Unfortunately, SCVMM 2008 R2′s P2V crashes when run on this machine. disk2vhd can produce a proper VHD from an EFI/UEFI install of Windows Server 2008 R2, but there’s not way of getting it to boot in Hyper-V (i tried a myriad of ways, including several Linux tools that can convert GPT disks to MBR-style disks, got the Windows Boot Manager installed, but it still wouldn’t boot).

So. What now? I’m out of reasonable ideas. I have opened a Microsoft support case regarding the SCVMM 2008 R2 P2V crash on an EFI machine, but i’m not sure i’ll get a quick out of this. If anyone has any ideas on how to get this fixed, i’d be thankful for any replies.

If i ever get a solution that does not include reinstalling everything from scratch, i’ll of course post it.

Update: Here’s the official statement:

There are no workarounds for moving a Windows system with an EFI partition to non-EFI architecture. EFI and Itanium are in lockstep. Classic x86 and x64 cannot boot EFI, and there and is no simple switch back to MBR boot.

Es tut mir Leid, das ich keine besseren Informationen für Sie habe aber das Feedback von unseren Development ist sehr eindeutig das keine Kombination von P2V / GPT bzw. EFI zur Zeit unterstützt wird. Mein Vorschlag wäre, unseren Service Request als “Dokumentations-Bug” für Sie kostenfrei zu schließen. Was halten Sie von meinen Vorschlag?

Bunch of idiots. Their agent shouldn’t crash in this scenario anyway and it should be documented that you can’t migrate machines installed in UEFI modes.

A window titled “Windows Installer Coordinator” will pop up behind the IBM i Access 7.1 Installer (hidden until you click on it in the task bar). This “Windows Installer Coordinator” will run indefinitively, without ever successfully installing the application.

Thanks to a helpful guy from IBM Software Support Austria, i now have a solution to this issue. It’s caused by a new feature in WS08R2 RDS.

It’s called Windows Installer RDS Compatibility. If this feature is enabled, IBM i Access 7.1 will not install successfully, and hang at the “Windows Installer Coordinator” window.

To successfully install IBM i Access 7.1 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Session host, set the following DWORD registry key to 0:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services\TSAppSrv\TSMSI\Enable

It’s possible that not all keys exist – in my case, the TSAppSrv and TSMSI keys didn’t exist yet – you have to create them manually. After creating this key, you can rerun the installation – a reboot is not necessary.

As the project progressed, we’ve found a few extremely irritating and hard-to-debug issues, which needed my involvement to figure out the root cause and get them resolved, without compromising the exam results.

Be aware that most of the debugging and research here was mostly done by our apprentice, not by myself.

There are several key issues with TMG, that we’ve noticed so far:

IP Blocklist Entries

If IP Blocklist Entries are present in Exchange 2010 Edge, enabling E-Mail Policy Integration will cause TMG to reject all further changes, with the following error message:

Windows Could not Start the "Microsoft Forefront TMG Managed Control" service on Local Computer
Error 0x80070057 : Parameter is incorrect

I’ve found this solution in the TechNet forums. You need to remove all IP Blocklist and Allow List Entries.

Extremely slow boot

Forefront TMG 2010 with Exchange 2010 and FPE 2010 installed will boot extremely slowly, requiring up to 30 Minutes to boot. This issue is caused by the coexistence with Exchange 2010.

Again, i’ve found a solution in the TechNet forums.

You need to set the service Microsoft Exchange Transport and Microsoft Forefront TMG Managed Control to Automatic (Delayed Start). This will reduce the boot time to about 3 minutes.

lsass.exe crashes when creating Edge subscriptions

The next issue we’ve noticed is that while the initial edge subscription worked, the second one didn’t. It crashed lsass.exe, which subsequently caused a bluescreen. Not a very nice experience.

Again, we’ve found a solution on the TechNet forums, and this is getting worse by the minute. The lsass.exe crash can be mitigated by removing all except one SSL certificate – not exactly a good approach since a TMG likely has multiple SSL certificates for publishing a variety of services. But it worked. Except that mailflow didn’t.

Outgoing Mailflow doesn’t work with TMG 2010

Of course, stuff wasn’t working yet. While incoming mailflow now worked flawlessly, outgoing mailflow didn’t – mails where stuck in the queue with “Primary Target IP Address responded with 421 Unable to establish connection”.

