So, today is the day that the Windows 7 was released to the public.  If you haven’t already, I highly recommend giving it a shot!

I recently signed up for the Windows 7 Beta Exam, 71-680, which pretty much forced my hand to install Windows 7.  In fact, I went as far as to completely abandon my normal day to day machine, and make Windows 7 my primary workstation.

So far, I’m liking what I’m seeing!  I was able to download the MSDN version on April 30th, so I’ve only had a few days to evaluate the product.  But the buzz phrase everyone seems to be using is “Vista Done Right”, and I tend to agree.  I have to warn you, the task bar will come as a major shock.  And when I was building a Windows 2008 R2 Server lab, one of the first things I did was get rid of the new taskbar, and make it work like older version of Windows.  However, since I’m going to be taking the Windows 7 exam, I’m really approaching Windows 7 as a full blown end user, and enabling and evaluating all of the features with an open mind, but also with the goal of being exam ready.

The OS feels very snappy and polished, and like I mentioned above, the new taskbar is really growing on me.  Expect a video demonstration as soon as I can get around to it.  (Disclaimer:  I’m in the process of completely re-landscaping my house, building a new storage server, re-purposing my old machine as a Hyper-V box, studying for the beta exam, and the CCNA exam, plus I have to get my network completely up and running before Verizon shows up this Saturday to install FIOS)

Here is the design of the new network for the house, which will use several Cisco Switches and routers. And this is just functional portion of the network. I'll be adding a router with a serial WAN link to another router will act as my "lab" portion of the network. :)

CCNA, Cisco, Hyper-V, MSDN, Video, Windows 7

So it’s been a few weeks since I’ve updated the site. I was finally able to crawl out from under this economy and find some work. First of all, a big thank you to a friend of mine that hooked me up with some consulting work. I really thought this was going to get me through a couple more months of job searching. But then, I got a full time job offer. And then, I got another consulting gig. And THEN, I got ANOTHER consulting gig! Needles to say, I’m quite busty.

In addition to that, I’m still trying to find the time to work on the yard, and study for my CCNA. In fact I just purchased my first Cisco router! It’s a SOHO 817W with Advanced IP Services. Basically this thing does just about every single thing the big boys do, just on a smaller scale.

It’s got:

• Switching with VLANs
• WLAN 802.11b/g
• Stateful Inspection Firewall
• IPSec VPNs
• Intrusion Prevention
•  RIP, OSPF, etc…
• Spanning Tree

And the list just goes on and on…  Basically everything I need to study for the CCNA!

Check it out yourself!

 So anyways, hopefully I’ll get caught up and can work on some more tutorial videos.  In fact, I actually have several things I’d like to share.  Maybe I’ll make a few videos setting up the 871W  :)

871W, CCNA, Cisco, jobs, Video

I wasn’t very happy with the quality of my last video. I had fun making it, just didn’t like the way Youtube compressed it.
I’m experimenting with trying to host my own videos locally and we’ll see how this turns out. Hopefully the screen text will be much sharper.

The big picture is that I’m wanting to play with the failover and nlb capabilities of Windows Server 2008. I currently have my Hyper-V box online, as well as a domain controller for the march.local domain. I also have a 2nd physical box that I dumped every spare IDE drive I could find lying around into, and installed an opersoure iSCSI Target called OpenFiler. This is really my first time playing with iSCSI or a linux based SMB file server, so it’s been a unique learning experience.

I had already installed Openfiler, and after a little tinkering, I got kerberos authentication working and joined the box to the domain. At that point I brought up my 3rd Windows 2008 server and got an itch to play with Windows Deployment Services. It was the one thing I didn’t experiment with live while studying for the Windows 2008 Server exams. As I was walking through the wizard it prompted me for a place to store all of my images, and rather than creating another .VHD file to store them on a 2nd drive locally, I opted to go for the iSCSI option.

So here is a quick video on setting up iSCSI.

So since setting up iSCSI, I’ve got WDS working. I was able to use a boot.wim to PXE boot a Virtual machine with an attached Legacy adapter and install Windows 2008. After I got the new OS up and running, configured and patched. I was able to then create a capture image on the WDS server, run SYSPREP on the base OS, and PXE boot the capture image to create a new Install image to be used for future deployments. With that said, I will not be deploying using the image I just created.

It was a painfully slow process pulling the image from the iSCSI storage. No doubt because I have 3 Virtual machines all attached to the same physical network adapter, which is also being used to direct the iSCSI traffic. *UPDATE HERE* I may try putting Netmon on the Parent OS and see if I can monitor the network traffic and see exactly how bad the bottle neck is. It also may have something to do with the legacy network adapter booting at fast ethernet speeds, and not properly negotiating it’s duplex settings, since the physical network is all gigabit. I’m not completely clear on how a Virtual Switch would handle that. Getting the network properly segmented is definitely on my to-do list. I have 4 physical adapters in the box, so if I had another switch, or even a layer 2 switch, I would be able to properly subnet my network out.

So, for the future builds, it’s much easier to just run SYSPREP with the shutdown command, and then copy and rename the .VHD file 5 more times.

Oh, and one last note on Windows Deployment Services. I had my server set to only accept known clients, which means you have to pre-stage the machines in Active Directory. The directions to do this are:

To prestage client computers

Yeah, ummmmm, no next button here......

Hyper-V, iSCSI, NLB, Openfiler, Video, wds, Windows Deployment Services

So today the topic came up about how many website you can run on a single NIC card with out using host headers. My thought was “as many as you want!”. But it was implied that there was a limit as to the number of addresses that could be assigned to a single NIC. So, when I got home, I decided to test it out. Now, I have a little spoiler here that is revealed towards the end of the video. The conversation we were having at the time was related to NT4, and my test below was done on Windows 2003, IIS6.

But, that’s ok. It gave me something to focus in on for awhile and I had fun doing it. I was just getting ready to blow this box away since I had already used it for some other testing and the Eval license is like 7 days from requiring activation.

I got an email asking about the validity of certain hosts.
Namely whether or not 10.10.1.255 and 10.10.2.0 where valid IP addresses. When dealing with a Class C range, you won’t see hosts with the last octet of .0 or .255, because those are the network and broadcast addresses. However, when dealing with class B or class A addresses, these addresses become completely valid.

You only drop the 1st and last host of any network range. In the above example, the Network is 10.10.0.0 and the broadcast address is 10.10.255.255, so all IP addresses in between are completely valid to use. It feels very odd typing in an address of 10.10.2.0, but I assure you, it’s a valid address, as is 10.10.1.255.
Hope that clears things up.

IIS, Video, Websites