Some of you have heard (or seen) that we've renamed DEC to The Expert's Conference, or TEC. Why? Well there are several reasons:

1. DEC is the acronym for the Directory Experts Conference. But DEC isn'just about directories, and hasn't been for several years. It includes ADFS, RMS, ILM, etc., etc.

2. We are also producing an Exchange expert's conference, along the same lines as DEC. But EEC and GEEC (for the Great Exchange Experts Conference) aren't great acronyms. OK, truthfully, I like them. Christine on the other hand just threw the back of her hand to her forehead and sighed dramtically. I've known Christine long enough to understand the non-verbal signal for "That ain't happening."

3. "The Experts Conference" has a good acronym: TEC. Sounds sort of, oh I don't know, technical. At least it does to a marketing person. Somtimes you have to go along to get along, know what I mean?

4. I got tired of confusing Wook. "Do you mean DEC my former company? Or DEC the conference?"

So we now have TEC for Directory and Identity, formerly known as DEC, and TEC for Exchange, formerly not known as anything, because, well, it's new. Make sense? No? Then start reading at the beginnig of the post again until you get it.

TEC/Directory and Identity and TEC/Exchange are separate conferences, but they will be colocated in 2009. TEC 2009 is scheduled for March 22-25 at the Green Valley Ranch Resort in Las Vegas (or Henderson for people with finicky travel policies) Nevada. So everyone who spent the entire year griping about Chicago in 2008, you can just shut the he** up .  We will also be hosting TEC Europe September 14-16 in Berlin (Germany, not North Dakota).

What are we going to cover? For AD, we'll focus more on real-world WS 2008 AD deployment and operational topics, what's coming in AD for Windows 7, plus the usual how-does-it-really-work type sessions. There will be lots of coverage for ILM '2' and ADFS '2' because both products will be just about ready to RTM. We will continue our coverage of RMS (which seems to be picking up a lot traction this year), and AD/LDS and GPO management will figure prominently as well. There will be 4 pre-conference hands-on workshops on Sunday, too.

For Exchange, the bulk of the sessions will be related to Exchange 2007, including Powershell, unified communications, architecting for performance and scalability, a MAPI deep-dive, and troubleshooting. We might be able to include some E14 content as well, but that will depend on the product team. We are planning on two pre-con hands-on workshops on Sunday as well.

The main TEC website is at http://www.tec2009.com, and the call for papers is now open for both conferences. Please get your session proposals in soon, because registration for the conferences goes live August 25, and I'd like to have the agendas pretty well firmed up by then.

If you have any questions, drop me an email.

See you at TEC!

Dave Lundell tagged me for the Scripting/Sys Admin meme.

How old were you when you started using computers?

Oh my. Lessee, I started with flowcharting in 10th grade in 1971 (we had a class, no kidding). I first started using a computer when I was 17. It was an IBM 360/65 if I recall correctly. I had access to the school districts's mainframe through an ASR33 teletype and a very primitive Harvard Basic interpreter.

What was the first real script you wrote?

It was a JCL script to compile, load, and run a Fortran program I was working on. Punch cards, baby!

What scripting languages have you used?

Wow. That's a tough one.... my memory sucks. JCL,  SIMSCRIPT (not sure if that qualifies), RPG, whatever the job control language on the CDC Cyber 70 and the old Westinghouse mainframes was, a really cool scripting language at Lawrence Livermore Labs that I don't think had a name, PROC and ENGLISH (on a Microdata minicomputer running REALITY, the first commercial Pick OS), the scripting language under PRIMOS (Prime), FOCAL (DEC PDP-8), MUMPS, whatever ran on the VAX, whatever ran on the DG Nova 3/4 and DG MV8000, INFOS, TCL, BATCH, LISP, C-Brief (thanks for reminding me Dave!), a couple of scripting languages that I developed myself, sh, BASH, DOS batch, java script, VB Script, JScript, CScript, Powershell.

What was your first professional sysadmin gig?

