Windows 7 Profile Woes

Back in the days of good old Windows XP there was three ways of assigning a profile to your users:

1. Roaming Profiles


2. Mandatory Profiles


3. A Default Profile stored in NETLOGON

I always chose to use the shared Default profile method but when changing to Windows 7, wiered things started to happen...

Every time a user logged on, they would receive a notification balloon informing them that they had been logged on with a temporary profile and accompanied by a message that my users found quite scary since it mentioned that none of their work would be saved! Whilst this was happening I was also experiencing a problem where folder re-direction would fail every other time that a user logged into a machine. This was particularly annoying!

So where to start?

I decided that the temporary profile warning must be because of using the default profile method above. The obvious thing to do then was switch to a different method with mandatory profiles being the most obvious. However, Microsoft decided that, as of Vista, it would make the production of mandatory profiles a pain in the arse. To find out how bad it is, see the Technet guide.

I spent a whole day building a nice fresh Windows 7 virtual machine so that I could create the mandatory profile. I followed the instructions to the letter only to have it not work! Onto roaming profiles then.

It was now time to experience a roaming profile problem. Despite activating a roaming profile for a user, I was still receiving the temporary profile warning and the profile directory did not contain anything. It trned out that there was some old profile information being left somewhere. To delete this old data I discovered a VBScript that basically does the same job as delprof.exe (which doesn't work for Vista or Windows 7).

Next it was onto the randomness of the folder re-direction failing to apply every other time somebody logged on. I eventually found an event log entry that mentioned that the 'logon optimization policy' was preventing folder-redirection from working. That's right... Windows optomized the logon by turning all the useful stuff off!

I eventually discovered that this was to do with a change in the way Windows performs 'asynchronous processing and logon optomization'. Long story short... enabling the 'always wait for the network at computer startup and logon' GPO setting immediately cured the problem!

So to summarise... turn on roaming profiles and enable the 'always wait for the network at computer startup and logon' GPO and your life will be much easier!

Migrating from Zimbra to Exchange 2010

Some time ago I switched from using Exchange 2003 to Zimbra to try to reduce the TCO of the school's messaging services. Switching to Zimbra was painless with a handy little tool to copy all the users and their data across.

After several years of admirable service, the time has come to switch back to Exchange so that we can exploit some of its more advanced features and integrate it with our forthcoming OCS implementation. The problem is... how do you migrate all the data to Exchange?

No simple tool seems to exist for the purpose and, short of opening each mailbox and manually copying the mail, I was struggling to find an easy solution.

I stumbled across a post on EduGeek.net where somebody was suffering a similar problem and it gave me two solutions to my dilemma:

1. Set up an Exchange 2007 server and use Microsoft Transporter Suite for Internet Mailboxes to migrate the mailboxes to Exchange 2007. After this the mailboxes could be migrated to Exchange 2010.


2. Use IMAPCopy to copy straight to Exchange 2010.

I obviously picked option number two because the first option seemed like hard work.

The whole process seemed to work quite well although I have since discovered that some mail was 'lost' during the bigger batches so it is worth writing the output to a file and double checking it for error messages. You should also be warned that it's not the quickest process in the world and attempting to run multiple copies of IMAPCopy at once simply doesn't work!

My poor neglected blog

Is it really that long since I last posted on my blog?!? OMG!

It has been super busy at work since November... trying to get things prepared for the Windows 7 and server 2008 R2 rollout. With the little darlings back on Tuesday, I've nearly managed to get everything sorted and I should have a few minutes spare to update my blog.

Watch out for a post about profile pitfalls very soon!

Pocket Scrobbling!

Last.fm is something I've been trying to use to find new music. It's a massive web application that analyses your listening tastes and connects you with bands you may not have heard of and with people with similar tastes to you.

A part of the Last.fm experience is the 'Scrobbler'. It basically sits there while you listen to music and sends information to your Last.fm profile - it only sends deatails of tracks that you listen to a certain percentage of though so that you can skip through the rubbish.

