Organice is a desktop application to access Sharepoint with an Outlook-like user interface. From the screenshots, it looks like an interesting product.

I always thought that Microsoft should have provided something like this because a web-based interface is not always the best solution. Same thing for the administration pages, should have been an MMC snap-in!

If you have worked with Sharepoint a bit, you probably know about ghosted vs. unghosted pages. A ghosted page (default) is a page that is constructed from a template on the front-end server. An unghosted page is a page that is read from SQL Server and not from the front-end template. A ghosted page becomes unghosted when you modify the page with an editor like Frontpage 2003.

There are tools to ghost pages such as Ghosthunter. Ghosthunter is a web part and requires you to put it on a page before you can use it.

It would be nicer to be able to ghost pages from a desktop application. This tool can be used to do just that.

Over at http://www.sysinternals.com, you can find the AccessEnum utility. It is a simple tool with which you enumerate the access rights of a folder or registry key. You can save the results to a textfile.

The nice feature is that you can compare the saved results to another scan. I used this feature to detect the changes made by the adprep /gprep procedure. After the compare, you can clearly see that the procedure grants rights on all policy folders to NT AUTHORITY\ENTERPRISE DOMAIN CONTROLLERS.

If you have a Gmail account, you can access your inbox using a mobile phone. Just point your phone to http://m.gmail..com and you are set.

It works well and has some cool features such as the ability to view Word documents, pdf files and images. Great if someone sends you a Word attachment and you don't have a viewer installed on your phone. I tried it on my i-mate SP3i and it works great.

A second article has been posted on the Exchange Team's blog about Exchange 2003 and kernel memory issues.

In this article, they talk about not giving more than 4GB ram to an Exchange Server and to disable hot-add memory support on servers with that feature.

If you implement Exchange 2003 servers with a large amount of users, you should read the article.

When I need to create new virtual machines (for a test lab for instance), I do not want to spend a lot of time on deployment. For customers who use VMWare GSX without VirtualCenter, I use a simple batch file to roll out virtual machines automatically.

Before you can use the batch file, you need a sysprepped virtual machine. This article presumes that you know how sysprep works. On the virtual machine's disk, c:\sysprep\sysprep.inf will be the answer file that provides all answers to the mini-setup wizard. The mini-setup is run when you deploy the virtual machine and start it for the first time. You should make mini-setup fully unattended.

Of course, I want to provide the computername automatically during deployment. In the sysprep.inf file, do not fill in a computername behind Computername=. So the  [UserData] section should be like:

[Userdata]
...
Computername=
...

When the machine has been sysprepped and is shutdown, you have a template to create other machines from. In the template directory, you should modify the vmx file as required. You should remove the displayName entry because we will set the display name during deployment. You should also remove uuid settings so VMWare can create a new uuid for your new virtual machines automatically without asking questions.

So suppose you have a template directory e:\vm\W2003Template. The directory has two files: w2003.vmdk and w2003.vmx.

To create a new virtual machine based on this template, I use the batch file with one parameter: the name of the new virtual machine. For instance:

deploy.cmd w2003srv

The batch file contains some variables that point to the template directory, the directory where new virtual machines should be created and so on...

The batch file then does the following things:

• A new folder called w2003srv is created under a directory you specify in the batch file.
• The w2003.vmx file from the template is copied to the new folder (e:\vm\w2003srv) as w2003srv.vmx.
• The displayName is set inside w2003srv.vmx to w2003srv.
• The w2003.vmdk file is copied from the template directory to the new folder.
• w2003.vmdk is mounted on V: and v:\sysprep\sysprep.inf is modified. Computername= is replaced with Computername=w2003srv.

To replace Computername= with something else, I used munge.exe from one of the Windows resource kits. Munge requires a munge script. That is just a file with one line that contains the value to search and replace. The munge script is created by the batch file.

To mount a vmdk on a drive letter, I used vmware-mount.exe. This is a download from the VMWare site.

That's it. You now have a new virtual machine based on a specific template. The computername of this virtual machine is automatically set in sysprep.inf. When you start the new vm and mini-setup is fully automated, the new machine will be up and running without having to provide answers to the setup process.

This is a very simple solution and was created out of need. It could be further enhanced by using VMWare APIs to automatically add this virtual machine to the inventory, maybe start the virtual machine automatically after creation, and so on. Maybe next time!

UPDATE: well, what about providing the information to register and start the virtual machine now? It is really easy, thanks to the sample vmware-cmd script that VMWare provides. That script can be found in c:\Program Files\VMware\VMware VmPerl Scripting API. Check the attached reg-start.cmd for a sample script that registers and starts a vm automagically.

