cluberti

Is this Vista Home Premium, or Vista Ultimate? It matters - Vista Home (Basic and Premium) do not allow *inbound* RDP connections, whereas Ultimate does.

Or if you image an Intel machine and restore to an AMD machine (or to an Intel box with a totally different chipset). What was the source machine (the source of the .wim) and what is/are the destination machine(s)?

And if the firewall is disabled on PC1, it still fails, correct?

Are these all XP machines?

Double-take basically copies the data from one machine to another (it's not a cluster, it's replication of data). I've used it in the past, and while it's good for web farms or static data applications, it's not as useful when the data is disparate on multiple cluster nodes. Also, restore with double-take can take quite awhile as well depending on the size of the data store, but it does work. For a Windows cluster DR situation, it matters more what application you'd be recovering rather than Windows clustering. Building a Windows cluster from scratch takes only a few hours - restoring your app and data is where the problem of time comes in. What exactly are you running in cluster, and why is there not at least one passive node (3 node cluster) to handle a failure of at least one of the nodes?

OK, so the files are there. Please post your \Windows\windowsupdate.log file so we can see why it's determining you need these hotfixes (you should not, so something's amiss).

If you're talking about user-specific reg tweaks, you can simply mount the .WIM file of the Vista or Server 2008 image you are planning on vLite'ing, copy \users\default\ntuser.dat down to your box, load up the registry hive in regedit, edit it to your specs, save/unload the hive, and copy ntuser.dat back into the wim and unmount/commit it. It sounds like a mouthful, but it's rather quite easy.

What network card is in that server?

Did you check the file versions like I asked?

[quote name='Rhuaidhri' post='798569' date='Sep 23 2008, 12:52 AM']So I'm a bit confused now. Does this tweak work?[/quote]Define "work" . If you mean does it physically lock pages in RAM for only the I/O subsystem to use, yes. If it provides marked improvement over the defaults the box uses otherwise, probably not in most cases.

Your idea of a flame and mine are vastly different. Being told (rather forcefully) that you are wrong is not flaming, but I digress. Anyway, school's in session - I told you I'd do it:/3GB allows for 3GB of VA for processes that are compiled LARGEADDRESSAWARE (not all are) and allows for any LARGEADDRESSAWARE process running on the machine to utilize the full 3GB (non-LARGEADDRESSAWARE processes still can only address 2GB of VA, regardless of the /3GB switch). This however limits the kernel to 1GB, into which it must cram nonpaged pool, paged pool, session view, drivers, kernel services, etc. /3GB does nothing more, nothing less. All x86 kernels for client OSes, NT4 Pro, 2000 Pro, XP, even Vista x86 are not designed to address more than 4GB of RAM, period. On a client OS kernel, /PAE is used for DEP, and DEP only, and is enabled automatically in OSes that support it when you have a processor that supports hardware DEP. The only OSes from Microsoft that can utilize the AWE APIs are server OSes, and only when the application is built to do so. It works as thus - the AWE "window" is actually mapped into the 2GB or 3GB of VA the process has, and the process itself is responsible for mapping views of RAM above 4GB into it's process-configurable "window" (the window is a process-configurable address range in which the memory allocated by the AWE APIs is made available to the process). Note that this is essentially a hack, and as such you *cannot* run executable code in the AWE window - it can be used for data only, and again, the process itself is responsible for it's own memory management of RAM mapped above the 4GB boundary when PAE is enabled - thus, it has to have it's own memory management code built in (like, say MS SQL does). Nexus, suffice to say I know what I'm talking about when it comes to memory management, and I'm not going into specifics - I *know* how this stuff works. I'm even certified in this area. Anyway, I'd love to hear how you're "using" PAE on your XP Pro x86 box, considering the x86 client OS kernels don't make any of the AWE APIs necessary to support PAE available to running processes...

If you look at windowsupdate.log in %windir%\, why does it say it has found a need for this update? If it is installed, the Internet Explorer files in both %windir%\system32 and \system32\dllcache (like urlmon.dll and wininet.dll) should be either version 7.0.6000.16705 (GDR) or 7.0.6000.20861 (QFE). You can see the entire list at the KB article for MS08-045 if you want to check. Usually what I find in these scenarios that the files in dllcache are not being updated during the install, due to a failed upgrade. Or, in some instances, people who "integrate" IE7 into an install via nLite run into the problem because the files in dllcache are NOT upgraded to IE7 versions during the "integration", thus you end up with IE7 files in \system32, and IE6 files in \system32\dllcache, and the update will fail to update files in \dllcache (because they don't match the installed product), and thus update.exe will continue to say this update needs to be installed.

