Robert MacLean's questions

I understand IO wait when I see it on a server, it means that the CPU is blocked while I wait for the IO to catch up [source].

I am trying to understand why a SAN stats would show a high IO wait - does this indicate that the SAN CPU is blocked by the SAN disk or is it something else?

What options are recommended for indexing Exchange mailboxes with SharePoint?

So far I have found the following:

• I found one article, which mentions that you can add http://<fqdn>/exchange and/or http://<fqdn>/exchange/user_alias as a content source, but as I have very limited expierence with Exchange I have no idea what those URI's are for and what it would be indexing
• I found a bunch of third party options which seem promising - so any feedback on them would be beneficial
• The third option I found is that Exchange supports Journaling which can be used to send mail to SharePoint which I can then search using built in SharePoint features? This seems to be a very interesting option, from a SharePoint perspective, as it means I can leverage existing SharePoint skills and features (like the security model) to get fine grained control. However I am not sure what the con's to this option are?

Using Windows 7 Virtual PC to create a virtual machine, I know you can sysprep the VHD and then you are able to use it to dual boot using the Win7 boot from VHD mode.

However can you take that VHD later and load it in Virtual PC? I suspect another sysprep will be needed to change the drivers.

We are migrating our current intranet to Drupal 6 and there is a lot of data within the current system which can be classified into:

• List data, general lists of fields. Common use is phone list of the employees phone numbers.
• Document repository. Just basically a web version of a file share for documents.

I can easily get the data + meta infomation out, but how do I bulk upload the two types of data into Drupal, as uploading the hundred of thousands of items manually is just not acceptable.

Multi-homed is the term that I have heard for being connected to a LAN at the same time as being connected to the internet via something like a wireless connection.

I have heard that this is so serious that certain large companies I have heard of make it an instantly fireable offense.

The way it's been explain is that Joe Hacker will compromise the machine via the internet connection and then have access to the LAN.

My questions on this is,

1. Is this really a massive security hole?
2. How (if any) does this differ from being connected to a VPN? Is that not the same thing.
3. How (if any) does this differ from being connected to a LAN and public wireless network at the same time?
4. How do you protect from this, both for the being connected to the LAN and being connected wireless and also the VPN scenario?

In Win7 you can attach a VHD as a drive, however after a reboot the VHD is no longer attached. Is there anyway to make it permanent?

I have two machines (A & B), machine A has to be able print to a local printer. The issue is that the problem it can't have any printers connected to it (network or local) - so what I want to do is redirect the printing to machine B which does have a printer.

In my mind that means that the printer on machine A will be a software printer (like those Adobe PDF ones) and it sends the request to machine B.

Is there such software like this or another way to do this?

Update:

• It is on a network and can browse network shares, however the users that will make use of it have no physical access to it only via remote desktop like sharing. They need to click print on it and it must print on their local printer.
• It will be printing from a limited number of apps, although I have no control of that.
• It is a Windows OS on both machines.

Update 2:

There are two reasons why I am looking for a generic solution for this problem:

• Short Answer: Trying to get the users to think as little as possible.
  Long Answer: The users are mobile, so the list of printers available can change and is not the same for each user. On their machines (machine B) they are aware enough to choose the correct one. If they had lots of printers setup on machine A, as they move around and connect to it they may get confused.

• Short Answer: The costs of manual setup are prohibitive.
  Long Answer: As the users move around and can connect remotely (from some of the furtherest least connected parts of the country which is South Africa) going to each user and setting it up to reflect their the correct printers and maintaining it when printers are added/removed is very high. Ideally a software solution that we can distribute should lower costs.

Microsoft has WSUS which is great for the Microsoft products it supports (and it doesn't support all Microsoft products), but in reality companies have many applications from other vendors.

Is there a patch/update management server similar to WSUS, but that works with lots of vendors or developers?

Update
Some good soul decided to change the server tag to a Windows tag - Note that this is NOT just for Windows. If you know a good patch server that runs on Linux or Apple then those are perfect too.

Firefox adoption in the home/personal user base seems to be growing fine, but adoption in the enterprise is not going anywhere quickly.

My view on this is because SysAdmins are not promoting it within the organisations because Internet Explorer has features which make it more acceptable to an enterprise, such as

• Managing settings via GPO
• Integration into the rest of the update stack
• Support of common business applications

So what would you add to Firefox to get it more promotion by SysAdmins in the enterprise?

