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Wow… My last post was a holiday ago. 
A few items of interest:
- The wireless WAN problem I mentioned a few months ago has been solved using about $8 of supplies from my local Lowes store. The problem was due to the extreme heat that we have down here in Central Texas (and to tell you the truth, this has been a pretty cool year). My solution? Build a mesh shelter out of storage cubes and patio screen fabric. My problems are now gone. Of course, the point would have been made moot in another month or so, but it felt good to get it solved.
- Cisco’s TelePresence room is cool.. If you haven’t seen the TelePresence rooms in one of the local Cisco office, try to make it a point to see it in the future. This room is like a virtual conference room (which isn’t that special), but there implementation is excellent (with surround sound, similar furniture, etc).
- Sysprep and Mass Storage Drivers suck. Actually, that is being too kind. I spent over a week fighting with Sysprep and getting the 5 different type of Mass Storage devices working on a Windows XP image. Why Windows XP? Our LOB applications still do not work reliably under Windows Vista (ESRI, Bentley/Haestad Methods, and Oce Archiving).
More soon.. 
Site Note:
I have started locking some of the older posts due to spam problems. These spam postings never make the public side of the site, but are VERY annoying on the administrative side of the blog.
From a mailing list that I am on:
This chart provides information regarding security breach notification legislation which has been enacted in U.S. jurisdictions. The pioneering statute on this issue, California’s Security Breach Notification Act (Senate Bill No. 1386), is used as the baseline for comparisons herein.
Link (Perkins Coie)
It’s been out for a while now (March 2007), but somehow I missed it in my security browsing.
There was an interesting article over at Network World that caught my eye today – Vista over the WAN: good but not great. As I have been immersing myself in WAN technologies lately, this has piqued my interest. I admit that I somewhat agree with the reviewer – the experience over the WAN is better, but it isn’t the end-all be-all experience that I think MS was aiming for.
I must admit, though, that the Windows Vista networking experience has not been very positive. Autotuning works well, but forget about using a Vista machine connecting to a Windows 2003 R2 Server or Terminal Server. The TS/RD experience is painful on the LAN due to the “pauses” that autotuning causes. What is weird, although predictable, is that TS/RD connections over the WAN with autotuning “enabled” provides an experience like XP or other W2K3 servers.
Vista to Longhorn Server (Beta 3) over the WAN did provide a significant boost to reliability. In the off hours, I attempted a few tests in connecting and disconnected the WAN session to see how Vista/LH Server handled these interruptions. XP based workstations and W2K3-R2 servers would immediately pop-up a network error and result in mild system hangs and timeouts. I didn’t experience this with the Vista/LHS combination. This would be a welcome relief not only to those who have a WAN setup between branch offices, but also those who are on marginal wireless network connections.
One thing that I have noticed is that DFS Replication in W2K8 Server hasn’t been significantly improved over the offering in R2 server. For our system, I am having to push several GB of replication data across the WAN to our hot backup server (and local branch office server) and I ended up having to disable RDC (Remote Differential Compression) due to the tremendous system loads that this presented to our system. Some of this is due to the type, format, and sizes of data that we produce in this office (i.e., AutoCAD drawings and Access Databases). RDC has to work too much to track all of the changes that are saved every 10 minutes for all of our workstations (10 minutes is the autosave time in AutoCAD). I was hoping for some sort of additional tweaking of the RDC mechanism, but I have not experienced this as of yet.
In summary, there are improvements for WAN-related communication, but nothing that I would call earth-shattering.
In my absence, I have missed the past few Cable Guy articles over at Technet:
June 2007 – The Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol
This article from TechNet Magazine describes how the Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP) uses the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) over secure sockets layer (SSL) for remote access virtual private network (VPN) connections across network address translators (NATs), firewalls, and proxy servers.
May 2007 – EAPHost in Windows
This article from TechNet Magazine describes the new architecture in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (now in beta testing) to support Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) supplicants and authentication methods.
April 2007 – Wireless Group Policy Settings for Windows Vista
This article from TechNet Magazine describes the enhanced wireless Group Policy settings that are supported by wireless clients running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008.
I plan on testing out the SSTP (or SSL VPN) capability in Longhorn Server for a few people at the office who can’t use PPTP or L2TP VPN technologies.
Thanks for all of the help to my request for assistance with out two Tranzeo wireless bridge units. The ultimate answer was so simple that I am still beating my head on the wall about it..
