I've never been much a LinkedIn maven. I suspect I'm like most people and I keep adding people to my LinkedIn network, but I never really use it for anything. But I got an InMail from Eric Aarts today that made me think I need to start poking my nose into LinkedIn (and Plaxo for that matter) a little more. It turns out you can post events on LinkedIn, and people can indicate whether they are going or not. I suppose you can then use that information to set up meetings and so on.

Eric pointed out that TEC 09 is on LinkedIn now. You can check it out here.

Pam Dingle made some nice comments about TEC in this blog entry.

Interestingly, there will be several shorter keynotes for TEC 09 Day 1, one from each of the product teams. I think this will work out better than the single 90 minute keynote we have done in the past.

The last couple of months have been a bit of a blur. Quest acquired NetPro towards the end of September, and since then I've been traveling and meeting other parts of the team(s), and gradually figuring out what my job should be. I'm officially part of Quest's Active Directory and Identity Management business unit, and I report to John Milburn who heads up the BU. John's a really great guy who came up through the systems engineering and product management route, and we get along just fine. My role at Quest is similar to what I was doing at NetPro, with the main difference that I now have more direct involvement with the product planning process, which is something I've been missing over the last couple of years. I will be working with a team of PMs and architects to investigate new technology opportunities for Quest, as well as act as the "public face" of the business unit. That means I get to continue meeting with customers, writing articles (and books!), speaking at conferences, and continue in my role as host of The Experts Conference.

I have had nightmares (well, that's overstating it a bit. Maybe "bad feelings" is a better term) that Quest marketing would take over TEC and turn it into a drivel-laden corporate megaphone event. But Quest marketing has held true to their word that they will leave TEC alone, and Christine, Stella, and I get to run the conference the way we think it should be run, as a community-building educational event. I can't tell you how happy I am about that. In fact Christine and I were working on the opening ceremonies today, and if everything works out according to plan, it's going to be hilarious.

TEC 2009 is actually two conferences: TEC for Directory and Identity (formerly DEC), which will be focused on Microsoft IdA technologies, and TEC for Exchange, which will be focused on Exchange and Unified Communications. Registrations for TEC/D+I are doing great; we're ahead of where we were this time last year, and the pre-conference labs are filling up quickly as well. A lot of the "usual gang" will be there: Guido, Laura Hunter, James Booth, Jorge, Ulf, Joe Kaplan, the Tribe of Brians (Puhl, Desmond, and Komar), etc. Dean Wells is a question mark right now given his new role at Microsoft, but I'm pretty confident I can make a good case to Dean and his boss that Dean should make an appearance, or even better do a session. joe's situation is perhaps more nebulous; HP (like a lot of companies) is clamping down on travel. But we go through some flavor of this drama every year, and I'm hopeful joe will be able to make it as well. TEC without Dean and joe would be like a baseball game without beer and hotdogs... still enjoyable, but not quite right. (The question as to whether Dean is the beer or the hot dog is left to the reader.)

Registrations for TEC/Exchange are a little light for my liking. I expected that would be the case; after all, NetPro wasn't really known in the Exchange community, but Quest definitely is. We've got a pretty solid lineup of speakers as well: Ilse van Criekinge, Michael B. Smith, Evan Dodds, Brian Posey, and Brett Shirley (yes that Brett Shirley) for starters. We've got a great keynote speaker for TEC/Exchange as well, but I can't say who it is till the press release hits. Hint: Think large scale, hosted Exchange. So pass the word on to your Exchange buddies. TEC/D+I has been one of the best conferences around since day 1, and TEC/Exchange will be likewise. Check out http://www.tec2009.com for more information.

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 don't know who the hell Matt is, or where the hell Matt is, but damn, I think he's the greatest.

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