Speaking at TEC 2010!

I’ve been accepted to speak at TEC 2010 April 25^th – 28th, in LA! TEC – formerly the Directory Expert’s Conference – is a 400 level propellerhead’s conference about directory services, identity, Exchange, and SharePoint. On top of that, it holds the record in my book for being the quirkiest conference with the most unusual traditions I’ve ever attended (e.g. the DEC / TEC chicken, the Joe & Dean show, the DEC / TEC Wook Lee Memorial Pro / Am Challenge*, Stuarts Kwan ordering pizza delivery for all attendees, even the opening keynote). I’m sure all the new Exchange and SharePoint attendees will be confused :).

I’ve been invited to speak for a number of years, all my friends go, but this is the first time I’ve spoken there. I’m giving a session on AD replication troubleshooting based on my troubleshooting flowcharts at adtroubleshooting.deuby.com.

Please try to make the conference! You get to rub elbows with the top – I’ll repeat it, top – directory experts in the world, both inside  and outside Microsoft. A significant number of the Microsoft Directory Services team comes to this conference. It’s 400 level detail, beyond what you get at a Tech Ed. It’s in LA this year, not Las Vegas, so you can’t be accused of just going to party. But it’s still a heck of a lot of fun.

http://www.tec2010.com/

* No, he’s not dead. It’s a long story. Which you’ll hear if you attend.

Technorati Tags: TEC 2010,DEC,TEC

Polychrome Pass

Last week I was walking past a colleague’s desk, and did such a double-take that a couple of other heads popped up to see what was so interesting.

Satish had downloaded a new Windows 7 theme, Bing’s Best, that has what someone at Microsoft picked as the best photos from the amazing collection displayed on a daily basis at Bing. The particular photo is of a hiker standing on a point, looking out at a stunning collection of green tundra, multihued (polychrome) rocks, snow-covered mountains, and a cloud-dotted blue sky.

I saw it when it first came out and was transfixed by it. It’s an interesting photo with great colors, and a perfect example of why you want to put the point your eye moves to – the hiker – well off to one side instead of in the center. Where on earth was it?? Poking around on Bing, I saw it was called Polychrome Pass, deep in Denali National Park in Alaska. Huh, what are the odds of getting to THAT in my lifetime.

I was never able to get a clean JPEG of it, so it faded into that netherworld in your head where the eye candy of amazing photos goes. Little did I realize when I first got to see this photo I’d be standing in that very spot six months later.

Alas, I wasn’t able to duplicate the exact shot because I didn’t remember by then what it looked like exactly. This is what all of Polychrome Pass looks like, after a harrowing drive in a Park Services bus on a narrow dirt road.

The hiker’s point is in the bottom center. The Bing photo’s viewpoint is off to the left of the camera, so the photographer was actually comfortably standing on the road :). But the picture is just as stunning even with that knowledge.

We had a really terrific day ourselves, a very rare day when Denali was perfectly clear instead of being covered in clouds (it’s so big it has its own weather system), but it didn’t look as nice as that. Might be sour grapes, but I think a little Photoshop work might have been applied to it. Or at least that’s my story :).

Technorati Tags: Denali,Polychrome Pass,Alaska,Denali National Park,Bing,Windows 7 Theme Pack

Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components Poster Available!

In a previous entry I’d mentioned the cool AD Reference posters put out by technet. Well, there’s now a Windows Server 2008 R2 poster available. It’s incredibly detailed, something any IT pro would love to have on their wall. And a magnifying glass on a string nearby.

Thanks to Paul Thurrott for pointing it out to us.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=64a5cc28-f8a1-4b30-a4a2-455c65bda8d7&displaylang=en

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2008 R2,R2,poster

Free Lab Training On New(& newish) AD Features

Are you perhaps considering upgrading your DCs from Windows 2003 to 2008 R2, but you want to kick the tires of some of the new features available in it and Windows 2008? I’ve got a resource for you.

Doing some other research, I found that TechNet Virtual Labs has a good amount of resources on AD features in W2K8, like

• Best Practices Analyzer
• Recycle Bin, PowerShell V2
• The new Server Manager utilities

There’s also good stuff on existing W2K8 features:

• Managing AD DS
• Remotely Managing Server Core (a MUST for anyone implementing Hyper-V)
• Fine Grained Password Policy

These are well worth 90 minutes (probably less) of your time. Ironically, the Virtual Labs don’t have what I was looking for - a lab on Hyper-V virtualization :-/.

