crossloop.com

teamviewer.com

I like crossloop - built on VNC and offering a whole support community  sort of thing.  I have only tried it over a shockingly slow connection to africa though and it was pretty painful.

1. 1. Personally I would prefer to stick with XP until the bitter end, but we will begin to see increased support overhead after mainstream support ends.  My main concern is the “Non-security hotfix support” which will require a special agreement with Microsoft. http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy.
   2. It makes sense start putting  together a roadmap to transition to Vista.
      1. full environment software and hardware inventory
      2. determine possible hardware problems
         1. Printers, scanners, business-card readers, etc.
      3. Determine software problems
         1. Compatibility of standard software
         2. What about non-standard, business critical
      4. set up training for techs and end users

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People that have used ASR backups sporadically might be surprised to learn that yes, it is possible to automate ASR Backups.  It’s not really documented, but NTBackup.exe accepts a parameter called “asrbackup”.  Now you might be saying - well I don’t really want to leave a floppy disk in the drive all the time, and I don’t want to be swapping floppy disks every  backup or maybe I have machines without floppy drives.  Well, I hear you!  But have you ever heard of Virtual Floppy for Windows?  It basically lets you create a virtual floppy drive and script the insertion and removal of virtual floppies which are like tiny little .iso files.

Here how I did it:

1. Download and unzip Virtual Floppy for Windows
2. Write yourself a batch file that looks something like this:

REM Get the date for the file using the wonderful :~ trick — thanks to Terry Uptmor for that trick
set MYDATE=
set MYYEAR=
set MYMONTH=
set MYDAY=
set FILENAME=
set MYDATE=%DATE%
set MYYEAR=%MYDATE:~10,4%
set MYMONTH=%MYDATE:~4,2%
set MYDAY=%MYDATE:~7,2%

REM create a variable for your filename - might as well include the computer name

set FILENAME=ASR_%COMPUTERNAME%_%MYYEAR%%MYMONTH%%MYDAY%
REM might as well do some BASIC logging
Echo starting ASR Backup at %TIME% %DATE% >> backup.log
REM refer to the vfdhelp.txt for info on these commands
vfd.exe INSTALL
vfd.exe START
vfd.exe LINK A:
vfd.exe OPEN A: c:\scripts\%FILENAME%.vfd /NEW /F
REM The mysteriously undocumented asrbackup command in action (/F just specifies your filename)
ntbackup asrbackup /F “%FILENAME%.bkf”
vfd.exe SAVE
vfd.exe ULINK
vfd.exe STOP
vfd.exe REMOVE

So now you would have a .VFD file and and .BKF.  (You would probably want to also run a data backup around this time, also I’m not sure if ASR will backup non-system files on the system volume so a separate full system volume backup wouldn’t hurt).

If your server crashed, you could just load up the VFD file on your laptop (which is all prepped with VFD.exe and ready to go of course to a virtual B: drive and use windows explorer to do a “copy disk” over to a physical floppy (using your handy USB floppy drive), plug  a large usb drive with the bkf files on it to the new server, boot to the 2003 install disk, select ASR option, yadda yadda yadda

1. Access to shared calendars won’t work the same
   1. I guess you could use something like OggSync to sync public and selected private calendars, but that is kludgey compared to Exchange free/busy functionality.
   2. Using the Google Apps web interface is probably almost as good, but there is usually a lot of resistance to this thin client approach.
   3. I played around with Outlook 2003 and iCal/WebDav for free-busy info, but it was a pain to set up.  I should revisit this and see if there is a better way to do it now.
2. No Global Address Book
   1. I’m not sure how to address this.
3. No Public Folders
   1. Does anyone really use these effectively anyway? Most of the uses I’ve seen could have been done a number of different ways.

Well one client recently didn’t see a problem with going down this route.  I would definitely put my money on Google over ZImbra, OpenGroupWare, etc.

1. User data - My current approach is to backup all user data to the server anyway.  Sometime users will save files outside the standard folders (i.e. My Documents).  This HMO also had a clever script that would locate all supported data files (i.e. - .doc, .pdf, .pst, etc.) and back them up prior to the image drop.
2. Non-standard software - Once drawback to this method is that IT didn’t necessary have images that included ALL of the software required by all the departments.  One group required SAS tools that weren’t in the base image.
3. Software updates - This approach would work best if the images were updated with the latest Windows updates, etc.   Otherwise you need to re-run all the patches each time you drop an image.
4. User profiles - On the one hand you could keep the user profile on the network, but on the other hand sometimes a corrupt user profile is the cause of the problem.

I haven’t tried this method at the small business level, but I think that it would be very difficult to reduce support costs by taking this approach.

So his primary argument in favor of a separate system volume (or partition in his case as he is an adherent to FAT32 - which is a whole other can of worms) was that he can keep a “ghost” image on the data partition and if there is ever a problem with the system partition or if the OS won’t boot, he can walk the end-user through booting to DOS and running a script to re-image machine. Now I like the creativity of this solution, but here are my reservations:

1. Using FAT32 is probably causing as many blue screens as it solves. Because it’s not a journaling file system, you are more likely to run into problems whenever Windows is ungracefully shut down.
2. Having users self image a machine risks overwriting data that might have been unknowingly saved to the system partition.
3. It can be a waste of disk space if you allocate too much space for the system partition, but you risk filling it up and bringing the system down if you allocate too little.

I think it’s simplest to just keep one partition.

1. You don’t need to worry about resizing partitions or wasting disk space.
2. Simplifies administration (no need to document or train admins on this aspect of a client build)
3. You can save a base “ghost” image to the fileserver or on a USB drive somewhere. If you do want to risk having the end-user re-image their machine, you can have them first backup their current image to USB.

Of course client data backups are a must:

http://globalizenetworks.com/blog/2008/05/22/client-backups

NetMeeting is a deprecated Microsoft H.323 client.  Looks like Microsoft wants to push everyone over to Live Meeting.  It’s still included in XP though (START | RUN | Conf), and I guess that you can install it into Vista: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting

We have been using NetMeeting to test H.323 connectivity and to link in remote users.  (Multi-site capabilities in the VC codec usually cost more.)

I have come to conclusion that it doesn’t make sense to keep your codec behind a firewall, I agree with this site: http://www.more.net/technical/video/troubleshooting/videofirewalls.html.  Basically just turn off the web-interface and other IP services and you should be secure.  I have many bumps on my head from H.323 firewall configuration.

Ok, so I had problems with “C Header files” when I tried to install VMWare server. I might still beat on that later, but in the meantime I found that someone else has already gotten WIndows running on EC2 using Qemu:

(http://www.howtoforge.com/amazon_elastic_compute_cloud_qemu)

I also found out that the Amazon “Cloud” is  really just running Xen and that it only recently became more cloud-like with the addition of “Availability Zones” (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/27/amazon_flexible_ec2/)

Now I find that you need to regenerate your AMI each time you make a change!?!@#%  How is this going to work for what we want to do??

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1403&ref=featured

Maybe GOGRID is the way to go, but it doesn’t support multiple virtual processors…  Maybe I should just call it a day and get a dedicated server after all.