slag's questions

We have AD FS 3.0, working well. A new Relying Party Trust has been set up - again, it works well. However, there's a business (security) requirement for Same Sign-on rather than Single Sign-On, that is, we want the user to be required to enter their credentials each time for this Relying Party.

To do this, I've configured a Custom Primary Authentication Policy for this Relying Party, with the Users are required to provide credentials each time at sign in box ticked.

This doesn't seem to work - users are redirected from the third-party site to our Federation Server, but are then authenticated to the third-party site without being asked to enter their credentials.

Is there something obvious I've missed? What else should I check?

Can't get an HP 8200 Elite Small Form Factor to boot from USB. It's done so in the past & the USB boot drive works in a different machine (HP 8440p laptop).

Have tried upgrading BIOS (from 2.09 to 2.15a, then back to 2.14a) with no luck.

USB drive appears in BIOS "Device Configuration" list, but not in "Boot Order". USB Hard Drive is set highest in the BIOS "Boot Order" list.

What simple, obvious thing am I missing here?

I have a VMware ESXi 5 environment running on Fujitsu BX922S2 blade servers, connecting to a Fujitsu DX90 SAN.

I've had no problem with RAID5 volumes, but RAID10 volumes (for MSSQL) are exhibiting ridiculous write latency - up over 1000 ms at times, and never lower than about 30 ms. These latency figures are being measured in VMware, using the Performance tab for the SQL server concerned, changing to Advanced, then switching to Datastore view.

The DBA noticed this, and wrote a quick script to continuously create a 1GB file on the server.

Migrating the SQL logs drive to a RAID 5 volume on the same SAN shows no perceptible write latency.

Can anyone point to anything obvious I've configured incorrectly that would cause this?

I'm trying to set up a template Server 2k8 R2 (Standard) VM in our VMware ESXi environment, we'll need to deploy a whole lot of them and I want to (a) streamline and (b) standardise the server build process.

Originally I built a sysprep answer file using WAIK and the Windows System Image Manager - once I'd run sysprep using this, restarting the machine resulted in a "autochk.exe not found - skipping autocheck" message, followed almost immediately by a BSOD. Rebooting just resulted in the same thing.

I first assumed it was my answer file, but have now checked this on a physical machine and it works fine.

I've reinstalled the OS on the machine (and NOTHING else), and run sysprep.exe (ticking Generalize) - this produces exactly the same result.

I've also attempted to use the Customisation Wizard built in to VMware - again, the same autocheck message and BSOD is the result.

Any ideas? Let me know any further information I need to provide...