We’ve tried to look at this, but everything seemed alright – but we couldn’t modify any connectors on the Edge server – TMG prevented this, and thus we had no Verbose logging from the Receive Connectors. Changing the configuration in the Exchange Edge console resulted in the following error message:

Forefront TMG detected changes in Microsoft Exchange Server or Microsoft Forefront Protection configuration, and reapplied the e-mail policy configuration on server

So i’m not supposed to do that. The TMG console didn’t give me the option of enabling Verbose logging. We were stumped.

Luckily, further research showed that one could disable the integration between the Exchange Edge role and Forefront TMG – this was mentioned on this TechNet forums post.

After disabling this integration, i was able to allow Verbose logging. Which didn’t help at all, since the Exchange 2010 HT just wouldn’t show up in them, suspecting a deeper issue.

At that point, we’ve checked the receive connectors that were created by Forefront – and the internal Receive Connector didn’t allow Exchange Server Authentication. After setting that to enabled, we were finally able to send mail successfully using the Exchange Edge services.

Final words

Forefront TMG 2010 still seems to be in Beta. The integration with Exchange 2010 doesn’t work as nicely as it should. I hope these things get fixed soon with Hotfixes for TMG 2010. Until then, we’ve found workarounds for all of these issues.

I’m publishing this article as quickly as i can, because i’m most likely not the only one with these issues.

I have attended TechDays 05, 06, 07, 08 and 2010. While i’ve always had something complain about, there was always something to gain from attending. Not this time.

When reading this, keep in mind that i’ve only attended IT Pro Sessions (with the exception of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Briefing).

There were to many things that have gone wrong.

• The keynote was boring and it didn’t even remotely have anything to do with the job of an IT Pro or a Developer. The keynote speaker also used a MacBook with OS X/Keynote.app. Seriously.
• The food was worse than what I got to eat at my Berufsschule (which wasn’t very good).
• The long lines were still there – waiting 20 minutes in line for bad food isn’t my idea of spending the day. They should’ve solved this problem by now.
• No more English talks. Why? I think we could use some experts.
• All the talks were very basic. No In-Depth stuff. Nothing to learn.
• I don’t want a basic talk about what OCS 2007 R2 can do. We’ve been using this for two years. It’s old news. Talk about Wave 14.
• Giving a basic intro on what SCVMM and Hyper-V are is not an IT Pro track – these technologies have been out since years and everyone that’s interested will already know those basics
• Make sure your stuff works. 75% of the demos did not work. Most of them because of bad internet connectivity. Yeah, i guess moving all the stuff to the “cloud” is a good idea.

The location and the whole ship theme was okay though. The evening event was also nice, and they did have good food there (different catering organization). Not sure what some danish bloke was doing there yelling “in the cloud” about 50 times. I wanted to see some chair-throwing.

Another interesting tidbit: The number of iPhones at the event. I’ve seen more iPhones than WinMo phones.

So, did you attend TechDays? What did you think about it?

The most important thing between the laptop and the desktop is that i’m using BitLocker on the laptop, which might have an influence on things. I’ve always been using BitLocker on the SSD, so it would seem strange that this is now suddenly an issue.

I’ve always been aggressive about SSD firmware updates, after a good backup. I’ve upgraded both the Vertex and the Intel drives to be TRIM capable as soon as the respective firmware was out.

Unfortunately, a few days after using the OCZ Vertex in my new laptop, it started to have serious hickups – during which no IO would take place (perfmon disk queue shooting up to 50). During this time, the HDD light on the laptop is not lit.

I’ve tried to make sure that this issue was related to the SSD, so i ran HDTune benchmark:

This looked bad. Further investigation showed that there was a new Firmware out – 1.5. I’ve upgrade to Firmware 1.5, which supposedly had a Garbage Collection and TRIM support. After upgrading to 1.5, the hickups became much worse – the laptop needed about an hour just to boot up.

After looking at and posting on the OCZ support forum, i was told that i’d need to wait for Garbage collection to kick in. I let my laptop sit for a night, during which it crashed and the subsequent reboot was stuck on a “No harddisk found” message from the BIOS. Things looked bleak.

Further replies on the OCZ support forum requested that i do a sanitary erase, which would reset the disk to pristine performance levels (and delete all the data on it).

Unfortunately, the machine was too slow to run a Windows Complete PC Backup (wasn’t finished after 4 hours in). Fortunately, all the important data on my laptop is backed up using the Client Protection of DPM 2010, meaning all i had to do was reinstall my apps and i’d be good to go.

After reinstalling Windows 7, i installed the most important apps and then reenabled BitLocker protection – during which the hickups started happening again. The laptop would sometimes hang for 20-30 seconds, and then continue on on it’s merry way.

