Well, it’s finally weekend. That sure is a welcome change mind you.

This last week has been a pretty challenging one, starting with my talk with the bank, lots of stuff to do at work etc. Which immediately brings me to my tip for some of the sys-admins / IT-assistants and fellow System Engineers;

If you remove a server from your network only to replace it - with a new server with the new name, be sure to check your DNS, WINS AND your DHCP databases. Today I had one server that had been installed configured apart from the computername and the IP-address. So when I shutdown the old server and rename the new server I couldn’t connect to it anymore via RDP (the new - and renamed server) So I use the IP-address and RDP to it, do a nbtstat -RR and a nbtstat -c to check if it all went correctly. Then a ipconfig /flushdns followed by a ipconfig /registerdns. And still my trusty notebook resolves to the ol’ IP-address… Aroo?

So I check Active Directory, remove the old servername in both DNS and the Active Directory itself. Remove the WINS entry by hand and tombstone it (which then replicated to the other WINS Servers) Still resolved to the old IP-address. So I check WINS again, yup - entry was recreated and correct. Same for DNS and AD. Then I did the nbtstat / ipconfig on my notebook…. Still no go. So then in a moment of wisedom I checked the DHCP leases. Lo’ and behold there it was. Removed it, and voila! Resolves correctly.

PowerShell 

So all-in-all that was a good learning experience. I also recently have installed PowerShell on my own notebook and at home, and I must admit I like it. Eventhough the start-time leaves a bit to be desired - it is well worth it. The Findstr alone makes it worth it. For example, I can now do the following:

ipconfig /all|findstr Physical

Powershell will then ONLY display the lines containing the word Physical in it. Great stuff! I have however noted that it doesn’t work with dynamic stuff. So doing a;

ping -t 192.168.1.1|findstr Timed

Will not only show the timeouts. In fact it won’t show anything at all. However,  typing

ping 192.168.1.1|findstr from

Does work (note that no -t is included; as this keeps pinging a host untill terminated via CTRL+C or CTRL+Break) In case this all sparked your interest; it’s a free download (as in freedom ) from Microsoft.

Visual Studio 2005 Express

I also installed Visual Studio 2005 Express, and applied SP1 to it - and a hotfix as these are required for it to function on Windows Vista Ultimate. I hope to spend some time on it so that maybe I can learn a little ASP.NET. Yes I know that it’s ironic that my blog is in PHP while I am now posting about ASP.net but hey, the more languages one knows - the better right?  Microsoft has also opened up a site at MSDN for the beginning developer Wikid stuff! 

DELL

Well this week I found out that DELL no longer supplies the PERC5 with the PowerEdge 840 and 860. Which sucks becase the SAS model utilizes Write through policy which can not be changed; and some software does not take kindly to write-caching. Then again, the 840 and 860 ARE the budget models. I had a good chat with our account manager; which I’d like to thank for his patience and thorough assistance (which keeps me coming back as a customer of course ;)) and we have opted for then 860 (still) but will manually add the ADAPTEC 1220SA PCI-e SATA controller. This card does allow us to disable the write policy so that wil get us by at this time. However for future models I think that we will start looking towards the PowerEdge 1900 and 1950. Both good solutions, but unfortunately not my call

Windows Vista Ultimate Extra’s - but not for Ultimate alone

If you go over to the Windows Ultimate Extra’s site you’ll find a couple of backgrounds (direct link) Personally I like the Windows Ultimate Wallpaper - Strands - 4:3 but that’s just my opinion