Anyway, I primarily listen to music on my phone (HTC Touch Pro2), so these haven't been getting 'scrobbled'. Today I stumbled across an app though... the 'Pocket Scrobbler'.

The Pocket Scrobbler will work offline too and only send data when you want it too. Brilliant!

Check it out at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pocketscrobbler/ - I decided to try the 1.8 beta... TinyURL is http://tinyurl.com/l3qrxw if you want to easily download it onto your device.

HTC Touch Pro2

So I got myself a second hand Touch Pro and it's been AMAZING. It does everything you want and more with ease. Plus the keyboard made SMS and email a pleasure.

I recently had the opportunity to swap it for a Touch Pro2. I knew it would be nicer but it's INCREDIBLE!

The phone is quicker, smoother and generally easier to use. The bigger screen is amazing and the battery life is far superior. Hell, even the audio from it is better.

I do have one criticism mind... the keyboard isn't as good. The keys are now spaced apart and are bigger - hence less of them. I really think that the old layout should have been kept... it was perfect after all ;-)

Blogtastic Birthday Gift

Caroline and Gary gave me a lovely birthday present that was crying out to be blogged! :-D

Picasa and Picasa Web Albums

I decided last night (whilst we performed miserably in the pub quiz) that I would post a few of my photographs to the web for all to admire.

The easiest way to do this was to use Picasa (which I already use to organise my pictures) which allows easy upload to Picasa Web Albums. After a few clicks, the job was done.

I've even added a couple of albums on the right hand side for you to enjoy if you can't be bothered bowsing all the way to http://picasaweb.google.com/ric.charlton.

Touching the music

As some might be aware, my local recently closed - we're still not 100% sure why. For this reason, I've had to find another and I had a choice of two - The Windill Tavern near Clifton and The Hand and Dagger near Treales. I chose the Windmill because it's easier to get to while the weather is a bit rubbish.

The Windmill is about a mile from my house and it takes me roughly 15 minutes to walk there :-( This is about 14.5 minutes longer than it took to get to the club!

To make my walk slightly more bearable, I decided I would listen to some music. The obvious choice was to use my phone. I have a 1GB microSD card which I chuck a load of albums onto in MP3 and WMA format. The sound quality is OK. The only problem was that the earphones that come with the Touch Pro are pathetic to say the least. If you imagine a pair of headphones without the headband, you wouldn't be far off the earphones - they're huge and don't even fit in my ears!!!

The Toouch Pro only has a slightly mangled mini-USB connector or everything to plug in to so the first thing I needed was an adapter. Flea-bay to the rescue and £2.50 (inc. postage) later and I could now plug a 3.5mm jack into my phone. Bargain!

Then to choose the earphones. Only one choice really... the Sennheiser CX-range. Unbelievably I managed to find a set of CX-500 earphones for a meagre £17.50 delivered (another Flea-bay bargain - new and in the box!). Considering these earphones are £60 at Richer Sounds it's amazing!

I've been using the combination of the adapter and earphones for about a week now. It's brilliant. The earphones produce excellent sound... nice and basey and excellent top too. Background noise is irradicated too - possibly not a good thing when you're walking but as long as you're careful....

Falling into the mobile Internet trap

Lately I have been increasingly using my phone for mobile Internet goodness.... it was just getting to be a pain using my LG Secret.

I spotted a bargain-priced HTC Touch Pro on flea-bay and decided to have a punt... £250 later I had a nearly new Touch Pro with car kit and a PAYT SIM (which I have no use for).

The first thing I did was use the new Google Mobile Sync Beta to get all my contact details on my phone. This was dead easy and my phone was soon set up to sync the contacts and calendar!

Next came email... very important! Again, this was super easy to setup and I was soon sending and receiving mail.

