Alexander’s Blog

If you have been using Microsoft ActiveSync to synchronize your Windows Mobile powered devices in Windows XP and now are planning to upgrade your PC to Windows Vista, this blog entry is for you.

I recently did a fresh install of Windows Vista on a client laptop that was previously running Windows XP SP2. I wanted to make sure that Microsoft Outlook will synchronize with the Pocket PC Phone, just like it did in Windows XP. I assumed that the support for mobile devices is better on Windows Vista so that should be a no brainer. It turned out that I was completely wrong. Microsoft ActiveSync 4.2, which is the latest version of ActiveSync synchronization software for Windows Mobile powered devices, doesn’t work on Windows Vista. It only supports Windows XP and earlier versions. There is a Microsoft ActiveSync 4.5 Beta 2, which is also not supported on Windows Vista.

On Windows XP, you can use ActiveSync 4.2 to synchronize your PC via USB cable, Bluetooth, or infrared connection. According to Microsoft “If you have Windows Vista, your synchronization settings will be managed through the Windows Mobile Device Center. Windows Mobile Device Center is available through Windows Update and the Windows Mobile Device Center page.” I am sure there are good reasons, which I don’t know, for not including Windows Mobile Device Center in Windows Vista.

Although you can download the Windows Mobile Device Center (Beta 3 release) from Microsoft’s Web site, it is only meant for Windows Vista RC1. In addition, Microsoft recommends that you do not use this beta software on your production computer. To summarize, Windows Vista doesn’t support ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center is still in Beta and is only supported on Windows Vista RC1. Just out of curiosity, I downloaded and installed the Microsoft Windows Mobile Device Center Beta 3 for Windows Vista (published on 10/6/06), only to find out that it didn’t do the job.

After a lot of googling, I discovered a solution that involved hacking the registry to include a WHOS key. This solution posted on microsoftweblog.com finally solved the problem and showed me the update that was missing after running Windows Update. Here’s the solution.

1. Start the registry editor (regedit.exe).
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft.
3. Right-click the Microsoft key and then select New, Key and add a key called WHOS.
4. Reboot your computer (some people have been able to get this to work without rebooting but I had to reboot to see the results).
5. Run Windows Update. You will notice a new update that will allow you to configure and synchronize using Windows Mobile Device Center. You should reboot again after the update.
6. Configure your mobile device and synchronize with your Windows Vista PC.

Needless to say, there are some questions as to how well Windows Vista supports mobile devices. Windows Vista was RTM’d in November and as of today there is still no official replacement for Microsoft ActiveSync. In addition, you can only add one mobile device at a time in Windows Vista, which is not Microsoft’s intent but perhaps this is an issue because the Windows Mobile Device Center is still in beta. And there is still no support for podcasting.

Despite all these hassles with ActiveSync, do I still recommend that people upgrade their Windows XP computers to Windows Vista, the answer is ABSOLUTELY! The advantages of upgrading to Windows Vista far outweigh the disadvantages.

According to Microsoft “Broadly speaking, spyware is deceptive software that is installed on a user’s computer without the user’s consent and has some malicious purpose.”

Brian Livingston of WindowsSecrets.com disagrees with Microsoft definition. He states that “This is patently absurd. Many spyware programs, such as peer-to-peer file sharing applications, are knowingly installed with the user’s consent. The user downloads the software to get music, a screen saver, or whatever other benefit is promised. What makes a program spyware, among other things, is that it operates in ways that aren’t clearly disclosed before installation and it reports data back to a central server. Furthermore, this activity needn’t be malicious. Many spyware programs do nothing more than serving up targeted advertising or tracking anonymous marketing behavior. If a user wants such tracking functions, they might be fine. But if the user wasn’t clearly made aware of this, whether or not such software has a malicious purpose, it’s still spyware.”

The majority of security experts will agree with Brian Livingston’s argument that spyware does not have to be installed without the user’s consent and spyware does not have to have a malicious purpose. Here are some of the definitions of “spyware” that you’ll find on the Web.

Webopedia.com: Any software that covertly gathers user information through the user’s Internet connection without his or her knowledge, usually for advertising purposes.
Wikipedia.org: In simpler terms, spyware is a type of program that watches after what users do with their computer and then send this information to a hacker over the Internet.
CNET: One generally agreed upon definition of spyware states that it is software that tracks personal information about you and transmits that information to third parties.
Dictionary.com: Any software that covertly gathers information about a user while he/she navigates the Internet and transmits the information to an individual or company that uses it for marketing or other purposes.

Finally, The Anti-Spyware Coalition (ASC), headed by the Center for Democracy & Technology with support from industry giants America Online Inc., EarthLink Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Yahoo Inc. among others, has released a document designed to establish definitions that will bring clarity to anti-spyware vendors. The ASC is a group dedicated to building a consensus about definitions and best practices in the debate surrounding spyware and other potentially unwanted technologies.

ASC has two definitions of spyware. According to ASC, in its narrow sense, spyware is a term for Tracking Software deployed without adequate notice, consent, or control for the user. In its broader sense, Spyware is used as a synonym for what the ASC calls “Spyware and Other Potentially Unwanted Technologies.” In technical settings, ASC uses the term spyware only in its narrower sense and always marks it as such [spyware(narrow)]. However, the term spyware, when used generally in an ASC document always refers to the broader colloquial usage. This is how ASC defines spyware in the more common “broader sense.”

Spyware and other potentially unwanted technologies are described as those that “impair users’ control over: material changes that affect their user experience, privacy, or system security; use of their system resources, including what programs are installed on their computers; or collection, use, and distribution of their personal or otherwise sensitive information.”

All this debate about spyware definition leads to the privacy issues that most people are concerned about. I’ve written a couple of articles on privacy issues that you might be interested in.

By default Internet Information Services (IIS) is installed in c:\Inetpub\wwwroot folder. For security reasons, you should move it to another location, such as a different drive or partition. During installation you are not given the option to move IIS folders to a new location. However, there are a couple of ways of moving IIS to a different location. The first method is not suitable in all cases but is rather simple. The second method is the recommended method because it will update the registry entries appropriately.

METHOD 1
You can create a new folder on a different drive, e.g. E:\MyWebFiles and move all your files there. In IIS Manager simply point to the new location. This method will work for basic HTML code but has its limitation and is not appropriate for all Web sites.

METHOD 2
This is the recommended method. Create an unattend.txt file which will be used to install IIS. For more information on unattended installation of IIS, check out How To Perform an Unattended Installation of IIS 6.0.

Essentially, you need to point to the new path in the unattend.txt file.

[InternetServer]
PathFTPRoot=D:\Inetpub\NewFTProot
PathWWWRoot=D:\Inetpub\NewWWroot

For more information on configuring how to use the unattend.txt file check out the KB article How to Change the Default Installation Paths for FTP and the Web.

To get automatically notified when there are changes on a Web site, you can use a little-known feature called “Link Crawling”. This technology is supported in Internet Explorer 4.0 and later. You can configure your favorite URLs so Internet Explorer will check for updates on a scheduled basis. If there are updates, you can have Internet Explorer send you an email alert.

The procedure for configuring Link Crawling varies depending on your OS and Internet Explorer version. For example, on some versions you’ll right-click the Active Desktop and select Properties. Then you’ll click the Web tab. In Windows XP the procedure is slightly different. Here’s how you’ll configure Link Crawling on Windows XP. The procedure describes how to add TechGalaxy.net but you can add any Web site or picture on the Web.

1. Right-click the desktop and select Properties.

2. Click the Desktop tab.

3. Click on the Customize Desktop icon.

4. In the Desktop Items window, select the Web tab. You’ll notice My Current Home Page as the only item listed under Web pages.

5. On the Web tab of the Desktop Items, click on New and in the location box type the URL for the Web site e.g. http://www.techgalaxy.net. You can add live Web contents such as Web pages or pictures here.

6. Click Customize to further customize the desktop item or simply click OK.

7. Now you should have two items listed under Web pages, My Current Home Page and http://www.techgalaxy.net.

8. On the Web tab of the Desktop Items, place a check mark in the box next to http://www.techgalaxy.net and then select Synchronize to update the Web page.