I am wondering if there is a way to change the group policy settings for accounts without using the GUI tools (GPMC or the GPO editor MMC snap in). In other words can I can change these settings via a registry change or by using a tool like PowerShell? The idea is to automate this so it can be applied to a number of servers quickly without having to fire up a GUI.

The key values I am interested in is:

• Log on locally
• Log on as a service

After upgrading to Drupal 6.12 I can no longer access the admin section on my site - I get a page not found error.
Things I've been able to test/check:

• I have clean URLs enabled but trying to bypass them doesn't work either, and urls in the rest of the site are fine. So I doubt it's that.
• The menu_router table is also looks fine.
• I've confirmed the .htaccess is setup correct and so is Mod_Rewrite.
• The rest of the site works fine
• I have set the base url in the settings.php with no effect
• I had rootcandy for the theme for the admin section and have removed that to be sure.

Any ideas for other things to try?

Most projectors I have available display fine at 1024x768, except that resolution is very low. If I up the resolution to 1280x1024 the image is still displayed, however the text quality drops.

Is there any solution to having a high resolution on a projector while maintaining quality of the image? Besides the obvious solution of buying a better projector ;)

I am looking for a way to run a script¹ when a user logs in² AND and when they log out³ on their⁴ Windows⁵ machine.

Notes:

1. Perfect world script would mean Powershell script, but any script or application would be acceptable.
2. Log in can mean at machine start too, but user log in would be ideal.
3. Log out can mean machine shutdown too, but user log out would be ideal.
4. This machine is not on a domain.
5. The Windows version is Windows Vista.

I asked previously if there are good reasons to partition disks on Windows, and one of the big ones was for splitting data and OS. So that should you reinstall, you do not need to worry about the data (i.e. the partition with the OS gets wiped, while the data one remains).

Windows 7 allows you to have a VHD (virtual hard drive) file as a drive in the OS natively. My thinking is that you now have one partition and you create a VHD with the data on it. That way moving from machine to machine or reinstalling you just need a copy of the VHD. You could have two partitions still and dedicate one for the VHD, which gives a best of both scenario.

Is there any pitfalls or issues that could occur in this scenario?

When using Microsoft Outlook with Exchange (not the online only mode) a Sync Issues folder that appears in the local PST folder. From the link above I know why it exists - but often that information is not needed (sync issues caused by the fact you are not on the network, and haven't switched to offline mode).

For users besides the space consumption, the fact there is a folder called issues with a big number next to it worries them. So my question is, what are effective methods of managing this? Can be server side (such as settings) or client side (such as rules).

If you do have a suggestion that is specific to a version of Exchange or Outlook please indicate that version.

I have worked at a few hosting companies and seen two schools of thought on this

1. Do not allow customers into the server room. The argument is basically it raises security (this news story is normally provided as a reason that security is only good if you know the people) and privacy and that if you provide a local terminal for them it is good enough.
2. Allow customers into the server room because people need access to their machines and it makes a good show piece.

Is there any reasons (such as legal, compliance etc...) that you should not allow people into the server room?

In the perfect world I could get everything I want, however budgets for new laptops are low so I normally can get a user a laptop + additional RAM (to at least 4Gb). This has been mostly motivated by Vista's RAM eating abilities - however I have always thought that putting in a faster drive (i.e. not the standard 5400rpm drive) would have a bigger benefit.

What would you put (more RAM or faster disk) in for laptops running Vista/Office AND Win7 or XP/Office (since they are less of a RAM hog)?

I have always used hardware based RAID because it (IMHO) is on the right level (feel free to dispute this), and because OS failures are more common to me than hardware issues. Thus if the OS fails the RAID is gone and so is the data, whereas - on a hardware level regardless of OS - the data remains.

However on a recent Stack Overflow podcast they stated they would not use hardware RAID as software RAID is better developed and thus runs better.

So my question is, is there any reasons to choose one over the other?

Very simply what software KVM's would you recommend for using on Windows?

There seems to be a lot of confusion around having multiple partitions for Windows. Some of the theories I have heard are

• It's faster to move to a new partition start than searching for a file start
• If you need to format it's easier since the data is on the other partition
• Putting swap file on a separate partition increases performance
• File/Folder level security

Generally I found the data one to be true, but in that scenario I would rather have separate disks since those will be faster.

In short my question is, is there any truth to the above theories and are there any other reasons to partition a disk?