I've never been a professional sysadmin; I've always been a developer. But I managed the IT operations for American Medical Laboratories for about 6 months. It was a 24x7 kind of setup, and most of the staff worked in drone-mode, so I routinely got calls at 2:30 in the morning: "The terminal in Hematology is frozen, what should I do?" "The same thing I told you to do when the terminal in Cytology was frozen. Turn it off, then turn it on. Those cable runs too long and aren't properly shielded, and when the techs run the purge cycle on their machines, the transients freak out the RS-232 circuitry." I swear, sometimes I had to get up at 2am, get dressed, and drive to the lab, just to discover the loose RS-232 connector on the terminal.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new sysadmins, what would it be?

Things fail for a reason, and they work for a reason. Don't try to fix it until you know why it failed, and don't accept "Well, it seems to work now". Voodoo programming (and voodoo system management) is EVIL.

What's the most fun you've ever had scripting?

I vaguely recall some sort of hack war with another dev at a company I was working at. We were both using a big Prime minicomputer. He wrote a phantom (daemon) that would send me gratuitous messages. Then I would kill his pahntom, and he would restart it. Then I wrote a script to kill his phantom whenever it appeared. Then he wrote a script to automatically start his phantom when it was killed. Finally I wrote a script that would kill his phantom, send him a message, log his terminal session off, and then automatically spawn itself, and so on.

I won.

Who am I calling out?

Ulf B. Simon-Weidner

Jorge de Almeida-Pinto

Hello Secure World is a website set up by Microsoft to promote Windows security. The Microsoft Business Marketing Organization (BMO) and Tri-Digital worked with us on DEC 08 in Chicago to record some of the more security-related sessions, and they are now available on the HSW site. Start at the main page, sit through the intro (or click the Skip link), and click the "Inside the DEC" link.

IIRC, we recorded 10 of the sessions. Currently four of the RMS-related sessions are available; I believe that the BMO rotates the 10 sessions through the site.

Is this a usable format for you? Would you like to see all of the DEC content recorded this way?

Seems like everyone is a big fan of George Carlin now that he's dead. I loved his earlier stuff, back in the early to mid 70's, but then I guess the drugs and alcohol made him stupid and he dropped off the radar for a while. In his most recent incarnation he always struck me as angry and mean-spirited, and I found little joy in listening to him. But I ran into this clip recently, and I have to say it is genius. It comes across as sort of an old white-guy rap.

I'll be hosting the Active Directory Disaster Recovery Workshop (based on the one that Guido Grillenmeier and I put together) at TechMentor in Las Vegas Oct 13th. It will be hands on, but you'll have to bring your own machine to run the VMs. There will be some changes in the workshop agenda as well. I want to spend a little more time on the actual DR planning process vs. the mechanics of recovering deleted data, and I want to incorporate the changes in WS08 DR as well.

If you plan on being there, please leave a comment as to whether you'd rather see VMWare or Virtual PC images.

Here's a cool promo video for TechMentor:

-g

From Steven Stevenson:

Installing tools on Server 2008  - Especially SQL 2005 64 bit (New UAC user controls limit even Administrators group permissions on what it considers system based exe's - right click and run as administrator where permissions denied.)

1.  make sure after you have installed applications you bring up server manager 2.  Add Role and choose iiS.

        Make sure these items checked

        - Check all Common HTTP Features

        - Check all Application Development

        - HTTP Logging

        - logging  tools

        - Tracing

        - Security

        - Windows Auth

        - URL Auth

        - Request Filtering

        - IP and Domain restrictions

        - All Management tools (especially iis 6.0 compatibility as this affects some of SQL installation tests)

        - all FTP publish Service

2.5 Add Features

        - .Net 3.0 (Rumor has it this will install .net 2.0 automatically.)

3. Run this Script cscript

%SystemDrive%\inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs setw3svc/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 0

        - If you dont you end up with ASP.net Warning in testing of SQL install and Reporting Services will not install

4. Install tools.  MagicISO Virtual CD/DVD has a mounting application freeware that works with 2008 Server

5. If you need to add dll to system searchable path and be able to load it you must put them in the sysWOW64 folder

Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music