My colleague Eckhard sent me these pictures from Hamburg, Germany. It is of the construction of a new retail store on the main shopping street in Hamburg. You might think that it would be a new Microsoft store, but you would be wrong. Look carefully at the “Windows” logo. What’s wrong with it? Are the blue and green squares in the right place? Why no, they’re not!

It turns out this is of the new Apple Store. Nice to see someone in a large corporate marketing department has a sense of humor. Good one, Apple!

The priority of backwards-compatibility in the Microsoft development culture is sometimes overlooked. Check out this video of upgrading a single machine from DOS/Win 1.x through each successive version of Windows up to Windows 7. You can still run many (most?) 20-year old DOS and Win 1 apps on Windows 7. http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/absolutely-brilliant-windows-upgrades-through

If you hadn't heard, Quest Software acquired NetPro (press release). The whole deal was done rather quickly, and I have to say I was surprised by the whole evolution of events. I figured we'd be acquired by someone at some point, but I didn't see this one coming.

As you can imagine, one of my biggest concerns has been what will happen to DEC (now TEC). Quest has been jealous of DEC for quite a while, and I've had nightmares about Quest turning it into some giant sales and marketing fiasco. But I've been informed by people up and down the organization that they want TEC to continue just as it is. One of the Quest marketing people even said something to the effect of "We don't want anything to do with it; we'll just mess it up. You've got a great thing going and we just want to leave it alone." That's certainly great to hear, and it gives Christine and me a pretty good confort level that TEC will continue to be a great event for the Microsoft IdA community to meet and learn. And in fact that's going to be my primary focus for the next several months.

I've spent a little time with the Quest product teams (product management mostly, along with some R&D guys), and I've been pleasantly surprised both at the quality of the people (they're all really sharp) and of the process of product line integration. Everyone has had an open mind, there haven't been any agendas or significant politics, and everyone is on the same page as far as bringing the best products and features forward to our customers. I really expect to see substantial improvements in the Quest product line as we go forward.

Corporate acquisitions are usually complicated, messy affairs, and often don't net out very well, but this one seems to be off to a pretty good start.

I run WS08 on my laptop, mostly so I can run Hyper-V, but also because it seems to provide a better Vista experience than Vista does. Part of what I like about WS08 is Windows Server Backup. WSB has some quirks and hassles (e.g. system state backup is just awful), but for the basic "back up your machine to a hard disk" scenarios, it's easy and fast. I generally back up to my BFS[1] over the network, which takes about 20 minutes for a full 90GB.

I've been building virtual machine images for the workshops I'm doing for Pacific IT Pros next week, and after I got the Active Directory Disaster Recovery VMs all put to bed, I thought it would be a good time to back up the machine. I ran WSB and tried to perform a full backup to the BFS, and I received the error "Volume Shadow Copy Service operation failed. Error 0x800423f0. Backup not started." Ick, I was not expecting that.

A little poking around determined that the error was due to the inability of one of the VSS writers to create a consistent snapshot prior to the backup. I ran VSSADMIN to see if it would provide a clue, with the following results:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6001]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>vssadmin list writers
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Writer name: 'Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer'
   Writer Id: {66841cd4-6ded-4f4b-8f17-fd23f8ddc3de}
   Writer Instance Id: {6162e336-7448-4371-93a7-29581512b103}
   State: [8] Failed
   Last error: Inconsistent shadow copy

Writer name: 'System Writer'
   Writer Id: {e8132975-6f93-4464-a53e-1050253ae220}
   Writer Instance Id: {b1c47cec-0e12-4ac6-b84b-9c1d8292a9f3}
   State: [5] Waiting for completion
   Last error: No error

Writer name: 'Registry Writer'
<... more similar stuff...>

The interesting bit is the Hyper-V entry. It apparently was the VSS writer that could not establish a consistent snapshot. Not coincidently, I had just finished up building a bunch of images with Hyper-V.

The cause of the problem: I built my VMs using differencing disks (a type of virtual disk that starts with a read-only base image, and writes all modifications to a separate image). To improve performance, I placed the base image on my laptop's internal drive, and the differencing images on an external USB drive. When I started the backups, I had disconnected the external USB drive. The VSS writer for Hyper-V tried to build a consistent snapshot of the differencing drives, and couldn't because the differencing images were offline. Hence the error.

I plugged the USB drive back in, and fired up the backup with no trouble at all.

Note to WSB product team: A little more effort in the error message department wouldn't hurt.

[1] BFS = big freakin' server

The intersection between those who develop software and those who write music is broad, and a source of constant amusement.

You Had Me At EHLO... : The Autodiscover Song

I dropped by the first Ignite Phoenix event last night (it was Kiry's birthday, so no way could I stay for the whole thing). Really interesting motif: Random speakers, random topics, 5 minutes, 20 slides, exactly 15 seconds per slide, go! Apparently Ignite is something that O'Reilly started a while ago, but this is the first time it has appeared in Phoenix. There were about 100 people in the room (at Jobing.com on the 2nd floor of the NetPro building, which was nice), and apparently about 40 more watching the video stream. The two talks I saw were interesting and pretty well done: a perspective on human vs. geologic time scales, and a discussion of the diversity of peanut butter & jelly sandwich styles (I am not making this up). If the remaining talks were as well done as the first two, then I would say I was impressed.

The population was largely 20-to-30-somethings, most with a tech bent as near as I could tell, although the woman sitting next to me was in PR/marketing. The point? I'm not entirely sure... networking, conversation, thought-provocation, hanging with some interesting people (and I guess drinking at the Half Moon afterwards).

Congrats to the Ignite for pulling off a fine event. I'll definitely participate in the next one.

I had a chance to speak to the Pacific IT Pros admin group meeting last night about diagnosing AD performance problems. I did the session over Live Meeting and the telephone, so it's difficult to say exactly how it all went. There were a lot of good questions, and I got a nice round of applause over the phone, so I guess it went ok. I did a demo of Server Performance Advisor also, and that went well too. Amazingly, almost 2 years after writing about SPA in Windows IT Pro magazine, only a couple of the 150 people present had ever used SPA.

One fellow asked if SPA would run on Windows 2000. I said yes, but I may be wrong about that, at least according to this KB article. I wonder if the issue is just not having the .Net 2.0 framework installed, or it its something deeper. SPA relies heavily on Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), and I know W2K AD was a ETW provider, so it should work. I'll to try it out.

There was another question about SPA providing Exchange performance information. The answer is no, not really. The Exchange store (in EXCH2003 and I presume in EXCH2007) provides ETW counters that you can collect with SPA, and there are a host of Exchange-related perf counters as well. And you can compose a new data colelctor in SPA easily. The tricky part is creating the report and rules, which requires some XML/XSL wrangling. In theory it should be doable, but in practice it will be hard, as there is nothing but a couple of samples to provide you guidance.

If you're an IT Pro-type person in the Northern California area, check out PacITPros. They host their meetings in San Francisco primarily, but the do live 'casts to other locations as well. They're very active, despite the relatively stale website. Check them out at www.pacitpros.org.