool like PowerShell. Microsoft has delivered, however like anything worthwhile, Windows admins will need to meet Microsoft halfway and really learn the usefulness of this tool.

Remember, if you are repeatedly performing tasks, then automation is up your alley. PowerShell will help you achieve this.

In prepping for Windows 7 I decided to take another look at Microsoft's USMT (User State Migration Tool) to see if it was up to the task of getting users migrated from XP to Windows 7 in fairly short order.

The USMT has been around for awhile and is available from the Automated Installation Kit (AIK).

There is a so-so video available from Microsoft's Windows 7 page which walks you through using the USMT. It seems fairly simplistic and would probably work for small-to-medium organizations. Note, this is used to migrate user state data only, not for deploying images of Windows 7.