Steve Glendinning

I just discovered the Complete PC Backup feature of Vista, and I’m very impressed!  This is included in the  Business, Enterprise and Ultimate editions (not the home editions).  It takes full drive image backups which can be restored by booting a standard Vista install DVD.

There’s a simple GUI to kick a backup off (backup and restore center), but unfortunately it’s rather restrictive.  It only lets you backup to a directly attached hard disk (e.g. USB) or to DVDs.  Fortunately the underlying engine DOES support backing up to a network file share.

To kick off a one-off backup, start an elevated command prompt (Start menu, Accessories, right click “command prompt” and select “Run as Administrator”) and type the following:

wbadmin start backup -allCritical -backupTarget:\\SERVER\SHARE -include:C: -vssFull

replacing \\SERVER\SHARE with the path to your network share location.  It’ll ask if you’re sure and then display its backup progress.  When it’s finished you should see it’s created a folder called WindowsImageBackup\MachineName on your backup share.  If you dig under this folder you can find it stores the entire backup in a .vhd file (virtual hard disk, also used by Microsoft’s virtualisation products).

You can schedule backups to run regularly using the task scheduler to call the command above, and adding “-quiet” to stop it prompting.  There’s a full guide to scheduling complete pc backups here.

EDIT: Apparently this is all fixed in Windows 7.

One of the features of Vista that I really like is it’s “sleep”.  Unlike XP, which usually used S1 sleep, Vista puts the system into the much lower power S3 state.  On my Core2Quad workstation, this takes the power usage down to 3W (from ~62W running at idle).  To put this into perspective, the power usage when the system is fully shut down is ~2W, but wakeup is MUCH quicker than a full boot.

Vista allows you to configure which hardware sources can wake up the system from sleep, so for example you can enable or disable Wake On Lan.  It also allows software to schedule a wakeup, and Media Centre is one such beast.  Ever since I started playing with Media Centre, the system has randomly woken up from sleep (and not returned to sleep afterwards), which kinda defeats the purpose of sleep!

It’s quite easy to find out the source of the most recent wakeup (powercfg /lastwake), but this lists all software sources as “RTC”.  It doesn’t identify *which* process (or scheduled task) was responsible.

I found one solution over at thegreenbutton (thanks to mxcrowe):

If you do this, your computer will not auto-wake for any reason (s/w reason – I suppose WOL etc. will still work).  This info was given to me by another poster here on the Green Button:

1. Open a CMD prompt
2. powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_sleep bd3b718a-0680-4d9d-8ab2-e1d2b4ac806d 0
3. powercfg -setdcvalueindex scheme_current sub_sleep bd3b718a-0680-4d9d-8ab2-e1d2b4ac806d 0
4. powercfg -setactive scheme_current

This changes and applies a new power scheme that stops the machine from being woken from sleep. In my case, I have a desktop system and probably didn’t need to set the DC option, but I did both anyway.

Vyatta 3.0.3 (and its community equivalent VC4) boots fine on Virtual PC, which is really handy for firing up a “test” router.  Unfortunately, the latest subscription release 3.1.3 (and probably VC5) fails shortly after the bootloader prompt with this error:

Vyatta Virtual PC boot error

The solution is to pass the linux kernel boot argument noreplace-paravirt.  This is done on the live CD by typing “live noreplace-paravirt” and pressing enter (instead of simply pressing enter or waiting for the CD to automatically boot).

When you’ve installed to the virtual hard disk (using the install-system command), you’ll find it displays the same error.  To boot the first time you’ll need to press Escape to access the grub menu, then press “e” to edit the default entry.  Add the word noreplace-paravirt to the end of the line (after “console=tty0″) and press ctrl-x to boot.

When you get the login prompt, you can log in as root and edit the grub config file (nano /boot/grub/grub.cfg) to add the option to the command line permanently.

I’ve had an Orange Samsung i200 (running Windows Mobile 6.1) for just over a week now, and I have to say I like it! It’s noticeably more responsive than the Nokia N73 it replaced (TBH i think that mostly illustrates how sluggish the N73 was), and I’ve *nearly* got used to the different keypad. Honestly, why do all the different manufacturers use a different key for “space”?!

Being a Windows Mobile handset, it came loaded with all the expected Microsoft applications… except one! It seems Orange have decided to remove the MSN Messenger client, presumably because they’re worried it’ll dent their extremely profitable SMS revenue. And Microsoft no longer makes the client available for download (”ask your operator for MSN access”).

After several hours of trawling through forums, I found the nice chaps at xda-developers have many builds of the mobile msn client available for download (although you need to register to get access). Most are for the full PocketPC (PDA) OS, but the file attached to post #202 works on SmartPhones like the i200.

As expected, Pocket Outlook’s Microsoft Exchange synchronisation works seamlessly, so I now have real-time push email, contacts and calendar sync. And it’s actually usable as a phone too!

Now Visual Studio 2008 has been released, I thought I’d look at the new LINQ functionality. I followed ScottGu’s introduction tutorials, but came across a problem.  hopefully this post will save others some time!

ScottGu wrote his LINQ tutorials based on the Beta2 release of .NET 3.5. Between Beta2 and the final RTM, Microsoft renamed several methods:

• Add is now InsertOnSubmit
• AddAll is now InsertAllOnSubmit
• Remove is now DeleteOnSubmit
• RemoveAll is now DeleteAllOnSubmit

So when I followed Scott’s 3rd tutorial, I thought the methods were missing.

Of course, if you know where to look, this is all documented in the Linq to SQL Beta2 to RTM breaking changes document. But that doesn’t help the huge number of online tutorials already published with the Beta2 naming convention.

I’ve been having a recurring problem with my Windows small business server 2003. Sometimes when I reboot it, it decrements the serial number of one of its DNS zones. This causes repeated warnings to be logged on a Linux slave DNS server:

Dec 3 06:53:49 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:03:48 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:11:26 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:21:24 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:29:18 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:37:54 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:47:10 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:56:11 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)

The solution is simple: Log onto the windows server, open the DNS management console, find the zone and click “increment” a couple of times on the serial number (SOA). But it’s very annoying, especially when the damn thing reboots itself every month for patch Tuesday!

It seems this was a documented problem in Windows Server 2000 (fixed in SP4): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304653, but I can’t find any reference to the same problem in Server 2003.

Forefront Client Security is Microsoft’s anti-virus product. It’s designed to be deployed to entire organisations, integrated into MOM (for reporting) and WSUS (for signature and engine updates). This is all great but how do you install it in standalone mode on a single PC?!

I had to dig through quite a bit of microsoft deployment guide, but I found the answer: it is possible.

Open up a command prompt (”run as administrator” if you’re running vista), change directory to the CLIENT folder of the FCS CD and type:

clientsetup.exe /NOMOM

It should install totally silently, then you’ll see the icon in the system tray telling you it needs an update already. Open internet explorer, visit Microsoft Update and install the critical update available for forefront.

When it’s all installed and updated, the forefront system tray icon should turn into a green tick.