Your iPhone has a virus? Well it’s your fault

Monday, November 9th, 2009

So anyone who has hacked their iPhone now finds it open to attack. There is one word to describe this – “excellent”. I am extremely pleased that this has come about. I am delighted that people who have hacked their iPhone are now under attack. (more…)

No Windows 7 drivers turn Dell M1330 into a doorstop

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

At last year’s PDC (Professional Developers Conference), Microsoft handed out shiny new laptops preloaded with the then-new build of Windows 7 to the press corps. It ensured that no-one would get hung-up on installation issues, because each machine was ready to go. Plus it gave the press a machine each to try the various beta builds as it progressed.

I confess that mine stayed in its bag, because I preferred to test both in virtual machines and on my own known hardware. But over the weekend, I was tempted to unpack the laptop and try it with final Windows 7 code.

The laptop is pretty decent — a Dell XPS M1330 with a big battery, 4GB of ram and a decent hard disk. Quite a good workhorse, I think you would agree.

So this morning, in went the Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit DVD. Naturally, I decided to wipe the hard disk and start again from scratch. Once the install was done, there was a bunch of things to download from the Microsoft website via the Windows Update service.

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Windows 7: the licensing mess continues

Monday, October 19th, 2009

There’s a fabulous new document on Microsoft TechNet entitled “The 10 Things to Do First for Windows 7″, which is an excellent checklist on what you need to think about doing in your organisation before you move to Windows 7.

I was particularly thrilled to read “Section 3: Plow through licensing”.

Now maybe I am just being a stick-in-the-mud, and I accept it is a Monday morning and I have a headache, but my headache is made worse by reading this:

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The perils of auto-patching

Friday, October 16th, 2009

I have a rackmounted server in a data center some 50 miles away from me in Huntingdon. It’s a lights-out operation, and I can’t remember the last time I visited the server in person. Everything just works through Terminal Services.

The server has been humming along quite happily for a number of years, which is why it’s running Server 2003 and Exchange 2003 – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, sez I.

With such a remote server, you have a hard choice to make – do you set it to auto-update when Microsoft issues new patches, or do you bring them down to a local machine, check them out and then apply them yourself, preferably waiting a few days to see if others have problems?

Well, I would always advocate a managed patch implementation for a local network – it can dramatically reduce the download of updates to multiple identical machines, and gives you, the sysadmin, control over when updates are applied. This can be critically important to the business workflow, of course.
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The shame of Microsoft’s Media Center EULA

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

For reasons too boring to relate, I just had to fire up a Windows Media Center installation on an HP touchscreen device – the one that comes with every bell and whistle, and is actually quite a nice box.

In going through the TV setup for a DVB-T TV tuner which is built into the device, you get to this glorious licence screen. There are a half-dozen lines of text in that box, and then sixty-nine, yes SIXTY-NINE pages to scroll through. It’s 67 pages if you maximise the window to full screen on this large, high-res display. (more…)

Making sense of Microsoft’s downgrade rights

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Trying to work out Microsoft’s licensing policies is enough to make a grown man (or woman) cry. You always seem to be in a maze of twisty passages, all alike, and it’s hard to know whether what you are doing is actually legally correct.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Microsoft will not understand the pain and cost it imposes on its customers until it actually has to run software licensing internally. I accept that the development groups can be let off, because they are constantly installing and uninstalling beta versions of their software. Or running up the Serbo Croation version to check a typo. But the marketing arms of Microsoft have absolutely no excuses - they should run licensing and pay internally in exactly the same way that we do. If that happened, then I predict there would be massive simplication within months.

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Why I get faster connections in the West Indies than Suffolk

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

My tale of woe of ADSL Max lines rumbles on. “Max” appears to mean “maximum grief” – last week, I had five different engineers visit to poke at one or the other of my pair of ADSL connections.

Lots of hmm and humpf and hmmmm resulted. At the end of the day, the fault appears to be diagnosed as being between the exchange and the green box in the village. BT’s response was to offer me a choice – accept this new slower-than-a-modem speed as being “acceptable” or have the lines cut off. You can imagine my response. One engineer suggested trying a 3G modem stick instead – I was quite calm at pointing out that there is no 3G signal, only slow EDGE. (more…)

Want to run Exchange Server 2007 SP2 on Windows Server 2008 R2? Forget it

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Sometimes little things just pop out of the page, and hit you round the head. This official Microsoft TechNet forum, for example.

On there, “Zhengwen Zhu MSFT” stated: “There is NO support for any Exchange Server 2007 SP2 components (any roles, including admin tools) installed on Windows Server 2008 R2.

“Exchange Server 2007 SP2 will not even install on it – the pre-req check will fail during installation.”

Not even for admin tools? Something is clearly seriously amiss. I checked this with Microsoft UK, who said that it’s something to do with Server 2008 R2 having a new version of IIS (7.5) and PowerShell (v2).

I have asked for further clarification – clearly this is a barking mad set of dependencies if it has broken Exchange Server, arguably Microsoft’s premier server platform.

It could be that Microsoft simply hasn’t had enough time to test Exchange Server 2007 SP2 on Windows Server 2008 R2, and has decided to skip it – after all, Exchange Server 2010 is apparantly just around the corner.

However, you should be aware of this limitation. And factor it into your deployment plans. I confess I am somewhat shocked at this news, given that deploying R2 of Server is a fairly straightforward decision but moving from Exchange Server 2007 to 2010 will require real planning and consideration.

The real reason Microsoft has given in over Internet Explorer

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

So why is Microsoft giving in over Internet Explorer? What’s the true motivation for the so-called browser ballot? It hasn’t been forced into the matter, although it could be argued that this was coming over the hill from the EU.

No, I think there is another reason, but this is pure speculation. I think Microsoft is actually walking away from Internet Explorer because it knows the battle is going to move elsewhere. It’s a kind of inversion, but the logic goes like this. (more…)

Windows 7 pre-order pandemonium

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

So today is when the Microsoft Online Store has gone live for the pre-orders of Windows 7. You can buy your shiny upgrades (I mean “full versions dressed as upgrades”) to be delivered in the future.

This is an offer I could not resist. So I click to the relevant page on the Microsoft website and hit the Microsoft Store button – after all, best to buy it from the source don’t you think?

Ah, no.

So much for Microsoft’s cloud based scale-up scale-out on-demand infrastructure.