By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 10:45:44 AM

Justin Zarb (MS) recently published a blog entry that Microsoft is now able to virtualize fonts on Terminal Server using the fairly new SoftGrid 4.1 SP1 Client.  This is great news as it use to be a PITA to need to push font installs to a base system before deploying virtualized apps that relied on those fonts being present.  That being said, I really wish that Microsoft would publish a full change log of things that are in each client/sequencer release.  It's unfortunate that these things have to be discovered through blogs instead of a nice readme.

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, October 25, 2007 9:38:23 AM

The SoftGrid Team has put up a blog entry explaining a bug in the management console that causes it to crash when it processes icons that are non-symmetrical pixels (i.e. not square).  Here's a link to the KB article with the details.  Unfortunately, there's not a fix for the console.  You just need to make your icons symmetrical.  Then again, there shouldn't be all that many icons that are affected by this issue.

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, October 04, 2007 6:55:54 AM

The SoftGrid Team blog published an entry today that describes the three methods for upgrading Softgrid applications.  The three types are:1) Active Upgrade - You open the existing package up in the sequencer, install your updates and add the package version to the Management Console.  New launch requests for the package will begin using the new version.2) Completely new sequence - You build a completely new sequence.  The new sequence will need to be streamed down to new clients, but a client can run both versions simultaneously.  The downside is the user preferences from the old version of the app are not carried into the new package.3) Branched package - You approach a branched package like an ActiveUpgrade, only you perform a Save As function which will create a separate package GUID and asset folder.  This operates like a completely new sequence in that both can operate at the same time, the difference is that you avoid having to recreate...

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By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 7:21:41 AM

HD Moore's Metasploit is an invaluable free tool that's used by many to perform penetration testing of their systems.  Recently, HD blogged about buying an iPhone and beginning the process of porting pieces of the Metasploit platform to the iPhone.  What does this mean?  It means a portable handheld pentesting platform!  Perhaps HD should get a copyright on iSploit now

Read the entire blog entry here.  Good times ahead!

By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 7:12:49 AM

Michael Burke has posted part 3 of 4 in his series on troubleshooting Terminal Server licensing.  This entire series is a great read and reference to hang on to.

This topic is on:

• Corrupt license databases
• Activation issues
• Problems adding CALs

Read the full article here.

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, September 25, 2007 9:59:49 AM

Since server hangs is an often reported issue on Terminal Server environments due to high resource depletion, I thought it would be best to post this blog entry under the SBC blog even though it largely applies to all Windows Server environments.  The Windows Server Performance Team blogged about methods to troubleshoot server hangs today and it boils down to these steps:Is this a hard or soft hang?  If this is a hard hang, then the odds are that there is an underlying hardware issue, so contact your hardware vendor. Check the Event logs for any events in the System Log at the time of the hang.  In the case of Pool Depletion, you will see Event ID's 2019 or 2020 with the Event Source being SRV Launch Performance Monitor and check the starting value for Free System PTE's under the Memory object.  If a system is booting up with fewer Free System PTE's than is normal (around 15,000 or fewer), then that is not a good sign.  That means that...

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By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, September 25, 2007 9:54:22 AM

Michel Roth has written a nice article about tuning file server performance.  The Windows Performance Team has recently blogged about settings that can be tuned for Windows Explorer to reduce the amount of SMB traffic generated.  These would be great settings to apply to a Terminal Server environment since you have a lot of instances of Windows Explorer or File Open/Save dialogs running that could create a lot of SMB traffic.Some of the suggested optimizations would disable the following Windows Explorer behaviors:Searches for Desktop.ini files used for folder customization Periodic refreshes of folder contents Searches for supporting library (.dll) files Individual file details and attributes pulled for each file Thumbnail extractionAnd the settings to accomplish these changes are as follows:Windows...

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By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, September 25, 2007 7:25:12 AM

From an entry on John Howard's blog, I've learned that Server 2008 RC0 with Vridian just hit MSDN last night.  I'm off to download it now.  BTW, John also posted a nice entry on the steps required to install Vridian (no server core option just yet).

By Shawn Bass on Saturday, September 22, 2007 10:58:12 AM

I recently had a need to convert a few SoftGrid-related VMs from VMware Server 1.02 VMs to one of my ESX 3.x hosts.  I needed to do this because VMware Server only allows for a single snapshot/revert path.  While sequencing/testing applications in SoftGrid, it's ideal to have multiple VM snapshots to be able to revert back to a variety of timelines.  I have explained many different methods of converting VMs and have detailed a few of the processes (complete with screeshots).  I hope this helps someone out there who may need to do the same thing.  Read the full article here.

By Shawn Bass on Friday, September 21, 2007 11:08:15 PM

Microsoft has definitely embraced blogging as a means of providing feedback to their partners and customers alike.  It's often difficult to know whether or not a particular team within Microsoft has an official blog or not.  Brandon LeBlanc over at The Windows Experience Blog has created a list of the known official Microsoft team blogs.  Check out the list here.