Planet Lowyat

Microsoft will add Windows XP Service Pack 3 to Windows Update on Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific time.

A Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed that July 10 is, in fact, XP SP3’s automatic update debut, but cautioned that not all users would see it immediately. “As with all service pack releases, Microsoft will carefully monitor the release to ensure that all customers have a good experience,” she said in an instant message reply to queries. “Once Windows XP SP3 is posted to AU Automatic Updates, some users may see it right away; others may not see it for awhile.”

The announcement that Microsoft would release XP SP3 to Automatic Updates came just a week after the company started Windows XP on its road to retirement by halting sales of the operating system to retail outlets and barring major computer makers from installing it on most new PCs.

People who want to block the automatic deployment of Windows XP SP3 can either modify the Windows Update settings or download and use the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit, which provides several tools for stopping the service pack from reaching client PCs until at least April 2009.

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What? Why VMware is better than Citrix Xen or Microsoft Hyper-V?

Personally, I’m using VMware ESX 3 and VMware ESX 3.5 and I have evaluated Microsoft Hyper-V. But I have never try Citrix XenServer yet and I found VMware blog said why VMware is better here.

“The architecture for Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V puts standard device drivers in their management partitions. Those vendors claim this structure simplifies their designs compared to the VMware architecture, which locates device drivers in the hypervisor. However, because Xen and Hyper-V virtual machine operations rely on the management partition as well as the hypervisor, any crash or exploit of the management partition affects both the physical machine and all its virtual machines.”

“The Xen and Microsoft architectures rely on routing all virtual machine I/O to generic drivers installed in the Linux or Windows OS in the hypervisor’s management partition. These generic drivers can be overtaxed easily by the activity of multiple virtual machines - exactly the situation a true bare-metal hypervisor, such as ESXi, can avoid.
Hyper-V and Xen both use generic drivers that are not optimized for multiple virtual machine workloads.”

“Products like Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V lack an integrated cluster file system. As a result, storage provisioning is much more complex. For example, to enable independent migration and failover of virtual machines with Microsoft Hyper-V, one storage LUN must be dedicated to each virtual machine. That quickly becomes a storage administration nightmare when new VMs are provisioned. VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMFS enable the storage of multiple virtual machines on a single LUN while preserving the ability to independently migrate or failover any VM.”

In fact, I do agreed with VMware. I like simplicity of VMware Infrastructure Client, I like Virtual Center Centralized management, I like Update Manager and etc.

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Microsoft ISA Server 2006 Service Pack 1 have been released!

The new features focus on configuration change management and enhanced troubleshooting designed to help you identify and resolve ISA Server configuration issues within the ISA Server Management console.

The service pack includes the following new features and feature improvements:

• Configuration Change Tracking—Registers all configuration changes applied to ISA Server to help you assess issues that may occur as a result of these changes.
• Test Button—Tests the consistency of a Web publishing rule between the published server and ISA Server.
• Traffic Simulator—Simulates network traffic in accordance with specified request parameters, such as an internal user and the Web server, providing information about firewall policy rules evaluated for the request.
• Diagnostic Logging Viewer—Now integrated as a tab into the ISA Server Management console, this feature displays detailed events on packet progress and provides information about handling and rule matching.
Improvements for existing features, including:
• Support for integrated NLB mode in all three modes, including unicast, multicast, and multicast with Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP). Previously, ISA Server integrated NLB-supported unicast mode only.
• Support for use of server certificates containing multiple Subject Alternative Name (SAN) entries. Previously, ISA Server was able to use either only either the subject name (common name) of a server certificate, or the first entry in the SAN list.
• Support for Kerberos Constrained Delegation (KCD) cross-domain authentication. Credentials from users located in a different domain than the ISA Server, but in the same forest, can now be delegated to an internal published Web site by using KCD .
• Support for client certificate authentication in a workgroup deployment. This removes the requirement to map each client certificate to an Active Directory® directory user account.

For more information about this service pack, see Microsoft Article 943462.
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How to  Shutdown, Restart, Sleep, Lock and Hibernate using command line on Microsoft Windows Vista.

1. Shutdown your Computer

• Shutdown.exe -s -t 00

• Force all applications to close and shutdown immediately
• Shutdown.exe -s (After 30s…)

2. Restart Computer

• Shutdown.exe -r -t 00

3. Sleep Computer

• Rundll32.exe Powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Sleep

4. Lock your Computer

• Rundll32.exe user32.dll LockWorkStation

5. Hibernate Computer

• Rundll32.exe Powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Hibernate

So for anyone who would like to make your life easy, you can create a shortcut button that link to the related command show as above.

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Shit! My Windows Vista x64 Service Pack 1 RC build expire soon. I was download Windows Vista X64 SP1 RC build few month back from MSDN and it’s going to expire end of the June 2008.

Hi there -

Quick reminder for all of you out there who helped test Windows Vista SP1 and may still be running Release Candidate builds (any build less than 6.0.6001.18000). The RC builds will expire on June 30th - so if you happen to running one, be sure to uninstall it before the end of the month. More info is available in the SP1 Forum.

Thanks,

From Microsoft Update Product Team Blog.

How do you know if you’re running a pre-release build?

If your desktop says “For Evaluation Purposes”, you are running time-limited beta/RC software and will need to uninstall.  Another check is to hit the start button and type “WinVer” – if it lists an expiration date then you have a time-limited version of SP1.

How do you uninstall pre-release versions of Vista SP1?

If you installed SP1 Beta/RC as an update to an existing RTM version of Vista, you can probably uninstall it directly.  For instructions on how to uninstall SP1, please see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948537.  The best way is to uninstall from the “Programs and Features” control panel icon, using the “View Installed Updates” option on the left, click Service Pack for Microsoft Windows (KB936330), and then click Uninstall.

If you did a full install (a.k.a clean install) of SP1 from a DVD or network share, or updated an RTM version using the DVD to do an upgrade full install, there is no uninstall method; we recommend you back up your data, reformat, and start with an RTM DVD (and then install SP1) or a final SP1 integrated install DVD.  While you may be able to force upgrade using a full install upgrade, this isn’t a recommended practice over the Beta or RC version of SP1.

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