Alexander’s Blog

As far as I know, the only Mac software that Microsoft offers to MSDN subscribers is Virtual PC for Mac. The latest version available through MSDN is 7.0.1 and is listed under the operating systems category. You can download the latest update version 7.0.2 from Microsoft here.

The latest update 7.0.2 is free for users of Virtual PC version 7 or 7.0.1. This version works on Mac OS X Tiger and also supports Mac G5 processor. Here are the minimum system requirements for installing the 7.0.2 update.

Processor: 700 MHz native PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor.
Operating system: Mac OS X Version 10.2.8; Mac OS X Version 10.3; Mac OS X Version 10.4.1. G5 processor requires Mac OS X Version 10.3 or 10.4.1 to run Virtual PC for Mac.
Memory: 512 MB of RAM.
Hard disk: 70 MB of available hard disk space is temporarily required to complete installation; after installation, the program requires 50 MB of hard disk space.

When you install Windows XP on a Virtual PC for Mac, you may notice that in the beginning the options you are given to format the partition includes FAT16 and FAT32 but not NTFS. Don’t worry, during the operating system install you will specify the size of the partition and will be able to select any one of the standard formatting options, including NTFS.

Depending on the screen resolution on your Mac, you may notice that the mouse cursor starts to paint black all over your virtual machine screen when you move the cursor. As a workaround, you can avoid using mouse and simply use the keyboard. Once you’ve finished the installation and selected the appropriate screen resolution for Windows XP, the problem will go away. You can control the virtual machine’s screen quality by adjusting the VRAM.

A lot of companies with higher security requirements are concerned about the possibility of users copying confidential data on to their USB memory sticks and taking it off site. Luckily Windows XP Service Pack 2 offers a solution. It supports a registry entry that will make the USB drive read-only. Here’s the procedure.

1. Start the registry editor (regedit.exe).

2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control.

3. From the Edit menu, select New, Key, and type StorageDevicePolicies. If this key already exists then skip to the next step.

4. Highlight the newly created key StorageDevicePolicies and from the Edit menu select New, DWORD Value, type WriteProtect and press Enter.

5. Double-click WriteProtect and enter 1 for Value data. The value 1 makes all the USB drives read-only, a value of 0 will make them writable.

6. Close the registry editor and restart the computer.

Make sure that your users aren’t using any other USB storage devices such as hard drives or rewritable CD/DVD drives because the above registry modification will make all USB storage devices read-only.

Officials at the City University of New York blamed human error for making sensitive financial information for 300 law school students public on the Web. The information included a spreadsheet with names, Social Security numbers and loan information as well as a file containing direct-deposit bank information, an unidentified student told Newsday.

The student found the information during a Google search using her name. ‘I was shocked, I was outraged,’ the second-year law student said. ‘People have access to our names. Lord knows what they have by now. I’m worried about my safety and my credit.’

‘It’s a human error … that placed the file outside a protected firewall,’ a CUNY spokesman said of the mistake that affected Queens College students.

More info…

Here are some general guidelines to monitor Exchange Server 2003. Since each environment is different, you should consider these guidelines as a good starting point, monitor your Exchange Server 2003, and then configure the parameters accordingly. To configure Monitoring, locate the server, Properties, and go to the Monitoring tab.

Virtual Memory
Should not fall below 25% free.

CPU
Should not exceed 80% over 5 minutes.

Free disk space
Configure the monitor to issue a warning when you have less than 250MB available and issue a critical alert when the drive has less than 50MB of free space.

X.400 queue growth
Should be empty for any environment that uses SMTP to connect to other messaging systems.

Guidelines for Monitoring Cluster Resources
Use System Monitor to identify memory fragmentation for each node in the cluster by monitoring the following counters.

MSExchangeIS\VM Largest Block Size
Should not fall below 32MB. Exchange will log a warning in the event log (Event ID=9582) if this falls below 16MB.

MSExchangeIS\VM Total 16MB Free Blocks
Should not drop below 3. If it does, restart all the services on the node.

MSExchangeIS\VM Total Large Free Block Bytes
Should not fall below 32MB. If it does, restart all the services on the node (or restart the server) and then fail back the Exchange Virtual Servers.

Monitoring Exchange Store

Free disk space
Must be equal to or greater than 110% of the size of the largest database.

Baseline Counters
The following counters should be monitored over time. The required values are only realistic if they are observed over time. For example, you may notice that % Processor Time value peaks to over 80% temporarily on occasion. We are only interested if these values are sustained over a period of time. For example, if you are using Performance Logs and Alerts to collect data for the recommended counters, configure it to collect data at regular intervals, such as every 10-15 minutes.

You may also want to collect data every week during specific hours, such as Monday-Friday between 8:00am-10:00am for several weeks to obtain a baseline of network performance during peak hours. These are just some suggestions. Every network is different and your baseline may be very different than other networks. Use the following counters as a guideline.

Here are some of the highlights of the Cluster Service in Windows Server 2003.

1. Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition supports 8-node clusters (compared to 2 in Win2K) and Datacenter Edition also supports 8-node clusters (compared to 4 in Win2K).

2. Server clusters (i.e. clusters based on Microsoft Cluster Service-MSCS) in Windows Server 2003 do not support GUID Partition Table (GPT) disks, a new disk architecture in Windows Server 2003 that supports up to 18 Exabyte disks.

3. Although Terminal Server can run in application mode on nodes in a Server cluster, there is no failover of Terminal Server sessions.

4. Clustering is installed by default but you need to configure a cluster by launching Cluster Administrator, or script the configuration using Cluster.exe.

5. You no longer need to provide a media CD to install Server clusters.

6. Installing or uninstalling Custer Service no longer requires a reboot.

7. Remote creation and configuration of the Server cluster is supported.

8. The default size of the quorum log has been increased to from 64KB to 4096KB to support large numbers of file and printer shares (e.g. 200 printer shares).

9. You no longer need to select which disk is going to be used as the Quorum Resource because it will be automatically configured on the smallest NTFS disk that is larger then 50MB.

10. Cluster service is Active Directory-aware but it doesn’t modify the schema.

11. The existing volumes can be expanded online without taking down the applications or services.

12. The Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC) can now be configured once, and then be replicated to all nodes. No need to run COMCLUST.EXE utility on each node any more.

13. Instead of writing resource DLLS in C or C++ you can now make your existing applications Server cluster-aware by using scripting (VBScript and Jscript).

14. Unlike Windows 2000, if clustering service loses network connectivity, the TCP/IP stack doesn’t get unloaded by default. You don’t need to set the DisableDHCPMediaSense registry key any more.

15. Volume mount points are now supported on shared disks (exclusing the quorom). Volume mount points (Windows 2000 or later) are directories that point to specified disk volumes in a persistent manner (e.g. you can configure C:\Data to point to a disk volume). They bypass the need to associate each disk volume with a drive letter, thereby surpassing the 26 drive letter limitation (e.g. without volume mount points, you would have to create a G: drive to map the Data volume to).

16. Client Side Caching (CSC) is now supported for clustered file shares.

17. Granular failover control is available for each DFS root. In addition, you can now have multiple stand-alone roots running actively on multiple nodes.

18. EFS is supported on clustered file shares.

19. Applications are failed over to spare nodes before active nodes.

20. Passwords can be reset on multiple clusters at the same time.

21. Unlike NT/2000, now you can change the Cluster Service account password on the domain as well as on each local node, without having to take the cluster offline.

22. Resources can be deleted in Cluster Administrator or with Cluster.exe without taking them offline first.

23. A new tool called ClusDiag is available in the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit.