for IT Professionals

Since Tech Ed 2008 It Pro does not officially start until tomorrow, the Orange County Convention Center is still a little quiet. However, with registration beginning today, things seem a little busier.
My main mission for today was to register for Tech Ed and to study and take exam 70-649 which I crammed for the day before. Upon arriving at the Testing Center and showing my MCP Id, I was treated to one of the limited edition “Certified” hats, designed by Trika. It was so surreal after following Trika’s blog posts on these hats and then finally holding one in your hand. The hat read “certified. I am. You’re not”
I then sat down with Self Test Software for some last minute studying before my test. Then, of course, it was on to take the dreaded 70-649. 49 questions, I passed! Thank you Zach for the exam cram on Sunday!
I left the exam room to encounter a vaguely familiar laugh. A laugh that I had not heard in about a year. It was my good Microsoft blogger friend, Trika Harms zum Spreckel. I hold Trika personally responsible for driving me to blog.
Another highlight of the day was attending a Train the Trainer class on Powershell. The speaker was Thomas Lee and he was incredible. His level of knowledge of PowerShell is just amazing. Also, his attention to detail in his training style is phenomenal! He was able to cover a three day course in three hours.
I was also able to attend the first ever “Party with the Pros.” Attendance was good and there were plenty of giveways. Thank you to all the sponsors who made this event happen. “Party with the Pros” was billed as the largest non-Microsoft event at Tech Ed with over 600 registered attendees.
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I started my Tech Ed experience on Sunday to take part in an exam cram for 70-649, the MCSE 2003 Upgrade test for Server 2008. The training was led by Zach Nieman who is the president of Training Experts. Zach is a great presenter. I have to give credit to anyone who can keep my attention for the entire day the way Zach was able. From 8:00 to 4:30 pm, Zach covered the material from exams 70-640, 70-642, and 70-643 (which is what 70-649 covers). I am scheduled to take the exam tomorrow at 1:00.
It was interesting seeing how empty the Orange County Convention Center was on this “tweener” weekend.

Since the Tech Ed developers and it pros were separated into two conferences this year, the covention center was opened up to user groups. Training events were held over the weekend covering topics for both developers and it pros. The Certification Testing center was open over the weekend and will be open on Monday for Tech Ed attendees only.
I was also able to talk with William Sabo, a consultant from the Tallahasse, Fl area. He was there for a pre-conference on SharePoint.
Ken Rosen was at the Testing Center for Microsoft. Although he has changed positions within Microsoft, I still think of him as a MCT Celebrity.
Speaking of MCT Celebrities, I got to meet Bill Chapman of Microsoft.
Good times today - except that I did not get to see my blogging Microsoft friend, Trika.

One of my original purposes for starting this blog was to help people to find resources to help obtain IT certifications. In this article, I would like to highlight one such resource.

Train Signal is a company that creates and sell IT Training videos. They have over 38 titles covering Microsoft, Cisco, CompTIA, and VMWare. Train Signal provided me with a review copy of SharePoint Server 2007, one of their latest titles. Also included was Intro to Windows Server 2008, a promotional video which contains training an some basic topics of the new operating system as well as an introduction to their upcoming Windows Server 2008 titles.

The first thing that impressed me was the bio of the instructor, Benjamin "Coach" Culbertson. Coach Culbertson has the usual credentials that you see in instructor bios. What stood out to me was that he served a two year tour of duty as an inner city high school teacher where he motivated at-risk students to achieve excellence. As an instructor, myself, I realized that this guy has to be good to be able to impact students the way he did!

For the SharePoint title ($199.95), there are 22 videos, each running approximately a half hour each, on two CD’s (10+ hours of training). The videos cover both Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007). When you insert the CD, a flash based menu runs showing you the video titles. When you click on one of the title, your web browser opens with the video embedded in a web page.

As I watched the videos I was not disappointed. Mr. Culbertson’s style is very easy going and informal. To setup each video and to illustrate concepts, Mr. Culbertson starts out with slides created in Microsoft One Note. (Frankly, I think Microsoft ought to thank Mr. Culbertson for demonstrating how useful One Note can be ) The rest of the video is demonstrations of the actual software in use. When it comes to installation and configuration, you are shown each field and get an explanation of what the settings actually do. The training will prepare you to take the associated certification tests, but also prepares you to actually be able to support the products in a real world situation.

Another feature that I liked is that the videos are all linked to a business scenario. For the SharePoint video, you are an employee of Verde Petra Publishing. The company wants to move away from using email as a collaboration tool. You have been charged by the CIO to implement Windows SharePoint Services. If that trial is successful, then you will implement Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

A video on how to setup your own lab is also included. This is great if you want to duplicate some of the training on your own. Also, all of the instructor’s slides are included in a PDF file, which you can also print out and use to take notes, if you wish.