Yup, well aware, I was just pointing out that calling out the video card (at least nowadays), unless it's some onboard POS, really isn't going to do anything to "upgrade" the photoshop experience like a (very) nice IPS monitor would compared to the very vendor-popular (due to it being cheaper) TN style.

Yes, using the perfmon utility, add the memory counters for all objects to see what is happening. Also, enabling auditing on logon/logoff events and auth events might give more insight into the error codes on failures you see.

That's what the forwarders are for. You don't need them in your DNS config if the SBS server is the primary DNS - anything it can't find in it's local DNS tables will be proxied/redirected to the forwarders for lookup.

Well, if you've searched and such a thing existed, you probably have found it by now. Otherwise, other than taking a scanner apart and looking at the bulb inside, it's not common knowledge.

There is some truth to the color issue with certain video cards, but since the Nvidia 8xxx series they've been able to reproduce very good color in both static pictures and moving video. However, ATI's Avivo processing UVD chip also makes it pretty much a dead heat. After that, it gets down to drivers and monitor, with the monitor being of utmost importance. I've had great color on a Dell 30", and switched to a Samsung 24" and (with the same settings and video card) gotten not so good color accuracy with the exact same setup. Yes, I can tweak the monitor and drivers for the 24" (and I did, to get the same results), but it just underscores the point that video cards can be equal, and yet not get accurate color due to calibration.

Well, for starters, the memory requirements of Exchange 2003 and the memory requirements of Active Directory mean that these should never, EVER be on the same server unless it's an SBS server (and even then it's a hack to get both working properly that I would not recommend anywhere else, as it is unsupported outside of SBS). You will likely find that splitting Exchange, AD, and File Server duties to 3 machines (buy a beefy box and use virtual servers if hardware cost is an issue) will rectify the issue. Normally what happens is that when you start to run low on kernel resources, something AD depends on quite heavily, you'll end up with odd auth issues. Noting that Exchange 2003 requires the usage of the /3GB switch, you've already cut in half the amount of kernel memory available to the server (/3GB in boot.ini == only 1GB of VA available for the kernel). File servers are relatively heavy users of AD, and Exchange is a VERY heavy user of AD. So what they've done, in essence, is put two very AD-reliant products on the AD server itself, and reduced the amount of kernel memory available to assist in those AD duties. With 50 - 60 clients, you should have at least 4 servers - 2x AD servers, 1x Exchange server, and 1x File server.

The problem with using external DNS entries is that it can play havoc on an internal domain. It would be wise to use only the local DNS server (the SBS box) as the primary and only DNS/WINS servers on all machines, and to configure the DNS on the SBS servers to use the external DNS entries as forwarders only.

Technically, only OS X 10.5 is a certified Unix (although I was unaware that it had received the certification - good find for you). I don't see 10.6 on that list, or 10.4 and older, meaning right now only 10.5 is a "true" Unix. As to it being an expensive licensing thing, maybe - the Unix certification means that any applications written for a Unix spec (in Apple's case, Unix 03) will run properly unmodified on the host system. And considering the highest license cost for the Unix trade mark is $110,000, it's not that expensive for a vendor to get the certification as a Unix if they pass the tests. It might not mean much to you or I on a desktop machine, but for servers and workstations in enterprise-grade environments, knowing that (when you need Unix) that you can buy anything on the list of certified Unices and they'll all conform to the standard is a big deal.

@Nexus_06, I have to step in here. Unless you want to be schooled, do research before you post things like this. /3GB allows for 3GB of virtual address space by a running process, but the memory manager determines what part of this goes into RAM, or gets put into the swapfile. It does *exactly* as crahak said, and /PAE only works on server 2003 or 2008, and can *only* be used for data (no executable code), and also the application itself *has to be written with it's own memory manager to address memory above 4GB* (which Photoshop does not).Read Windows Internals, 4th edition, chapter 7 before you post further on memory management in Windows. Please.

Well, I seem to remember a post here about disabling winsat.exe, so a quick search should find it. However, note that skipping winsat also means you won't be able to enable Aero, so it's not useless.

You're not determining RAM missing the right way - instead of percentages, check the *amount*. Note that when you add more that 4GB of RAM, you *always* lose the ability to address 1025MB, and you are unable to address 768MB when you have 4GB in the system.Also, if the *BIOS* is not recognizing all the RAM, I need to know more about what it fails to recognize. Is it not seeing all the RAM during POST, or is it simply not reporting all of the available RAM as "available" to Windows? If the latter is true, then jcarle is correct and your video card and BIOS are reserving memory for their usage, and Windows cannot touch this. However, if the BIOS simply doesn't see it, then that is a BIOS/chipset issue.

Close. Microsoft will not provide an OEM disc - only the OEM can do that. Otherwise, spot-on .@mikesw: You'd need to contact Dell, not Microsoft.

Making this post a sticky.