At this point, i went to sleep and let the laptop idle at the boot selection screen, so that the garbage collection could do it’s magic.

And now here we are, 8 hours later. While the read performance using HD Tune is nowwhere near as bad as it was before the sanitary erase, the write performance is stil abysmal.

For Comparison, here’s my Intel X25-M G2:

What now? I think i will RMA the drive. It’s the only choice i have left at this point.

If anyone has a better idea, give me a whirl.

Interestingly, the Hotline wasn’t reachable either – busy signal, Swisscom text “Leitung gestört” or simply “Call Failed”.

Lasted from 19:33 to 20:30, but it looks like everything is back online now.

I’ve setup a new Hyper-V server on a x3650 M2 (using server core) – i’ve also installed the latest Broadcom NetXtreme II drivers, all the firmware updates, all the best practices you do.

Setting up the machine, transferring VMs from another host (using BITS) worked well and fast, no issues.

And then i installed the DPM agent, started a backup. Two hours later, it was still stuck at “Replica creation in progress”.

I tried reading through the DPM agent logs, through the DPM server logs, looked if DPM created shadow copies (using vssadmin list shadows).

After two hours of fruitless searching (which included restarting everything), i wasn’t any further to a solution.

Well, backup wasn’t working right, but this was just a testing environment, so i decided to do other stuff.

A while later, i ran netstat -t to lookup connections – and also realized that TCP Chimney Offloading was still active. So i disabled it using netsh int tcp set global chimney=disabled. Just a few seconds later, the utilization of the management network adapter jumped to 100% and 5 minutes later, all the VMs were replicated to the DPM server.

So, if you’re having issues with DPM backups being stuck, check the status of your network offloading.

If you’re reading this, this blog is now hosted on Windows Server 2008 R2 Web Edition (Yay NFR promotions!). There may still be some kinks that have to be worked out, because this was quite a rush job. Leave a comment if you find any issues.

Currently, we’re looking for:

Project Manager (PDF)
Sales (PDF)

If you’re following the recommended deployment method for Exchange 2007, you’ll already be using a SAN certificate in order to publish AutoDiscovery and OWA. For coexistence of Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010, an additional name will need to be added to your SAN certificate.

With most CAs, this is a pretty straightforward process that can be done using their web interface, since the private key doesn’t need to be touched. After modifying this, you will get a new .crt file containing the certificate, but no private key (which is correct).

However, importing this into Exchange 2007 using Import-ExchangeCertificate doesn’t work – Windows won’t know which private key is associated with the newly imported certificate. When you try to use Enable-ExchangeCertificate, you will receive the following error message:

Enable-ExchangeCertificate : The certificate with thumbprint 1234 was found but is
not valid for use with Exchange Server (reason: PrivateKeyMissing).

I searched high and low on how to replace a certificate without touching the private key, but i didn’t find anything. So i turned to the community for support – MCSEBoard.de is an excellent Windows community for those who speak German.

Unfortunately, noone knew an easy way either – the suggestion was to use OpenSSL to create a new keystore.

This was rather easy, but i didn’t find any guides on the net on how to do this, so i’m publishing this here in the hope that it will help others with the same issue.

• First, you need to export the key including the private key using the Windows certificate manager. Open an elevated MMC, add the Certificate snap-in and focus on the Computer certificate. Click “Personal”, and then export the certificate with the private key.
• Download and Install OpenSSL for Windows
• Issue the following command: openssl pkcs12 -in mykey.pfx > out.txt
• Open out.txt using an LF-aware text editor, such as Notepad++. Save the PRIVATE KEY part to a textfile called key.pem.
• Save the certificate to a file called cert.crt
• Issue to the following command: openssl pkcs12 -export -in cert.crt -inkey key.pem -out newcert.p12
• Copy the newly created newcert.p12 to the Exchange server.
• Open PowerShell and run the following command: $secureString = ConvertTo-SecureString "blubb" -AsPlainText -Force – Replace “blubb” with the Passphrase you used in the step before
• Run Import-ExchangeCertificate -path newcert.p12 -pass $secureString to import the certificate back into Exchange
• The rest is as usual – use Enable-ExchangeCertificate to enable the certificate.

And that’s it. It might be a bit cumbersome – and i really hope that there is an easier way to to this. If you know, let me know so i can update this page.

See here for the fix and it’s description KB974571

Click here to download the ocsasnfix.exe directly, which will fix the incorrect ASN License data – something which i already guessed about in my previous post about this issue.