The included Intro to Windows Server 2008 contains some good training to help familiarize you with the new operating system. Although I am not doing a full review of this title, I was impressed with a feature that I hope will make it into all of the titles in the future. Not only were the videos for Windows Media Player included, but also formats for MP3 players and iPods. This makes the training more portable for users to review the material.

If I had to point out any negatives, it would be the interface. The flash menu is OK and it does give you a good overview of the contents of the CD. I would prefer an overview of the whole course as opposed to just the contents of the CD. When you click on a video to play, a bare web page opens with only an embedded video player. There is nothing on the page to allow you to switch videos or even just go to the next video. Although the interface was not as good as I would have liked, I find this to be a minor point, since the training itself, is excellent quality. The interface included with the Intro to Windows Server 2008 title is somewhat improved. Although you have to run a setup file, the new viewer is more useful. The video now pops up in its own custom viewer. On the left are bookmarks for some of the important parts of the video. There is an icon for viewing in full screen, but it did not seem to work on my system. Also, there is still no way to advance to the next video from the viewer.

Overall, I found this title to be a great value. The trainer and the training are both great quality. The training you will find in these videos are as good as the best training that you will find in any instructor led class. The video format is flexible - you can watch it when you have the time (even during your lunch hour) and review a portion as many times as you want. You also do not have to be "Out of the Office" for a week.

If you want to check out samples of training videos from Train Signal, go to TrainSignalTraining.com. To purchase videos, go to TrainSignal.com. Train Signal will also be at Tech Ed 2008 IT Pro, June 10-13. I have been told that they will be making an important announcement at Tech Ed. If you stop by Train Signal’s booth, tell them you read about them at ITCertPro.com!

This mysterious message was well documented by Microsoft.

Everyone knows that any user in a domain, even down to the user with least privileges, is able to connect to a network shared printer, right?

That is what I thought, until one of my users tried to connect to a shared printer and got the following error message:

Other users on my network can connect to shared printers with no problems. I did not remember creating a group policy to cause this. What is going on?

I found a Microsoft Knowledge base article (888046) with the answer. The first cause mentioned is trying to install a third party driver. Although the driver is from HP, I have never had this problem before with HP. The second cause had to do with the DNS setup. In my case, for this subnet, I did not have the DNS reverse lookup zone configured properly. To fix the problem quickly, I gave the user administrative permissions to the local computer and he was able to connect to the shared printer. I also created a reverse lookup zone for this subnet to solve what I believe was the main cause of my problem.

From time to time, I would like to highlight mysterious error messages that I have received and the solutions that fixed it.

I have a trust with another domain. A developer, with a user id in my domain, asked for access to a share on the web server in the other domain. I went to the web server and I added the developers group (which was a global group in my domain) to the share and the NTFS permissions.

The developer, with the proper share and NTFS permissions, should have access to the server, right?

I thought so. But the developer called me and told me that he could not connect. I added my non-admin user id to the developers group. I couldn’t get in either.

So, to the command prompt I go. I typed in a net use command to connect to the share. BREAKTHROUGH! An error message is returned. It read as follows:

Logon Failure:  The user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer.

Doing a little research, I discovered that the error had to do with the user rights. Even though I had a valid trust relationship, valid share permissions, and valid NTFS permissions, the developer still lacked the user right to "Access this computer from the network."

To fix this problem:

1. Go to Start-Administrative Tools-Local Security Policy

   

2. Under Security Setttings, expand Local Policies and click on User Rights Assignment.
3. On the right side, modify the Access this computer from the network policy by double-clicking on it.
   
4. Click on the Add User or Group button to add the user or group to the policy. Click OK to save.

Since installing Service Pack 1 for System Center Essentials (SCE), almost all of my computers are reporting the following error:

“Performance Module could not find a performance counter”

This is extremely annoying because it looks as though all of my clients are in trouble.

I have not been able to find much support for System Center Essentials and this issue. However, over on the blog for SCE’s big brother, System Center Operations Manager, there is a workaround for this same issue for their Service Pack 1. The instructions work for SCE as well.

Note that this is only a workaround. Microsoft still needs to provide a permanent fix which may entail updated Management Packs.

1. Navigate to the Authoring Space in the Console.
2. Select “Rules” under “Management Pack Objects”.
3. Type “Performance Data Source Module” in the “Look for:” box and click “Find Now”. Be sure a Scope is not set or filtering the “Health Service” Target.
4. Find the rule, “Performance Data Source Module could not find a performance counter” under “Type: Health Service (2)”*, right-click, select “Overrides”, “Disable the Rule”, “For all objects of type: Health Service”.
   *Note: In my installation, I only had “Type: Health Service (1)”
5. When prompted, “Are you sure you want to disable this rule for Health Service?” click “Yes”.

This should minimize your headaches until Service Pack 2 is released.

I have been running System Center Essentials (SCE) since July of 2007, after hearing about it at Tech Ed. I have pretty much been running SCE with little customization.

Then last week I was told by our web developers that our MySQL server was down. It turned out that the service had stopped running. Now, if only they had been using MS SQL, I would have been notified by my trusty SCE server (notice my gentle nudging). So I began to wonder how I could get System Center Essentials to monitor MySQL.

I was fortunate to find a forum post by a Microsoft MVP named John Joyner. Mr. Joyner made the following suggestions on how to monitor MySQL.

Go to the Authoring space in SCE. Expand Management Pack Templates.

1. Windows Service - Make a custom monitor that checks all the MySQL services are running OK.
2. TCP Port - Watch for the particular ports used by MySQL to make sure they are live from outside the monitored box.
3. OLEDB Data Source - Attach to the MySQL databases of interest using OLEDB, you can create a monitor for each one.

Now, steps 1 and 2 I found easy to follow. However, step 3 gave me a few problems. According to the MySQL.com web site, officially, OLE DB is not supported for MySQL. If you search hard enough, you will find an OLE DB driver for MySQL. It is officially not supported and carries a last modified date of Febraury 2001! Furthermore, although there is an official ODBC driver for MySQL, SCE does not allow ODBC drivers. So how can I monitor MySQL databases?

The answer is the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC. This way we can have OLE DB for MySQL using recent technology (No 2001 drivers, thank you).

To setup the Microsoft OLE DB provider for ODBC for this application, do the following:

1. Install the MySQL ODBC driver
2. From the SCE Authoring page, select OLE DB Data Source. Then click on Add Monitoring Wizard on the left side of the page.
3. For Select the monitoring type, make sure that OLE DB Data Source is selected. Click Next.
4. Give a name and an optional description to your monitor. Select or create a management pack for this monitor. Click Next.
5. For the Connection String, make sure that Advanced Configuration is selected.

You now have two choices for the type of connection string that you would like to enter depending on whether you want to use an ODBC Data Source Name (DSN) or not. My recommendation is not to use a DSN. It is just one more thing to troubleshoot. I have provided sample connection strings for both methods.

Connection Strings

Without a DSN (recommended):

Provider=MSDASQL;DRIVER=MySQL ODBC 3.51 Driver; SERVER=your-mysql-server; DATABASE=your-databasename; UID=mysql-user; PWD=password

(Note: If the name of the MySQL ODBC driver changes, the DRIVER parameter will have to be changed to match the new name. Currently, the name of the ODBC driver appears as MySQL ODBC 3.51 Driver.)

With a DSN

Provider=MSDASQL; DSN=name-of-you-dsn; DATABASE=your-databasename; UID=mysql-user; PWD=password

For further documentation on the Microsoft OLE DB provider for ODBC :

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms675326(vs.85).aspx

I think that I am coming down with a case of Tech Ed Head. It is a new condition that I have just invented to describe my anticipation of Tech Ed 2008 and that I may have the opportunity to attend the event again this year. The Microsoft announcements are all up online which only adds to my condition.

As I have mentioned in a previous post, Tech Ed will be split into two sessions this year, both held in Orlando, FL. The first session, which will run from June 3-6 is for Developers. On June 10-13, the second session will focus on IT Professionals. (This is not to imply that Developers are not IT Professionals! ) Early bird registration runs through April 4th, saving you $200 of the $1995 full registration price. I will hopefully be attending the IT Professional conference.

Something cool that I learned about Tech Ed today is how the Microsoft Certification Testing center will be run this year. The actual Tech Ed conferences are running from Tuesday to Friday one each week. On the Tech Ed web site I found that the testing center will open on Monday, June 2. It will also be open on the Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (June 7-9) between the conferences. Now try to tell me that you do not have enough time to get certified during Tech Ed!

As I learn more, I will try to highlight the interesting things that I find.

I have added a couple of non-Wordpress widgets to the blog’s home page recently. Both are Flash powered, so you have to click on them first before you can use them. One is a simple widget that displays a daily Bible verse. The other one is an RSS reader that I obtained from Spring Widgets. I like it because in the same space it would normally take to display one newsfeed, I can display a window that lets you view multiple newsfeeds that I think might interest my readers. Currently, I have Trika’s MCP Blog, a couple of feeds from CertCities.com on Career and Training, an MCP magazine news blog, my feed (is it overkill? :-), and Fox news. I may add more content as time goes on. Is it worth adding these widgets to my blog? Is the drain on loading the page too much? Let me know what you think.

Oh, and I am sorry for the month long absence. I will try to keep to my schedule of at least one blog post per week.

Thank you for reading.