Christopher Edwards's questions

sIs anyone using Hyper-V Production Checkpoints as an enhancement to Storage Replica? My thinking is that since Storage Replica is only crash consistent if we take hourly Production Checkpoints on the source server/cluster and keep them for 24 hours we will add the capability to fall back to a Production Checkpoint (or go back in time 24 hours) from our replica server, useful in a DR situation if the crash consistent copy turns out to be problematic. This would match the snapshot ability of Hyper-V Replica.

Has anyone done this, or read about anyone else doing this, in production?

EDIT: For clarity what I am talking about is the following:-

Server A is a Hyper-V host that has a main volume that has all the VM data stored on it including the checkpoint files. Server B has an identical volume which is kept synchronised with the main volume on Server A using Storage Replica. In order to provide for VSS application consistent recovery in the event of a DR situation a script is used to create Production Checkpoints say every hour on Server A. The same script deletes any checkpoint older than 24 hours, which will cause it to be merged in. In the event of a DR event where Server A is lost if Server B is brought online and the crash consistent Storage Replica of a particular VMs drives causes issues (say there is a database application with corruption causing DB not to mount etc.) then the Production Checkpoint can be used to restore the VM to an earlier time with a fully consistent VSS image.

The replication of checkpoints might significant increase the churn so real world testing would be needed to see how well this performs. Adding the Production Checkpoints to this Storage Replica scenario would match the features offered by Hyper-V Replica.

Has anyone tested this, done this, or read about any one doing this?

We have Seamless SSO with Pass through authentication and Azure AD Free. This is all in place to allow access to PowerBI to work "seamlessly". We also have Office 365 but it isn't being used.

What I would like to do is block access to PowerBI from outside the network. Is there any way I can achieve this without upgrading to Azure AD Prem?

I have a Hyper-V host that has it's performance bound by the storage subsystem, which is a RAID 10 array.

I'd like to add two SSD PCIe cards and use them to create a mirrored fast tier using Windows 2012R2 tiered storage.

The question is how should I determine how large my fast tier should be? I can run the Storage Tier Optimization Report after I have bought and installed the SSDs, and find out whether they are correctly sized but how do I run the report before I install the SSDs?

Please note this question is about Azure Active Directory Domain Services - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/services/active-directory-ds/

Not the similarly named Azure Active Directory - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/active-directory/

If I have an Azure site-to-site VPN to the vnet on which Azure Active Directory Domain Services is installed can I join an on premises server or client to the Azure Active Directory Domain Services domain.

An organisation whose IT I'm involved with has offices in a country which blocks access to various well know services such as Skype. I can get around the issue by routing all the traffic over IPSec to the HQ office but that has limited bandwidth.

Is there any way I could route all the traffic via an IPSec connection to a cloud provider and break out to the Internet there? I could either use a dedicated service for this purpose, if such a thing exists, or build a service using a generic cloud provider and a gateway product.

I have tried using Azure but this does not seem to be achievable.

I have a working windows deployment server set up on 2008 R2 which can image machines successfully with en-GB images of Windows 7 SP1.

However when I boot into the Install.WIM the Images are all listed as en-US. How do I get them to be listed as en-GB?

One of our customers habitually use very long path names (several nested folders, with long names) and we routinely encounter "user education issues" in order to shorten the path to less than 260 characters.

Is there a technical solution available, can we flick some sort of switch in Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 to say "yeah just ignore these historical problems, and make +260 character path name work".

P.S. I have read and been totally unedified by Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces

Does anyone know of any setting or third party software which forces print jobs to be printed in the order they are submitted?

Does anyone know of any alternatives or competitors to RWWGuard?

http://www.scorpionsoft.com/products/rwwguard2008/

I am looking for a two factor authentication system for Remote Web Workplace for Small Business Server 2008. RWWGuard seems good but a little expensive and also I'd like something to evaluate it against.

See Also - Small (Business) Server - Microsoft Windows Search or Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express

Can anyone tell me if they have Search Server Express 2010 Beta working on Small Business Server 2010, or indeed if it is supported. The only reference I can find is here, but given how scant it is I'm not sure I should trust it:-

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010setup/thread/12cf9846-b940-4441-9fc1-30016ea87e5c

I can't seem to input the "IIS APPPOOL\PoolName" 'account' into the Windows file/folder ACL setting GUI, it doesn't recognise the account.

I understand that this was a problem in vanilla Windows 2008 and you needed to use icacls, but it's supposed to work on Windows 2008 R2 in the GUI.

See - http://forums.iis.net/t/1156692.aspx

Any ideas?

Users would like to able to quickly search shared folders etc. on the server.

What are the PRO's and CON's of these two technologies?

NB: This server has SMTP installed, Exchange is not available to be installed on this box.

I'd like to set up a server to accept email for one domain. e.g. emails sent to [email protected] and then reroute these emails to a different domain address, say [email protected].

Is there any way to accomplish this?

Does any one know of a (preferably free) windows utility that recursively hashes all the files in a directory tree every x minutes and sends a notification if any files have changed.

I want to have a tool to notify me by email when any of the code files on a web server changes in order to know when the site has been hacked or compromised with malicious code.