Next for mobile blogging. I use Blogger (another great Google App!) and decided to use the Mail2Blogger function rather than the 'other' way of working Blogger simply because it made the most sense to me. An example is the post of my tidy office below ;-)

The next thing I needed was an IM client but I needed it to be compatible with XMPP (for the EduGeek.net chat server) and MSN. Ideally I wanted Pidgin for Windows Mobile but this doesn't exist :'( After some Googling and seeing some rubbish apps, I stumbled across Palringo which seems to do the trick quite nicely. My only criticism is the random noise it makes when it receives a message - although this is probably configurable if I really looked into it!

Finally... a few important favourites for Opera Mobile... my work email uses Zimbra which has a mobile web interface and of course EduGeek.net has a mobile interface which can be easily accessed through http://edugeek.mobi.

Finding Fiji

I managed to find a download of Fiji (aka the Microsoft Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008 - or whatever it is called this week!). Why did I go looking for this?

Without this pack, Vista Media Center doesn't 'do' interactive ('Red Button') content on digital channels and this is a feature I happened to want at the time so that I could watch the snooker. Associated with this is teletext support.

I'm not sure if the other features will be of much use (different file format for TV recordings and DVB-S support) but the updated guide looks a little nicer - although they have annoying moved the clock but I'll get used to that - and it takes less clicks to set up the tuners.

The Citrix XenServer 5 Upgrade

Ever since the release day of XenServer 5, I have been trying to upgrade my two hosts. This should have been a painless task taking less than an hour.

My first problem was that the documented uprade method was wrong... rather than putting a host into maintenance mode, all the VMs had to be moved to a pool member from the pool master and then the pool master had to be upgraded first.

The problem I then hit was that one of my storage repositories (SRs) would not reconnect. The full account is documented here but basically, the XenServer hosts decided that the LUN was wrong.

I have now got that fixed and it's all running smoothly. I activated the new HA features - how easy? Clickity click and it was done!

The new performance monitoring is amazing and everything seems good.

Time to virtualise some more servers I think ;-)

Acer Aspire One

I recently took Currys of all places up on one of their special offers. I'd been thinking of buying an Acer Aspire One netbook and then I spotted the Currys offer - basically a VAT free One!

It's fantastic! I tought that the Asus EeePC was pretty great but I never liked the screen size on the 701 and the other models are way too expensive IMHO.

The One beats the Asus EeePC 701 hands down. The screen rocks (you can see full width web pages - see t gallery below for an example). I don't even mind the oddly-placed touchpad buttons - the Eee's 'rocker-style' buttons get rather annoying when you keep having to jab at it.

The keyboard on the One is OK to use too. I've typed this blog entry on it and my fingers hit every key - the Asus' miniature keys are just too small for my fingers. Considering the larger keyboard and screen, the pictures also show that the One is only marginally bigger - in fact closed it is actually thinner!

Anyway, I've pimped mine a little bit - installed some more apps, tweaked the menus, added teh 3D Compiz effects...

I'll probably publish some guidelines soon for further pimping. For now, enjoy the gallery ;-)

Acer Aspire One Gallery

2009 A True Story

On my travels about the Internet, I stumbled across a series of short films on YouTube.

2009 A True Story can be found at http://www.youtube.com/user/2009atruestory and it chronicles the events after some kind of terrorist attack. It's pretty dark but all the better for it!

Pimping the EeePC

I have been loaned an Asus EeePC 4G (boosted to 1GB RAM) so that I can experiment with it to aid in the deployment of a load of them for a Lancashire schools project.

I have also added some ideas for ways to 'pimp' the EeePC... my idea being that you could teach kids to hack the configs and generally 'geek it up'.

In keeping with the open/free nature of these I decided to share some of my findings on the EduGeek Wiki too. Check it out at http://www.edugeek.net/wiki/index.php/EeePC_-_Linux_OS - I cannot take credit for it all mind.

Mobile Google Mail

This is probably nothing new but I've just discovered the wonders of mobile gMail. :-)

I have an LG Secret on Vodafone and all I did was go to http://m.google.com/mail and it took me to a page where I could download a little J2ME gubbin. Once installed (in the Games folder by default for some reason) this gives an even quicker way of managing your gMail account than through the standard mobile interface!