However, we’re also an ISV. DIAS-iS has been running on Windows Vista since the release – thanks to the efforts of our developers, who fixed everything during the beta phase of Windows Vista. As such, our software ran on Windows 7 since the beginning.

During the past few weeks, i did all the necessary administrative work to get our Software certified with the “Compatible with Windows 7″ Logo.

Doing this isn’t that hard, but it requires you to jump through quite a few hoops.

Here’s a basic rundown of steps:

• Obtain a MS Authenticode certificate from Verisign. Note that other code signing certs won’t work (e.G. Thawte)
• Create a WinQual Account here
  • You’ll need to sign a sample .exe with the code signing cert from step one
• Download the Software Logo Toolkit
• Download the Windows 7 Logo Requirements Document
• Both of these packages contain all the documentation you need – most of the requirements are easily satisfied if you have an application that behaves nicely, uninstalls correctly, works in TS environments
• Create an empty Windows 7 x64 VM. Note that it must be x64.
• Install the Software Logo Toolkit on the machine
• Start the GUI, start the Session Server in a second session on the same machine
• Run through all the phases, make sure the report says “Pass” or “Pass with warnings” (verify that the warnings are not real errors)
• Submit the .xml through the WinQual account. You’ll immediately get certified

So it’s not that hard.

The key point to delivering a good user experience is to ensure that your application uses standard installation technology like .MSI, that it doesn’t require administrative privileges, that all configuration is stored in the userprofile (Registry or %APPDATA%) and that it’s multi-session capable.

And that’s all the “Compatible with Windows 7″ logo verifies – so if you already have a well-behaving Windows application, getting that logo is easy as pie. It does not cost anything directly – the only costly requirement is the fact hat you need a Verisign Authenticode certificate. This will set you back 400$. Microsoft does not want any money from you for this Logo – and it can be great in Marketing your competitiveness and readiness as a software vendor.

So, with a fresh newly installed laptop and the new release candidate of Windows XP mode, i gave it a whirl again. But it failed with the same sequence of completely intelligible error messages, namely “Integration features have been disabled” and the even more helpful “Parameter is incorrect”.

So i installed it on my desktop as well, where it worked without a hitch. The major difference between my desktop and my laptop is that the laptop is joined to the corporate domain and the desktop at home obviously not.

I dug a bit deeper into the event log, and drilled down to Microsoft\Windows\Virtual PC\Admin, where i found this error message:

Could not enable the Integration features for ‘Windows XP Mode’. The current mode is – 0. Last Channel start Value – 0x800700B7, Last Disconnect Reason – 0x300001B, Last Extended Disconnect Reason – 0×0, GHI State of the guest machine – 0×1

Now, this whole “disconnect” thing sounded strange until i remembered that Windows Virtual PC used RDP to deliver the screen – and at that point i thought about the RD Gateway server that’s being pushed by a GPO.

So for a quick test, i set the following key in the registry to zero:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services\UseProxy

And tried starting Virtual PC again. It worked! Setting the key back to 1 predictably led to the same error message.

So next i excluded Windows 7 users from this GPO using a simple WMI filter, which will be a temporary measure to mitigate this issue.

This seems to be a bug somewhere, as those settings shouldn’t break Virtual PC. I’m not sure where i should report this to, but i’ll have a look at that. At least now people with the same issue should get this solution through Google.

I ordered mine last Friday and it arrived yesterday. It looks like i was rather lucky with this, because Intel has since withdrawn them because of an issue with using a HDD password. Since i don’t use that, i didn’t care and installed Windows 7 RC.

And, well, the performance is absolutely astonishing. I’ve upgraded from an old AMD X2 running Windows 7 Beta earlier this year to an i7 also running Windows 7 Beta – more RAM, new hard disk, new graphics. The UI wasn’t noticably faster, sometimes Explorer decided to take ages to work things out, the event viewer was still rather slow, but of course video recoding and games were a lot better.

But now, with an SSD, the UI is extremely responsive – event viewer opens instantly, switches instantly between categories. It just feels like a new machine, with just one part replaced.

So, yeah. I’m quite pleased with my purchase.

Everything worked, but LiveMeeting when using the Edge server. It worked fine internally, or when a VPN connection was established. The LiveMeeting Error Log showed me exactly what failed, but it took my almost half an hour to figure out why it was failing.