First, for those of you out there reading this who haven’t already met me, I live and work in the Central Texas area. The place where being outside many hours a day in the spring/summer will result in you being “well done”. Well, this contributed to the problem. One of our WAN units is completely out in the open and faces west and gets full sun all afternoon. Ever try going into your car on a hot day with a window pointing west? It is an oven. Well, that was what was happening to the WAN unit. However, it was designed to work this way. The problem was more related to our signal strength combined with the heat. Our two units are only a quarter of mile apart and clear line-of-sight. The problem was the way we were overdriving the units. I had the power cap set to the full 30dbm on both ends. This was getting me a normal signal strength between -48 and -53dbm. However, this was causing the units to be completely overdrived and then the signal completely dropped off, resulting in the -90′s we had seen.
The solution? I changed the power cap from 30dbm down to 8dbm. Now I get a signal averaging -62dbm and I’m not overdriving the unit.
Woohoo.
This has been a pretty nasty thorn in my side lately. I have been covering it up by DFS replication, but the link had to be fixed and it had to happen soon.
Now I can sleep better.
I have completed all of the optimizations and upgrades for the weblog. It took me longer than I expected but everything is working smoothly now.
With some of my “Engineering” stress relieved, I am finally emerging from the mountains of work that have been overcoming me for the past few months. In this interim, I have fought with several issues, both at and away from the office. In April, my mother became sick and had to undergo surgery. As her only care-person, this added a tremendous amount of stress and proceeded to put me even more behind (she was OK, by the way). Now I need a vacation (just kidding).
In the meantime, I have been actively involved in the testing of Longhorn Server (aka Windows Server 2008) and have set up a test network both at home and at the office. I’m also involve with Windows Home Server to a lesser degree, but I still have it installed on a few VMs.
In the coming days, I will have a few Vista posts, a review of Tranzeo wireless bridge units (used at my office to connect to our branch office), and a few other tidbits that I have been delinquent in reporting on.
Again, I want to thank all of you for reading. And thank you for your support.
Please note that I am in the process of upgrading the blog this weekend…
Be patient if things aren’t working – I’ll try to get them back up shortly.
UPDATE 1
OK, I have completed the base upgrades to the current versions of WordPress and I had to reset all of the plugins. Before you freak out, please note that I have expanded the blog to support Podcast and VLogs for future use. I suck at presentations and public speaking, but there will be some future use here for things like screencasts, demos, etc.
I’m also updating information on how to contact me and keep riding me to have things stay current around here. Even with my somewhat “new” position at the office, I’m still just as swamped as ever.
Again, feel free to IM me anytime you see me online.
OK, for the second item of the day, I want to make a general call for help in troubleshooting a particularly nasty 802.11A problem I am seeing between our office and branch office (basically, 1/4 of a mile down the road with LOS).
The wireless network works flawlessly for about 166 hours a week. However, everyday at about 4 PM, we get a few glitches in the data stream. When I look at the wireless performance data, I am getting about 15% of packet retries for about 5 minutes. This affects only the data (LAN) transfers and DFS replication. VOIP does not seem affected at all. On Wednesdays, however, this packet loss lasts considerably longer (for about an hour or so). This wreaks havoc with our CAD files (which are still being sent over the WAN).
During Normal Operations:
Strength: -53 dbm
Noise Level: -103 dbm
During the “Glitch”:
Strength: -90 dbm
Noise Level: -103 dbm
I have switched to all of the channels that the device (Tranzeo TR6) will support to no avail…
I’m working with the equipment provider, but I wanted to see if anyone out there has seen this..
I have tried to eliminate other interference sources, but there isn’t much that would cause problems throughout the 5 Ghz band…
Thanks for any help.
First of several quick updates:
The Beta 3 release of Longhorn Server has been released and is available for download on Connect…
Unfortunately, there is still nothing on the (immediate) horizon in regards to hypervisor, but one can hope..
Also, the IIS 7 team is making a Go Live license available. More at the IIS blog…
Toshiba has finally posted Vista drivers for the Toshiba M7 and R25 tablets – a month and a half late. What is frustrating about this is that these are the same drivers posted for the other Toshiba tablets (for the most part) early last month. Why did it take so long, Toshiba?
The R25 and M7 lines are still discontinued. And I will still no longer consider a Toshiba for a future tablet/laptop purchase. I’m looking at the Lenovo or the Fujitsu T4215 for the future. Even the new Motion shown at GottaBeMobile looks interesting.
Also note that Vista drivers apparently have been released for the Toshiba M200. I know of one person at my office who would be happy about that one.
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