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  Chewy Chong 1:20 am on April 26, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

  Every Port Used by a Windows Server (Grouped by the Services Provided) 

  How many times have you needed to put a Windows Server box in some firewall secured location (such as a DMZ) and spent a whole heck lot of time trying to figure out what holes should be placed in the firewall?  Let me guess… it did not work and you probably ended up rigging the firewall somehow.  You know exactly what I mean by ‘rigging’.

  Well, check out this excellent document provided by Microsoft.  It is a collection of possible services provided by the Server, which application protocol is used by the service, which network protocol is used by the application protocol and which ports are utilized.  Nice!

  Service overview and network port requirements for the Windows Server system
  http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;832017

   

   

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  Chewy Chong 1:40 am on April 20, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

  NTFS Architecture Limits 

  I saw a bit of interesting information floating around the limits of NTFS file system.  One of our other region’s customer is about to move a lot of files in and out of a NTFS volume.  They did some research and found this little gem:

  Description	Limit
  Maximum file size	Architecturally: 16 exabytes minus 1 KB (264 bytes minus 1 KB) Implementation: 16 terabytes minus 64 KB (244 bytes minus 64 KB)
  Maximum volume size	Architecturally: 264 clusters minus 1 cluster Implementation: 256 terabytes minus 64 KB ( 232 clusters minus 1 cluster)
  Files per volume	4,294,967,295 (2^32 minus 1 file)

  More information about NTFS can be found:

   

  How NTFS Works

  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/library/TechRef/8cc5891d-bf8e-4164-862d-dac5418c5948.mspx

   

   

   

   
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  Chewy Chong 4:20 am on April 5, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

  Email Notification for System Center Reporting Results in “Configuration Error” 

  My technology flavour for the month… Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005.  I’m helping a large local government organization implement MOM 2005 in their environment.  Things are going super well and the people here are lightning fast in responding and working with me.  This Australian government organization has their act more together than most private companies I’ve worked for.  Good on them.

   

  I guess I should first start by pointing out what ‘System Center’ is.  Microsoft’s direction is to integrate MOM with SMS into a single product called System Center.  In MOM 2005, the reporting bit is no longer ‘MOM Reporting’ but ‘System Center Reporting’.  This is one of the first steps of introducing the ‘System Center’ term.  Needless to say, that caused a bit of confusion with the guys here.

   

  The problems I just encountered occurred during the creation of a report subscription:

   

  Failure sending mail: The Report Server has encountered a configuration error; more details in the log files

   

  SQL Reporting Services store their reports in a ‘logfiles’ subdirectory of the application’s directory which… is a subdirectory of SQL Server (default).  Simply put, it should be something like:

   

              C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Reporting Services\LogFiles

   

  Anyhow, the log files did not tell me much.  After some investigation, this is a known bug in SQL Reporting Services. 

   

  FIX: Subscriptions that use the e-mail delivery method for distribution may not deliver the report successfully in SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services

  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842440/

   

  Fixed with a service pack:

   

  SQL Reporting Services Service Pack 1

  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=580febf7-2972-40e7-bccf-6cd90ac2f464&displaylang=en#filelist

   

  If you want the latest SQL Reporting Service Pack, visit this KB article:

   

  How to obtain the latest service pack for SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services

  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842440/

   

   
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  Chewy Chong 3:08 pm on April 2, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

  SDNUG Presentation Slides and Sample Code 

   

  Here are the materials presented at the March 2005 Sydney Deep .NET User Group.  A copy of the demo Virtual PC image can be requested by sending me an email.

   

  “The Many Uses of MIIS” Presentation

  http://firechewy.com/content/miisprezo/SDNUG Talk – MIIS.zip

   

  MIIS Provisioning Sample Code:

  http://firechewy.com/content/miisprezo/miis deprovisioning code.txt

   

  MIIS Deprovisioning Sample Code:

  http://firechewy.com/content/miisprezo/miis provisioning code.txt

   

  Again, thanks to Nick Wienholt (who organizes SDNUG) for giving me an opportunity to speak.  More information about SDNUG and their upcoming events can be found here:

   

  http://sdnug.org/

   
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  Chewy Chong 3:02 am on April 2, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

  PlateSpin’s P2V and V2V Virtualization Product for Microsoft Virtual Server (and the other guys) 

  I’m sure you already know about the Virtual Server Migration Toolkit (VSMT) from Microsoft.  Just incase… in short, this add-on allows you to virtualize a physical machine to a virtual one for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. 

   

  More info on VSMT here:

  http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/evaluation/vsmt.mspx

   

  Product works well but is a bit complex to get going.  VSMT is not really an out-of-the-box application but really a collection of scripts and processes for use with Windows 2003’s Automated Deployment Services (ADS).  ADS allows you to build a whole heck lot of bare metal systems remotely.  Think of it as ‘drag and drop’ build of servers.

   

  More info on ADS here:

  http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/ads.mspx

   

  So what am I saying?  VMST won’t be easy if you’re not familiar with ADS.  ADS is not easy either unless you’ve done some work with scripting server builds, Windows PE and PXE boot.  Oh yeah… ADS only works with Windows 2000 and 2003 servers.

   

  Well… I got rather excited when I heard a company claim they have a “100% automated server migration tool” which requires “no agents to install, no boot CDS” and works with “Windows and Linux OS”.  This I have to see.

   

  More info on PlateSpin:

  http://www.platespin.com/

   

  More info on this when I get my hands on it.

   
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  Chewy Chong 3:01 am on April 2, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

  Spam Causing Problems with Firechewy.com 

  I have been having problems posting to my blog due to something strange in my blog’s content.  Today was the first day I’ve actually had some time (and a fast link to the USA) to fix it.  I am strongly suspecting all the viagra and poker spam being attached to my early blog postings is causing the problem (possibly some strange characters).  Did a clean out of a bit of the spam and it fixed it right up.

  I have seen some interesting ways blogs are preventing bots from comment spamming including the “what text do you see in this picture” mechanism.  Will look into this and let you folks in on what I find.