Technorati Tags: Hyper-V,Active Directory,Best Practices Analyzer,Recycle Bin,PowerShell V2,Server Core,Fine Grained Password Policy

Winding Up Connections

I’ve just finished my annual visit to the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas to speak at Windows Connections. It was a good trip, with the dual purpose of presenting sessions and catching up with my professional friends and colleagues – most of whom I’ve never seen outside of some hotel, convention center, or the Microsoft campus.

Windows Connections is a relatively small conference compared to a behemoth like Tech Ed, but that’s one of the things its attendees like about it. They get to hang out and talk to the speakers in between session, and there’s usually an attendee party where the speakers are specifically instructed to come hang out with the people that pay for them. Every year I recognize a number of returning folks. I presented three sessions covering various aspects of Active Directory troubleshooting and recovery, and shopped around version 1.0 of some AD troubleshooting flowcharts. I also did a nice little interview with Josh Hoffman for AppAssure on AD recovery. Last night I spend a little time with the Windows IT Pro crowd (a rowdy bunch!) at MiX, the nightclub at the top of THEHotel at the Mandalay. I’m not a nightclubber – this was the first time I’d been there in at least five years of coming here – but the view of the Strip from the north balcony of this southside hotel was simply jawdropping. Fortunately, a vendor was springing for the hideously expensive drinks.

On the downside, I won’t be seeing the gang at the spring Windows Connections in Orlando; the organizers had to cancel it due to the slow economy. On the plus side, I was invited to do a couple of sessions at a new conference in the spring, a virtualization summit, at the Bellagio in Vegas. So, on the road again for conference season (March and April) next spring – virtualization, (hopefully) MVP summit, possibly TEC, possibly Tech Ed. I’d like to do some European gigs like I’ve done in the past, but you never can tell what will materialize.

Technorati Tags: Windows Connections,virtualization

The REPADMIN Reference

REPADMIN is the main utility Active Directory administrators use for checking replication. It’s very powerful and can provide a ton of insight about what’s going on between your domain controllers as they merrily pass those little objects and attributes amongst each other. However, as any less-than-experienced or part-time AD admin can tell you, there are a number of pain points around working with it:

• It’s huge. REPADMIN has 69 possible commands between its old (deprecated) command set, current ones, and expert “we warned you not to break your AD” advanced ones. And most commands have a stack of switches and parameters. Even the help on how you can specify a list of domain controllers for the command prints out to three pages!
• The syntax is byzantine – even the help is. There are three levels of help within the utility, and the syntax is different for each and can change between the product releases. I mean, who ever heard of /?:<command> ? Oh, and it falls into that special category of command line utilities from hell where if you don’t get the syntax exactly right, it simply spits the general help file back at you with no hint as to what you’ve done wrong. This is clearly a case where a few hours spent by the developer will save thousands of hours administrator’s time across the globe.
• The output is equally complex and takes experience to understand.
• There are few scenario-based examples on how to use the tool – which is the handiest approach. After all, most REPADMIN users are using it to solve a specific problem.

This is okay-ish for dedicated, experienced AD admins; they can impress their geek friends at TEC with their superior knowledge :). But the majority of AD admins in the world aren’t dedicated; they have other things to do as well. (Microsoft’s TAGM – technical audience global marketing – says the majority of IT pros are generalists that have to do many roles.) These people visit REPADMIN occasionally as needed, and can remember two or three commands. They have to look up the rest, either from their own notes, an article, general searching, or trial and error. And there’s so much REPADMIN can do, even the dedicated AD admins can usually find new cool things to do.

After whining about this on a Directory Services MVP conference call with the DS team, I learned that back in 2008 Microsoft published a comprehensive (111-page!) reference document on REPADMIN, including various scenarios. The document is available on Microsoft Downloads at http://bit.ly/16xir3; every AD admin should have a local soft copy they can CTL+F their way through.

It does not include Windows Server 2008 updates, but it’s a huge help to those of us used to squinting at syntax in command prompts.

Technorati Tags: microsoft,repadmin,Active Directory,replication,Active Directory replication,replication troubleshooting

First Look & Listen At Dallas’ New Winspear Opera House

We’ve been fortunate to attend two grand openings during our time here in Dallas, once in 1989 and again today . I don’t mean gallery openings or restaurant openings; I mean the kind of opening that happens about once every 50 years for a type of venue.

In 1989 we attended the gala opening of the Morten H. Meyerson Symphony Center (aka “The Mort” for obvious reasons), a stunning design by the famous architect I.M. Pei, and the only concert hall he ever did. Twenty years later on Sunday afternoon, almost to the month, we attended the Spotlight Concert for the Margot & Ted Winspear Opera House right next door.