I now just need to find a way of making my gMail-hosted EduGeek email work as easily ;-)

Handy iGoogle gubbin

Just found a handy widgetty-thing for iGoogle that allows you to quickly post a blog entry (e.g. this one).

Sorry Vista... It's turned out well now

It turns out that Vista hadn't shafted my PC after all... the rubbish Western Digital hard disk (that I had previously stolen from a Dell) had died in a major fashion. Being the system disk, this prevented any OS booting :-(

The only upside from doing this is that it forced me to buy a NAS - I got a bargain 750GB Lacie NAS (rackmount) for £160!!! I have put the Samsung Spinpoint from my external caddy into the media centre and installed MCE 2005 (yeas I finally found the disk).

I haven't quite finished re-instlaling eerything but it seems to be working like new again. The lack of Vista bloatedness is making it fly too!

Bloody Vista!

Apart from deciding to go for x64 which caused a whole load of its own issues, Windows last night decided it was time for some updates and the obligitory reboot.

Very kindly of course, Windows waited until the middle of the night to do this, thus waking me in the early hours of the morning when the black screen with bright white writing appeared to inform me that my registry was stuffed. I duly turned off the computer and went back to sleep.

I returned home from work today thinking I would fix the problem. Tried booting 'Last known good configuration' and tried booting 'Safe Mode' but received the same error message over and over.

I went for a hunt around for my Vista media. After a good 15 minutes of searching, I found the disk and booted off it, selecting the repair option. Apparently my system volume had bad sectors. I then restarted my computer and exactly the same problem occurred!

So I booted off the disc again and again it told me that it had to repair my system volume and told me to wait... restart... same again!

Around I go again - note that the process of booting from the DVD takes a while... especially if you forget to press a key when prompted! - and after a couple more attempts and the advanced CLI that I opened up to run chkdsk /F for myself, it eventually tries to fix the registry.

Same message again! I'm starting to get a little annoyed by this point but I persevered to no avail.

My computer is now reinstalling Windows in the faint hope that I might be able to resolve the problem and then perform not too many tasks to get my computer working 'properly' again... at least this might fix my problem with Windows only using one of the tuners in my dual-DVBT card!

Flexing

My broadband connection through Eclipse (link on the right), allows me to 'flex' the speed up temporarily. Although I know that my line is pretty poor I thought I'd perform a little experiment and given that an hour of flexing to 2Mbit is only 5p at the moment it will hardly break the bank!

I chose Speedtest.net to perform the tests and from there I used the Maidenhead and Dublin servers to test against.

The results were (download/upload):

• Standard speed to Maidenhead = 544kbps/528kbps
• Standard speed to Dublin = 619kbps/528kbps
• Flexed speed to Maidenhead = 692kbps/527kbps
• Flexed speed to Dublin = 652kbps/530kbps

My conclusion from this little test is that my line could handle a little more speed but it is hardly worth the effort (or money) realistically.

If I lived in an area with better lines, nearer to an exchange, this model would be great because you could just flex up when you need to download a big file. I wouldn't be surprised if some people could double their connection speed for that 5p! For me, unless BT get their arses into gear and sort out their infrastructure, I don't think that there is much point in me flexing again.

ADSL Speeds

Today I thought that I would spend some time seeing what sort of speed I actually get on my ADSL line - those of you that know me will be aware of my living out in the sticks and so being limited to an appauling speed :-(

Anyway, as long as I am getting my full 512kbps I'm happy. So off I go to www.speedtest.com and run a few tests. A representative result of my tests to different servers in the UK and overseas gave the following result:

I then decided to run some more tests...

www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk - 629kbps/531kbps

www.kbps.co.uk - 530kbps/-kbps

From my limited experiment, I can see that the results vary quite a bit but I can pretty safely say that I am getting around 600kbps download and 530kbps upload which IMHO is pretty good for a line tat supposedly is only good for 512kbps ADSL. I particularly like the upload speed that Eclipse Internet gives me :-D