May, 2009

Windows 7 Wireless Networking

Lately I have been doing a lot of work with the Windows 7 Release Candidate. One strange issue that I keep running into is that I keep losing my wireless networking connection.

I have been using an HP laptop with 4 GB of RAM to evaluate Windows 7. For some reason, my wireless network connection will drop for no apparent reason. If I wait for half an hour or so, the connection will come back, but in fifteen minutes or so it will drop again. during periods of inavailability, the machine seems to be able to see my access point, but it cannot communicate with it no matter what I have tried.

I suspected that a hardware failure might be to blame, so I blew out Windows 7 and installed Vista on the machine, but the problem went away when I did. I put Windows 7 back, and my connectivity issues returned with it.

The problem does not seem to affect wired network connections as far as I can tell. I was just curious as to whether or not anyone else has run into this issue.

Why Does Windows 7 Think it’s Vista?

For quite a while now we have known that the next Windows release is going to be Windows 7. The interesting thing is though, that Windows 7 will use an internal version number of 6.1. Actually, the version number is going to be longer than that, but we won’t know the full version number until Windows 7 goes RTM. In case you are wondering why I am even mentioning this, it is because Windows 6 is Vista.

You might initially assume that the reason why Windows 7’s version number makes it look like a Vista update is because Windows 7 was designed around the Windows Vista kernel. That’s not it though. According to my sources, the version number mimics Vista in an effort to avoid compatibility issues with applications that were designed to run on Vista.

The Excitement Around Windows 7

I’m in Redmond right now, and as you would probably expect everybody up here is excited about Windows 7. Although the level of excitement that seems to be present on Microsoft’s campus is about the same as what I have experienced near the time of any other major Windows release, something funny happened today that makes me think that there might be just a little bit more fanfare than usual.

As I’m sure you know, the latest Windows 7 release candidate was made available on TechNet early last week. On Friday I got an E-mail from someone at Microsoft saying that even though the latest Windows 7 build was available for download that they just wanted to make absolutely sure that I had a copy, so they were going to be sending me a DVD in the mail. They also told me that if I had already downloaded the build that I could just give the DVD to a friend.

I thought that was a nice gesture, but didn’t really give it a lot of thought beyond that. This evening when I got back to the hotel I got a phone call from my wife who told me that I had received a package in the mail from Microsoft. To be perfectly honest, I was tired from working all day and Windows 7 was the last thing on my mind, so I wasn’t sure what they had sent me. I asked her to open the package. When she did she told me that there were eight copies of Windows 7 inside! I guess someone in Redmond is a little bit excited about the new release (as they should be)!

Windows 7 Wireless Networking

I just installed the Windows 7 release candidate for the third time. For some reason this hadn’t registered with me until now, but the installer is actually designed to detect any wireless networks that happen to be in range. You can set up wireless networking as a part of the initial installation process. I absolutely love this feature, because it means that when Setup is complete, you are already connected to the network and are ready to go.

I haven’t seen tha automated installation kit for Windows 7 yet (if there is one), but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you could specify a wireless network and an encryption key within the installation parameters.

Virtualizing Essential Business Server

I would like to apologize to everyone for the lack of blog posts lately. I have been hard at work on my latest book, and that has been consuming all my time lately. Thankfully, I wrapped up the book this morning and I hope to return to a more normal blog posting schedule.

The book that I just finished is solely mine. I actually only wrote five chapters in it. Even so, writing this book was a learning experience, as it always is. This particular book was about Windows Essential Business Server.
Any time that I write a book I always set up a lab so that I can test the techniques that I writing about. This time I decided to use virtual machines rather than physical ones. According to Microsoft, Essential Business Server can be virtualized. Even so, I really struggled with getting Essential Business Server to work right in a virtual server environment.

If you have ever worked with Essential Business Server, then you know that there are three servers that make up the server suite; a management server, a messaging server, and a security server. Ultimately, I was able to virtualized the management and security servers, but I ended up having to run the messaging server on a separate box.
Another issue that I struggled with was network connectivity. For some reason, my host server (which had always worked fine in the past) periodically dropped my network connectivity. I have not had this problem for any other virtual machines, so I suspect that the problem may be links to Essential Business Server. So far I have not been able to come up with definitive proof though, so I plan to continue researching this issue.

Installing EBS with Hyper-V

For about the last week I have been ripping my hair out trying to install Essential Business Server for a project that I am working on. Every time that I have attempted the installation, I would get to the third server (the messaging server) and get an error that Setup failed because it was not able to extend the Active Directory schema.

I have gone over the Microsoft documentation numerous times, and it seems as though I am doing everything correctly. Tonight I stumbled onto an interesting Web page though (http://connect.microsoft.com/EBS08/community/discussion/richui/default.aspx?NewsgroupID=2554&RootArticleID=317560). Although Microsoft says that EBS will run on top of Hyper-V, there have apparently been a lot of problems with doing so.  Although some people claim to have been able to pull off a full EBS deployment using Hyper-V, I am running out of time in getting this deployment done. Tomorrow I am going to try using physical hardware.

Redirecting the Offline File Cache in Vista

A while back I had configured my laptop to cache my offline files to a secondary hard drive instead of using up space on my primary drive. When I had performed the initial setup, I wrote an article on how it’s done. That’s been a while though, and I can’t really remember who I wrote the article for, or even the exact registry key that I had to use to redirect the offline cache.

Over the weekend the hard drive in my laptop died, and I had to set up offline caching from scratch. I couldn’t find the article that I wrote on how to redirect the cache, but I did find a Microsoft Knowledgebase article on the subject at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937475

One thing that I will tell you about the technique that is outlined in the article is that you really do have to follow the steps in order. Offline caching is enabled by default in Vista, and you absolutely have to disable it and reboot the machine before you begin, or the technique in the KB article won’t work. After you reboot the system, it’s time to make the registry modification listed in the article. After doing so, you have to reboot again. Next, go ahead and enable offline caching, and reboot one more time.  Rebooting after each step is essential to the technique’s success.

When you are done, you can set Windows to show hidden files and folders. When you do, you should see a folder named CSC in the root directory of the designated hard drive. I recommend checking for the existence of this folder before you actually begin synchronizing your offline files, because if Windows has not created the folder, it means that you have done something wrong and the offline files are going to be cached onto your system drive.