9. On the Web tab of the Desktop Items, click the Properties button.

10. On the Schedule tab, select the options you want for synchronizing the Web site.

11. On the Download tab, select the options you want for downloading contents. This tab also allows you to enter an email address so when the page changes you’ll be notified via email. If you want to monitor changes on a Web page that is limited to subscribers and requires authentication, click on the Login button and enter your credentials.

12. The email message you’ll receive from the Internet Explorer will contain the following subject line:
Internet Explorer Notice: http://www.techgalaxy.net/

You can also add contents from Microsoft Desktop Gallery.

If you are interested in streaming media across the Internet using industry standard RTP and RTSP protocols, besides Apple’s QuickTime Streaming Server, you also have the option to use Apple’s
Darwin Streaming Server, the open source version of Apple’s QuickTime Streaming Server which is based on the same code as QuickTime Streaming Server.

Overview
Darwin Streaming Server is an open source project intended for developers who need to stream QuickTime and MPEG-4 media on alternative platforms such as Windows, Linux, and Solaris, or those developers who need to extend and/or modify the existing streaming server code to fit their needs. Darwin Streaming Server is only supported by the open source community and is not eligible for technical support from Apple.

Installation & Testing
I installed Darwin Streaming Server on a Windows Server 2003 to see how it works. The installation requires that you have ActivePerl installed on your Windows Server 2003. ActivePerl is available for free from ActiveState. I downloaded ActivePerl’s latest version 5.8.7.813 for Windows. The MSI file was 12.4MB in size. After I installed ActivePerl, I tested the example scripts and it worked fine. I also used the following TEST.PL script and ran it in my browser. It worked fine.

#!c:\perl\bin\perl.exe
# ^^^ this must be the first line of the script! ^^^
# start code

print $q->header( “text/html” ),$q->start_html( “hello from perl cgi!” );
print $q->h2(”ActivePerl is working…”);
print $q->end_html;
# end code

Here are the basic steps to install and configure the Darwin Streaming Server on Windows Server 2003.

1. Download and install ActivePerl on Windows Server 2003. If you run into some issues, read the Troubleshooting section below.
2. Test the installation by running the example script successfully at the command prompt (c:\perl\eg\example.pl).
3. Save the TEST.PL script listed above in the root directory of the Web site and then test it in your browser (http://localhost/test.pl).
4. Download and install Darwin Streaming Server from Apple.
5. Enable Perl CGI and Perl ISAPI Extensions in Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager (see Figure 1).
6. At the command prompt, run streamingadminserver.pl. It is best to have both Darwin Streaming Server and ActivePerl in the path. If they are not, switch to the directory where StreamingAdminServer.pl file is located and then run StreamingAdminServer.pl. When you execute this command, you won’t see a prompt in return. This is expected. See the Troubleshooting section for more information.
7. In your browser, configure and manage the server at http://localhost:1220. You need to make sure that IIS is running before you can manage the server in your browser.

Configuring Darwin Streaming Server for Streaming Videos
I won’t go into every setting for the Darwin Streaming Server but would list some of the basic steps to stream videos. Assuming you have configured Active Perl, Darwin Streaming Server and IIS properly, first go to the browser at http://localhost:1220. On the left hand menu go to the General Settings and enter the full path to the Media Directory where the media is located. For example, c:\inetpub\http\videos. This is the master directory where all of your media is located.

Under Port Settings, “Streaming on port 80″ is typically enabled. The Playlists area is where you configure your media and make it available for streaming. Here you can create a Playlist for MP3 or Media. Create a “New Media Playlist” and use settings similar to the following.

Name: movies
Mount Point: /movies.sdp
Play Mode: Sequential (or choose a different option)
Repetition: 1 (or enter another appropriate number)

If you copied your videos under the master directory mentioned earlier, you should see all your videos in the left hand window under “Available Content.” Click and drag the movies that you want to stream to the right hand window “Items in the Playlist.” You can arrange the order by moving them up or down. Click Save Changes when you are done. Back on the main Playlist page you will notice that the Available Playlists lists “movies” as your playlist, as shown in Figure 2 below. The status will say “stopped.” Highlight the movies playlist and click on the little triangle to start the playlist. If everything is configured correctly, your playlist status should change to “Playing.”