A first article in a series of three has been posted on the Exchange Team Blog about kernel resources and Exchange 2003.

This first article serves as an introduction. The next articles (coming soon) will present more details. Interesting stuff!

There can be quite some issues with this, especially when you plan to host a large number of users on a server (4000+) when all these users have large access tokens.

Check out this site for a GUI front-end to create vmx and vmdk files for VMWare. This is ideal when combined with the free VMWare player!

The cool thing about it is that it allows you to create a vmdk file (disk) as well. There is no need to use other tools to do that (qemu for instance). Or no need to download pre-made disk files from the web. Great stuff.

Check out http://www.pandora.com. Based on an artist or song name, a station is created that plays similar music. A great way to discover new music.

The site is free but requires registration after a number of songs have been played. When you register, you can also mark songs that you like for later reference. The free version has adverts.

Great stuff! At the time of this writing, I am listening to a music station based on Queens of the Stone Age. A lot of bands are played I have never heard of, but it is the same genre. Exactly what I needed!

Every once in a while, I decide to try to use Linux as my main desktop OS at home. I cannot use it on my work laptop for obvious reasons.

So I decided to try Ubuntu. I already played with Ubuntu in VMWare Workstation and I kinda liked it. I made an image of my Windows XP desktop machine to revert back to it if needed. I used Norton Ghost for that and backed up my drives to a 200GB USB hard disk.

Needless to say, five days later, I am typing this on my Windows XP machine at home. Why? Well, the same thing as the years before: lacking support for hardware. By the way, restoring images with the Norton Ghost bootable CD works really well. :-)

My home machine has a D-Link wireless card based on the acx111 chipset. Although Ubuntu comes with a driver for that one, it does not work very well. After a while, I got the wireless card to work fine (I thought), but some time later it just stopped. I unloaded and loaded the driver and then it worked again. Sorry, but I do not want to spend days to get a stupid piece of hardware to work especially since it works like a charm in Windows XP.

I decided to compile a driver using the instructions found at http://acx100.sourceforge.net/. I also used http://www.houseofcraig.net/acx100_howto.php. That made it work a little bit better but I lost the connection to the access point once in a while.

Second problem: I have an NVIDIA Geforce 6200 card, a cheap budget card. I don't play games that much so I don't need anything fancy. Although Ubuntu supports that, the support is not as good as in Windows XP. I also had some problems with large parts of the screen turning red and pink. And I hadn't been drinking. I also think that the rendering of fonts and graphics in general is not up to standards (and Ubuntu actually has quite some improvements in that area).

To cut the story short, using Linux as a desktop does not quite do it for me. It is just too much of a hassle to get everything to work. I also don't want to bother with having to install library X to get program Y to work etc... I like Linux for everything that is in the server field, but the desktop? Naah, don't think so.

A few days ago, I blogged about a tool called VM Optimizer from Invirtus (http://www.invirtus.com). Today, I downloaded an eval version to check how it works.

I must say that it works very well. I did not have older and bigger VMWare images available because my external USB disk has crashed. And of course, I did not have a backup.

I did have a newly created VM with a disk file that was about 4,5 GB in size. After running VM Optimizer, the size came down to 1,4 GB. After compression, I had a zip of around 700 MB. This makes VMs so much more portable for distribution to colleages. It may also solve my storage problems because I have many VMs to play with.

This tool is really a great way to optimize the size of your virtual disks. To me, it works way better than the native shrink tools provided by VMWare and Microsoft. Highly recommended!!!

You know how it goes. You download a piece of software that you would like to evaluate but after you install it you don't have the time to actually do the evaluation. 15 or 30 days later, you can start from scratch.

In some cases, eval software comes with a license that always ends at a certain date. Sure, you can ask for another license from the vendor, but that's annoying.

Well, when you test time-bombed software in VMWare, there is something you can do: always start a VM at a certain time and prevent time synchronization with the VMWare tools.

Just add these settings to your vmx file:

tools.syncTime = "FALSE"
tools.synchronize.continue=FALSE
tools.synchronize.restore=FALSE
tools.synchronize.resume.disk=FALSE
tools.synchronize.shrink=FALSE
rtc.startTime=1131148800

The key parameter here is rtc.startTime. That parameters sets the virtual CMOS TOD (time of day). The number you see in this example sets the CMOS TOD to November 5, 2005. The number 1131148800 is an amount of seconds since January 1, 1970. When you start up the virtual machine, the clock is set to the time specified. Each time you restart the machine, the time will be set to the time specified.

Of course, don't leave your virtual machine running for the duration time of the evaluation.

Obviously, this won't work for all types of evaluations. It also might pose problems if you need multiple virtual machines like a member server and a domain controller.