Microsoft components architecture posters

August 28, 2010 in Microsoft, Windows, Windows Server 2008 | No comments

W2k8

Back in February I mentioned that Microsoft placed a poster online about the features of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, and now they added 2 new posters:

Below you’ll see how the first poster looks. To best view these poster you’ll need a big screen or print them out on a large-size piece of paper (A0), or like I did, place the in you iBooks so you can view this on your iPat and zoom in to the part which you think is interesting at that time.

clip_image002

Blog title changed (well a little bit)

August 3, 2010 in General | No comments

During the time this blog was done to some unfortunate series of problems at the provider (x10hosting.com) I’ve acquired myself an iPad. I mostly use this during travel for reading (ebooks) and watching episodes of my favourite series (i.e. Top Gear).

My colleague R.S. always shortens my name to Pat and when I told him about my latest gadget, he immediately called me iPat :-) .

Well that made me thinking. My current abbrevation (PDA stands for Patrick DAmen) is something of the past.  The term Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) dates from back the early 90’s (1992), and has been gradually replaced with the smartphone. Well to catapult myself back to the 2010’s I’ve decided to update the title of this blog to:

blog.damen-online.nl (by iPat)

However the contents stay the same, mainly work related, but always related to technology.

Volleybaltoernooien.nl

April 2, 2010 in Sports, Webdevelopment | No comments

image

 

Together with a friend of mine, I’m the owner of Volleybaltoernooien.nl. We started this site back in 2006 in order to provide the Dutch volleyball community with a searchable calendar of tournaments played throughout the year. We decided to build this site on asp.NET (because we both work with Microsoft products) from scratch. Because this was our first encounter with developing websites we had some flaws/omissions in the site:

  • usage of tables for layout. The site had a different look in almost every different browser :-(
  • results only displayed in a table

Volleybaltoernooien.nl

Now after almost 4 years we found the time to update /upgrade the site. The main reason is that we wanted to implement google maps to show the results. So we started to develop a new version of volleybaltoernooien.nl based on the following requirements:

  • Same look in all major browsers
  • Easy
    • to search
    • to add a tournament
  • Show results in Google maps
  • Show results in ordered list
  • “clean” site
  • “Europe / World ” ready (requirements are in place, globalization is in progress)

Volleybaltoernooien.nl 2.0

Because both of us aren’t a developer or designer it took some time and probably things can be done smarter, but it’s another improvement of a site that attracts more than 10.000 unique visitors a month since the start.

Please feel free to visit the website (if you can read dutch) and comment on this topic. In a few weeks the site will also be available in English, German (& hopefully French).

XenApp: Server load 20000???

March 16, 2010 in Citrix, Microsoft, Windows, Windows Server 2008, XenApp | 1 comment

citrix  W2k8

Ok, before continuing I have to say this wasn’t one of my finest moments, but to my defense, 2 other colleagues on the job hadn’t a good idea/clue either.

The problem:

We were troubleshooting another problem and decide in order to troubleshoot to manually install some components (among them was XenApp Server) on the Microsoft Windows 2008 Server (x86). After restarting the server and performing a qfarm /load the server returned a server load of 20000.

What the heck?

In the past this indicated that a load balancing license was not available, but in our case this couldn’t be the problem because we’re running Citrix XenApp 5.0 Advanced Edition (with licensing in place).

The solution:

After some checking I discovered that RDP wasn’t enabled (this was normally done through a SCCM task(which we disabled during troubleshooting)). The reason I didn’t discovered this right away is that I prefer to use the console for installing software, and I installed the Terminal Services role. After enabling RDP and restarting the server I got a user load of 0, so whoohoo the problem was solved.

The error code put us on the wrong foot, so that’s why I wanted to share this “not so fine” moment :-) with all of you…

!!! ALWAYS ENABLE RDP on a XENAPP SERVER !!!

Application Virtualization 4.6 RTM

February 23, 2010 in App-V, Microsoft | No comments

 App-V 4.6

Yesterday Microsoft released Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6 (which is now compatible with 64-bit Windows client and server platforms). Because this release was tightly coordinated with the App-V MVP’s there’s a lot of information already out there, like the following blogs from the MVP’s:

Ment van der Plas also wrote a whitepaper about Choosing the right App-V Delivery Model. App-V integration: possibilities and impossibilities. You can download this whitepaper here (registration required)

App-V can be access immediately via MDOP 2010.

Existing MDOP customers can download MDOP 2010 at the Microsoft Volume Licensing Site (MVLS). For evaluation, MDOP 2010 can be downloaded from MSDN and TechNet.

App-V 4.6 for RDS (formerly App-V for Terminal Services) can be downloaded immediately here.

« Older entries