Everyone associated with the Opera, whether they’re attendees or performers, has been looking forward to this event for quite some time. The Dallas Opera has been performing in the Fair Park Music Hall almost since its inception. The Music Hall is cavernous (3420 seats), dark, cramped backstage, and very difficult to hear if you aren’t in orchestra or first balcony seats. I’ve spent many hours backstage in those dingy dressing rooms, so I personally can’t wait to see how the Winspear improves on them.

In contrast, the Winspear is very sleek and modern from the outside, with a large moveable louver “roof” to shade it from the Texas sun, and glass windows that are supposed to slide up and down as weather permits. It’s almost a third smaller than the Music Hall, seating 2200 people. The structure surrounding the Margaret McDermott concert hall is covered in a hard red plastic, with red neon lights inside it to display entrance names, floor levels, and even the opera house’s name. There are cantilevered stairs with exposed steps and glass-plus-chrome railings all the way up to the fifth level; it’s actually not for someone that has a fear of heights. The concert hall inside has sort of a mid-century Modern look with a bit of a Scandinavian twist. Its most prominent feature, I think, are the sculpted metal bands that ring the concert hall and (I presume) diffuse the direct sound from the stage. It has mahogany floors that may be good for acoustics, but is very distracting when they meet a latecomer during the concert wearing heels. Tap, tap, tap…does anyone ever think of taking their shoes off? It’s a thrill to walk into a distinctive concert hall like the Winspear, or the Mort, or the Disney in Los Angeles, for the very first time. I never get tired of showing visitors around the Meyerson. And there’s an extra thrill when you know you’re among the first to see the hall, period.

The Spotlight concert was a free but only word-of-mouth advertised event, held partly to thank Texas Instruments and Margaret McDermott, widow of one of TI’s founders, for their sponsorship. We got in “legally”, but hey, I’m a fifteen year TI alumnus so I didn’t feel out of place.

The main reason for the concert, however, was to test the sound of the hall for the first time. To do this, you must have bodies in seats as any concert hall sounds very different with our sound-absorbing and scattering bodies than it sounds empty. This was made immediately evident as Bob Essert of Sound Space Design of London, the chief acoustician of the hall’s design, set up an unusual speaker on stage. Instructing us to be quiet while he held up his hand, he ran a series of frequency sweeps and bursts of white noise to document the hall’s frequency response and latency with our warm bodies in it. With that completed, the concert began with Opera Music Director Graeme Jenkins leading the Opera Orchestra, chorus, and soloists.

Maestro Jenkins had selected a range of pieces, from very intimate piano and violin chamber music to the huge finale of Die Meistersinger with chorus, organ, onstage brass and percussion, and the 85-piece orchestra. I’m guessing he selected the wide range to check out how the hall sounded in different situations. Unfortunately, the audience was apparently shy of seasoned concertgoers. I suspect many of them, with little kids in tow, were there more to see the hall than sit through a somewhat lengthy concert. Children were more in evidence than usual on this Sunday afternoon, and for a particularly quiet chamber piece the Maestro turned around and asked if the children that couldn't keep quiet be kept outside for the duration of the piece. Seems a bit harsh at first, but when you consider that the main purpose of the concert was to hear and tune the hall – not the audience – a little cooperation would have been nice. The little girl and her parents behind us did NOT leave, so we were treated to 10 minutes of torture as we alternated between trying to focus on the piano / violin piece and hearing the girl just behind us. Unless we had the distraction of ANOTHER woman clicking into the hall on her heels. <sigh>

The sound of the hall was instantly, clearly different than the Meyerson. Very crisp, very dry. I’m not an expert at describing such things, but it was also the general consensus of other concertgoers we talked to. I guess this would translate to a more dominant high frequency response than the Mort, but the sound doesn’t ‘hang’, or echo about the place. It’s much less resonant than the Mort. There’s a surprising amount of detail you can hear from the orchestra – and remember, they’re in the pit in front of and under the stage. You can hear practically every note, good or bad.

There’s work to be done acoustically and physically, of course. I thought there was a little TOO much volume out of the pit, which overbalanced the soloists. Odd sound reflections, causing us to wonder if there was an offstage band or not. Separating of woodwinds and brass across the pit from each other, which created a disjointed sound. And several people crashed to the floor that afternoon; one tripped over a taped-down microphone cable, another stepped off an unmarked 4-inch riser in rear orchestra. And I really hope they just haven’t installed the hydraulic closers on the inner concert hall doors yet; the sound of a door thudding shut should not be heard in a $354 million dollar performance hall.

Technorati Tags: Winspear Opera House,Winspear,Dallas Opera,Dallas