[P] SEQ#16,placeware::SslSocket::connectInternal::TLSNegotiationTimer stop,112029,,
[D] [X-PSOM] SslSocket::connect end OK
[D] [X-PSOM] TunnelSocket::connect ProxyHeader sent.
[I] [X-PSOM] SSLTunnelStream: Established SSL Tunnel Stream to hor-ocsgw-01.acommit.ch
[I] [X-PSOM] Forwarded TCP probe succeeded
[P] SEQ#14,placeware::ServerInfo::ForwardedTcpProbeThread::run::ForwardedTcpProbeTimer stop,145082,,
[I] [X-PSOM] Best mode for Client RPC is : 1
[I] [X-PSOM] Best mode is fwdtls. Reusing stream in probe.
[I] [X-PSOM] PWS Handshake sent.
[E] [X-PSOM] placeware::Socket::readWSAGetOverlappedResult failed, error = 10054
[E] [X-PSOM] Socket error while reading.
[E] [X-PSOM] SslSocket::close: socket is not connected

So, looks good at first. And then it fails. No log entry on the OCS Edge, no entry on the OCS Standard.

I figured out the solution when rechecking my entire configuration – i misconfigured the external Edge server hostname on the Standard Server.

Fixing the issue is easy:

• Log on OCS Standard Server
• Right click on Pool – Properties – Web Conference -Web Conference Edge Server.
• Then, enter the correct external host name. You’ll find this name in the Edge server configuration.

The dump then reads like this:

[P] SEQ#16,placeware::SslSocket::connectInternal::TLSNegotiationTimer stop,83410,,
[D] [X-PSOM] SslSocket::connect end OK
[D] [X-PSOM] TunnelSocket::connect ProxyHeader sent.
[I] [X-PSOM] SSLTunnelStream: Established SSL Tunnel Stream to hor-ocsgw-01-1.acommit.ch
[I] [X-PSOM] Forwarded TCP probe succeeded
[P] SEQ#14,placeware::ServerInfo::ForwardedTcpProbeThread::run::ForwardedTcpProbeTimer stop,122853,,
[I] [X-PSOM] Best mode for Client RPC is : 1
[I] [X-PSOM] Best mode is fwdtls. Reusing stream in probe.
[I] [X-PSOM] PWS Handshake sent.
[I] [X-PSOM] Received PWS Handshake.

The problem was resolved (temporarily) by deleting shadow copies, but it still exists. As i’ve had time this weekend to investigate this closely, i’m pretty sure that i found the root cause of the problem, but i have no solution yet. Remember, this is all just a theory i cooked up – i’m putting this information out there in case anyone else has a similar problem.

My theory is that this is related to Plug & Play manager running enumeration of devices left by the Hyper-V VSS writer backup.

On the affected machine, the C:\windows\system32\config\SYSTEM file is around 170 MB. Using dureg, i could boil this down to two registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SCSI\Disk&Ven_Msft&Prod_Virtual_Disk
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\DeviceClasses\{53f56307-b6bf-11d0-94f2-00a0c91efb8b}

Which are about 6 megabytes each, when looking at them using dureg:

C:\Users\z-l.beeler\Desktop>dureg.exe /lm “SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SCSI\Disk&Ven_Msft&Prod_Virtual_Disk”
Size of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SCSI\Disk&Ven_Msft&Prod_Virtual_Disk: 6575468

Since this machine has been operational since about a year, with daily backups (BE12.5), it is much more pronounced here than on other machines. The Virtual Disk being part of the backup procedure is visible in the System log – it produces errors during the backup and Microsoft even has a KB article on the issue KB958669.

The eventlog on the affected machine looks like this:
18:02 The quota minifilter driver completed rescanning directories under quota management on volume “\Device\HarddiskVolume3 (G:)”. All quota information is up-to-date.
18:48 The Plug and Play service entered the running state.

Which for me further indicates that there is some kind of issue with the Plug and Play service. Unfortunately, the machine is not reachable remotely during the issue, but my guess would be that the Plug and Play service is hung in a “Starting” state, causing the lockup issue because of kernel interactions.

Unfortunately, i don’t have enough information and i’m not sure if deleting random registry keys is a good approach on this. I’ve posted on MCSEboard.de and the TechNet Forums – in the hope of getting valuable feedback from other long-term Hyper-V users.

Update: I don’t have a solution yet, but i’ve received a few insights. Thanks to zahni from MCSEBoard.de i got a link to KB959476, which doesn’t match my specific issue, but definitively goes into the right direction.

I’ve also found the Device Remover software, which gives me a clear graphic representation of the issue – over 9500 devices on the affected server. It even offers a removal function, but i don’t want to risk using this tool on a production server.