Minimize the browser and test the streaming video from QuickTime Player. Click File, Open URL and type the following command. Replace the Web site address with your own Web site.

rtsp://www.techgalaxy.net/movies.sdp

You should see your videos streamed based on the configuration method you’ve used. For example, if you’ve configured 5 videos to repeat once, they will play one after another and stop after the last video is streamed.

Troubleshooting
Although ActivePerl was installed and working properly on my server, when I tried to run the StreamingAdminServer.pl file at the command prompt, it failed to execute. I kept getting the error that ActivePerl was not installed. Needless to say that I wasn’t able to successfully access my server at http://localhost:1220, as instructed in the documentation. Port 1220 is the default port used by the Streaming Server.

After spending hours with various settings and looking for troubleshooting help I read somewhere on the Internet that if you try an older version of ActivePerl with the Streaming Server, it should work. The error stated that I must use a version 5.8.0 or later and I was using 5.8.7, which had failed. On ActiveState’s Web site I also found the older version 5.6.1.638. I tried that but that didn’t help. Fortunately, I stumbled upon another site that had version 5.8.6.811. I downloaded and installed that version and it did the trick. My Darwin Streaming Server was up and running.

Some people feel that when they run the script it hangs. When you execute this command, you won’t see a prompt in return. This is normal. Simply minimize the command prompt window. DO NOT close the window or else Darwin Streaming Server will stop working.

If your Web site stops working after a reboot and won’t start when you try to start it manually, first stop the Darwin Streaming Server service in Services console, then start the Web service in IIS Manager. It should start without errors. Once the Web service has started, you can restart Darwin Streaming Server service. At that point both your Web site and Darwin Streaming Server should be started and working. If you run into a problem, make sure StreamingAdminServer.pl script is running at the command prompt.

If you have modified your playlist and then saved the changes, you must start the playlist again. It is easy to overlook this so when in doubt double-check to ensure that the playlist has started.

And finally, if things are not working as expected, don’t forget to look at the error log which is located just under the Playlists on the menu (see Figure 2).

Additional Tips
Here are some additional tips. When you install Darwin Streaming Server, it installs as a service that can be managed in the Services console. Make sure that the service is configured to start automatically and that it is started. If you start the installation and ActivePerl setup hangs, make sure that you do not have another version already installed. I ran across this problem on one of the servers where I had version 5.8.7 installed and then I was trying to install the version 5.8.6 which eventually worked but I had to remove the newer version first from Add/Remove Programs.

ActivePerl will install the Perl CGI Extension and the Perl ISAPI Extension in Internet Information Services (IIS) but you must enable the extensions manually, as shown in Figure 1 below. The extensions are installed but not enabled. Also, make sure that both Darwin Streaming Server and ActivePerl are in the path. If you’ve looked at your path by typing PATH at the command prompt and then modified the path statement (Control Panel|System|Advanced|Environment Variables), you must close and reopen the Command Prompt window to see the changes. Also, if you can’t access http://localhost:1220 in your browser, ensure that you’ve executed StreamingAdminServer.pl at the command prompt.

If you’ve forgotten your password or would like to reset the password, go to the command prompt (make sure the Darwin Server is running) and type qtpasswd some_user_name, where some_user_name is the name of your choice for the Administrator account for Darwin Server. You’ll be prompted to reset the password. When you logon to the server in your browser with the new password to manage your server (http://localhost:1220), you may also be prompted to change the password for MP3 Broadcast, which by the way doesn’t allow spaces in the password.

To download Darwin Streaming Server for Windows 2000/2003, Linux RedHat, or Macintosh OS X, click here. To download ActivePerl version 5.8.6.811 click here.

Other useful links:
Darwin Streaming Server Administrator’s Guide
How to Stream a QuickTime Streaming Movie
How to Test Streaming Media

(This article was last updated on Sunday, June 25, 2006)