Month: July 2007

Xerox has been doing this for years, but this is the first time that I have seen it in a long while. A few years ago, I got a free color printer from Xerox. It was a Phaser 850 and did a great job for me. Did I mention it was free? I still have this printer and it is still running. It has needed some maintenance over the years, but I still love that printer.   It is time for me to maybe get another free printer, so I will apply for it.   The printer is their Phaser … Continue reading Free Xerox Color Printer – Phaser 8560

Microsoft posted a virtual lab today for Failover Clustering. This lab walks through the following procedures: Adding a second node to a cluster Creating a File Share in the cluster Creating a Print Share in the cluster Configuring Failback Policies Installing WINS in the cluster Installing DHCP in the cluster Bonus – Adding Physical Disk resources to the cluster You can get to the virtual lab here: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032345932&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US  The lab should take about an hour to an hour and a half to complete. That, of course, depends on how many times you get interrupted with the kids wanting you to take … Continue reading Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering Virtual Lab

I had a well known geek in my cluster class last week. Ben Miller, a former Microsoft MVP lead and SQL expert sat our cluster class, www.clusterhelp.com.   During our many conversations, Ben told me about a problem he ran into recently in SQL Server 2005 clustering. Basically, the issue is that the way the server names were recognized differed depending on what tool pulled the name since the different applications did not pull the name from the same place in the registry. So, if one node was all upper case, and the other node was mixed case or lower … Continue reading Upper, Lower, and Mixed Case with SQL Server 2005 Clustering

I was working on the June CTP for Windows Server 2008 when I created a basic file share. One of my students, looking over my shoulder, asked me to check the default share permissions. Windows 2000 Server, the default is Everyone with Full Control Windows Server 2003, the default is Everyone with Read In Windows Server 2008, there are no default permissions. The only permission that is there when you create the share is the Administrator with Ownership, but that is it. When you create the share, it bring up the window to create the permissions right away. I tell … Continue reading Windows Server 2008 Default Share Permissions

I have been dying to get my first Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster built. Of course, I want to do it on the cheap. That means using virtualization. The problem is that Virtual Server 2005 R2 does not provide support for Serially Attached SCSI (SAS) and there is just a complete dearth of virtualized SANs out there with virtualized HBAs. 🙂  OK, that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. So, my first Failover Cluster didn’t have any shared disks. That makes it pretty worthless for testing. Microsoft, though its acquisition of Stringbean Software (WinTarget), put an iSCSI target into the … Continue reading Building a Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster – finally!