I’ve also opened a case with Microsoft PSS, in hope of getting an official solution to this issue soon.

Update 2:Removing the devices cut down the number of devices to about 300. I did this after Microsoft PSS recommended me to remove them. As i assumed, this resolved the issue during boot-up hang. Unfortunately, even after installing WS08 SP2, the machines still creates new virtual hard drives when running backup. I will try to get this resolved completely.

This wasn’t nice, especially because i couldn’t start the machine using the RSA Adapter. After going on-site (at around 23:00), i unplugged the power, reconnected it, and the machine booted. And crashed. And booted.

I booted it in safe mode, disabled all DFS replication task by disabling the DFS service, and the machine was finally able to boot. As soon as something IO intensive happened, it crashed. I opened a call with IBM, IBM replaced the system board.

This worked again for about a day. Then the machine crashed again, this time with “Planar Voltage Channel Fault”. This was at around 20:00. A few hours later, IBM arrived on-site and replaced the system board again.

The ServeRAID Controller then started AutoSynchronization of the array, which made the machine unbearably slow. And then it crashed again. I disabled the Automatic Server Reboot service, and set the synchronization priority to low. I also upgraded the hard disk firmware to version 1.03.

After about a day, the synchronization completed. Performance was comparably normal, but the machine still required about 20 minutes to boot, which was unacceptable. Looking at the eventlog, i saw some log entries before the waiting time, and some after. All of them normal, none of them looking like errors.

IBM came on site two times, replacing the ServeRAID memory and replacing the CPU and HD backplane power connector. However, neither of that fixed the issue. I began to suspect a software issue.

Today, IBM was on site again. They brought a replacement server. After testing our server with one of their hard disks (which was fast, as usual), it seemed clear that this was a software issue.

I had an idea, mostly related to the fact that the first crash was during a backup. I looked at the device manager, set it to show all hidden devices, and found about 100 shadow copies.

I looked at vssadmin list shadows, which also showed a lot of shadow copies. I removed all shadow copies on one of the drives which contained shadow copies, but there were still some there. I deleted them using vssadmin delete shadows. The reboot was fast again: Instead of 20 minutes, it only took around 5 (including the BIOS).

So, if you have Windows Server 2008 hanging at the Black Screen of Death err Waiting, it’s probably a good idea to look at your shadow copies. They may be culprit.

Also, big thanks to the techs from IBM, and for taking this issue seriously.

Either way, i attended a Citrix course and started setting up our internal Citrix test environment. Naturally, i also took some uninteresting Citrix Sales exams and a real exam at prometric.

The exam is easy if you even halfway know your way around Citrix. One thing that i didn’t pay too much attention too are port numbers, but there were a few in which knowing them was an advantage.

Mergers and acquisitions have always been a big part of what the important people do.

Of course, theoretically, that wouldn’t be my problem. However, one wouldn’t believe on how much work it is to get rid of an old name throughout a whole network.

First comes Active Directory – it uses DNS as a primary means of identification. Renaming an Active Directory domain is purely theoretical, e.G. it doesn’t work and it’s not supported if you’re running Exchange 2007.

Then there’s numerous other stuff that depends on DNS, names and everything. But in the end, i did my part of this deal. It has been an interested time and now i really wonder how big companies like Swissair handled their renames – or are they still running their infrastructure under the old name?

My employer is now called Acommit AG.

Of course, the whole rename proved to be a really good argument to buy new servers and upgrade straight to Windows Server 2008 – that means on my side the renaming thing has worked rather well. I still don’t know a lot about the company we bought (Futura Retail Solution GmbH), but their main market is selling POS related products.

If you need the full details, you can get them here:

Futura Retail Solution GmbH
Acommit AG (soon to be updated)

One of the really good parts about it was that you could hook up with other people that also have A LOT of knowledge about and enthusiasm about their work.

Especially when talking about Microsoft technologies, nobody at my company wants to argue with me. This was different here, and i really enjoyed that.

It’s also great to see that Microsoft exams are a lot of hard work and a huge investment by Microsoft in order to provide up to date and accurate tests.

Keep in mind that when you make a Comment at a Beta Exam / Exam that they’ll be read by real people – they DO make a difference. So whenever you do not like a question for any reason, make a comment. It counts.

So, what now? It’s 1500 here right now, so i’ll try to find a few fun things to do before going to sleep. The same goes for tomorrow morning, my flight leaves at tomorrow 1600. And i’ll be back in Switzerland on Sunday 1200.