Category: Uncategorized

The good old days of CP/M 2.2 on a TRS-80 with an 8-bit Z80 CPU

I was reading the news on the release of Windows 7 and stopped to think of the early days of my IT career and what an OS looked like then. I thought way back to one of the first microcomputer disk operating systems I ever used: CP/M. I actually remembered the few resident commands we … Continue reading The good old days of CP/M 2.2 on a TRS-80 with an 8-bit Z80 CPU →

Strings, Arrays and Functions in PowerShell v2 (and some sample code that speaks for itself :-)

I spent some more time experimenting with PowerShell v2 and here goes my second post about it. This time around I am focusing on how to define variables, use expressions and create functions.   The "problem" we're solving 🙂   To make it fun, I decided to create a little script that creates some random … Continue reading Strings, Arrays and Functions in PowerShell v2 (and some sample code that speaks for itself 🙂 →

Changes in Roles, Role Services and Features from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 R2

Introduction  This blog post covers the changes in the list of Roles, Role Services and Features from Windows Server 2008 (with Service Pack 2) to Windows Server 2008 R2 (used the latest RC build available to me). To create the tables and lists below, I installed both operating systems, used the "ServerManagerCmd -query" command and did some editing of … Continue reading Changes in Roles, Role Services and Features from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 R2 →

Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 09) provides a snapshot of what Microsoft is up to (keynotes available for review)

Earlier this week Microsoft hosted the 2009 edition of the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 2009) in New Orleans.Thousands of partners joined to understand where Microsoft is going and how they can work together with Microsoft.The keynotes were streamed live (a bit too early on the Pacific side, but it certainly was very interesting).The entire keynotes … Continue reading Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 09) provides a snapshot of what Microsoft is up to (keynotes available for review) →

Five ways to check your DFS-Namespaces (DFS-N) configuration with the DFSDIAG.EXE tool

Introduction The Distributed File System Namespaces (DFS-N) service is a role service of the File Service role for Windows Server.For a basic description of DFS-N, start with  http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2009/03/10/the-basics-of-the-windows-server-2008-distributed-file-system-dfs.aspx DFS-N, as the name implies, is a distributed system and it involves a number of components running on a set of computers (Active Directory domain controllers, DFS-N … Continue reading Five ways to check your DFS-Namespaces (DFS-N) configuration with the DFSDIAG.EXE tool →

Proud to be a Microsoft Certified Master: Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Earlier this year (or last fiscal year :-), I participated in a grueling three-week training and passed four exams (one of them a lab exam) to become one of just a dozen Microsoft Certified Masters on SQL Server 2008 worldwide. This was certainly the most demanding IT certification I ever attempted and a great learning … Continue reading Proud to be a Microsoft Certified Master: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 →

File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) Release Candidate available for download

The File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) is a capacity planning software for CIFS/SMB/SMB2 file servers.  It’s also useful for identifying performance bottlenecks. FSCT results include the maximum number of users for a file server configuration, throughput for that configuration and performance counters for the server and clients used. This is a command line tool and … Continue reading File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) Release Candidate available for download →