Given changes to Windows backup formats in Vista/7/2008 the following tools may be rather useful as W7 and 2008 become ever more common:
http://www.jmedved.com/default.aspx?page=vhdattach
http://arainia.com/software/gizmo/overview.php?nID=4
this 2nd one can even allegedly be used [with care] with Vista native VHD backups. or
http://www.winmount.com/mount_vhd.html
which allegedly also allows one to write to the VHD as well.
Alternatively, if you need quick access to VHD backups, you can mount them directly from the 7/2008 Disk Manager, but the mount doesn't survive a reboot.
Also VHDTool - command-line tool which provides useful VHD manipulation functions including instant creation of large fixed-size VHDs.
Trying to install Windows SP3 (Network Installation) on a client machine. It would not install, giving the error message "The system cannot find the file specified." and "The installation could not complete"
Thank you to DataOne on the softwaretipsandtricks.com forum which pointed me in the right direction.
regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll regsvr32 /s wups.dll regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll regsvr32 /s atl.dll regsvr32 /s Softpub.dll regsvr32 /s Wintrust.dll regsvr32 /s Initpki.dll regsvr32 /s Mssip32.dll
Not sure what to say really. I got this error earlier this month and just stared blankly at the screen for a while.
Some customers are asking about downtime, so here is a quick summary of realistic expectations. The following excerpt is from a Slashdot comment 6 weeks back (thanks to mcrbids)
So we see the real issue isn't whether or not you can count on 100% uptime, but whether or not having downtime in your "100% available" costs all that much.
Are you serving personal pictures on a home DSL line? If so, 99% uptime is probably for you. What's the real cost of a few days of unavailability per year?
Are you serving data commercially? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.9% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 8 hours of downtime per year) Think about the freebie web server on your local ISP. If it's down for a couple of afternoons per year, is anybody going to complain much?
Are you serving financial records for a state government? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.99% uptime may not be worth it. (That's just under 1 hour of downtime per year)
Are you serving cash Visa for nations? If so, anything more than 99.999% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 5 minutes of downtime per year)
Each of these "nines" costs exponentially more. A home computer running the latest consumer grade O/S can generally maintain 2 nines without too much difficulty. A basic server running a server O/S (EG: Linux) can generally sustain close to 3 nines without difficulty. When there's a problem, you can drive to the local colo to reboot the server. Keeping a spare server handy and reliable backups means you can recover in less than 8 hours or so. It gets pretty spendy at 4 nines: 99.99% gives you just under an hour. That means you are hosting a fully redundant cluster, with lots of realtime "auto-recover" options. And 99.999% uptime is insanely expensive. Not only are you fully redundant, but you are actually watching each individual process to ensure that it completes, even if the hardware/process dedicated to it fails.
5 nines, along with high performance, can be ridiculously expensive.
So in order to assess how much money you should spend on uptime depends on how much downtime really costs you.
Some useful information today.
I'm in love...
I guess I should qualify that statement. I've been working on finding a firewall to deploy to our customers.
Gradually more and more of our customers want or need 2 ADSL lines for fail-over and/or VoIP traffic quality purposes. So the task was to find a robust router that importantly wasn't going to be deprecated or discontinued for a fair while so we could standardise on it. Our problem recently with low end ADSL routers is that we'd find a nice one, then after a few months we wouldn't be able to buy it anymore.
So low cost and sophisticated enough to do :-
We bought a Netgear Dual WAN router to investigate the commercial dual WAN routers, as we have had good experiences with their equipment. However on testing it didn't quite do everything I wanted. Particularly be able to choose the exit route of different traffic on our network. It also left me worried that choosing a commercial solution would leave us open to having the product changed or upgraded.
We've been a fan of IPCop's for a long time as we've always found that standard firewall routers have either lacked features or been out of the range of the SME budget. For those customers that have needed a featured firewall we've always used IPCop's. Using an old PC or a new mini-ATX PC and putting IPCop on it has made our lives much nicer in the last 5 years. However IPCop doesn't support dual WAN and there was nothing on the roadmap to suggest it was going to be implemented. The other thing was that being hard drive based, IPCop's are always going to be more prone to failure than an embedded firewall due to the mechanical nature of hard drives. We'd considered putting IPCop on CF-cards, but figured that since they weren't optimised for flash based drives, that the OS would rapidly wear the drive out.
However there is the dual-WAN capable pfsense, and after checking out a virtual appliance and being suitable happy with it, I decided to buy an ALIX embedded PC. This company sells them with m0n0wall or pfsense pre-loaded so I bought 2 for testing and waited for it to arrive.
