Speaking at TEC 2010!

I’ve been accepted to speak at TEC 2010 April 25^th – 28th, in LA! TEC – formerly the Directory Expert’s Conference – is a 400 level propellerhead’s conference about directory services, identity, Exchange, and SharePoint. On top of that, it holds the record in my book for being the quirkiest conference with the most unusual traditions I’ve ever attended (e.g. the DEC / TEC chicken, the Joe & Dean show, the DEC / TEC Wook Lee Memorial Pro / Am Challenge*, Stuarts Kwan ordering pizza delivery for all attendees, even the opening keynote). I’m sure all the new Exchange and SharePoint attendees will be confused :).

I’ve been invited to speak for a number of years, all my friends go, but this is the first time I’ve spoken there. I’m giving a session on AD replication troubleshooting based on my troubleshooting flowcharts at adtroubleshooting.deuby.com.

Please try to make the conference! You get to rub elbows with the top – I’ll repeat it, top – directory experts in the world, both inside  and outside Microsoft. A significant number of the Microsoft Directory Services team comes to this conference. It’s 400 level detail, beyond what you get at a Tech Ed. It’s in LA this year, not Las Vegas, so you can’t be accused of just going to party. But it’s still a heck of a lot of fun.

http://www.tec2010.com/

* No, he’s not dead. It’s a long story. Which you’ll hear if you attend.

Technorati Tags: TEC 2010,DEC,TEC

Polychrome Pass

Last week I was walking past a colleague’s desk, and did such a double-take that a couple of other heads popped up to see what was so interesting.

Satish had downloaded a new Windows 7 theme, Bing’s Best, that has what someone at Microsoft picked as the best photos from the amazing collection displayed on a daily basis at Bing. The particular photo is of a hiker standing on a point, looking out at a stunning collection of green tundra, multihued (polychrome) rocks, snow-covered mountains, and a cloud-dotted blue sky.

I saw it when it first came out and was transfixed by it. It’s an interesting photo with great colors, and a perfect example of why you want to put the point your eye moves to – the hiker – well off to one side instead of in the center. Where on earth was it?? Poking around on Bing, I saw it was called Polychrome Pass, deep in Denali National Park in Alaska. Huh, what are the odds of getting to THAT in my lifetime.

I was never able to get a clean JPEG of it, so it faded into that netherworld in your head where the eye candy of amazing photos goes. Little did I realize when I first got to see this photo I’d be standing in that very spot six months later.

Alas, I wasn’t able to duplicate the exact shot because I didn’t remember by then what it looked like exactly. This is what all of Polychrome Pass looks like, after a harrowing drive in a Park Services bus on a narrow dirt road.

The hiker’s point is in the bottom center. The Bing photo’s viewpoint is off to the left of the camera, so the photographer was actually comfortably standing on the road :). But the picture is just as stunning even with that knowledge.

We had a really terrific day ourselves, a very rare day when Denali was perfectly clear instead of being covered in clouds (it’s so big it has its own weather system), but it didn’t look as nice as that. Might be sour grapes, but I think a little Photoshop work might have been applied to it. Or at least that’s my story :).

Technorati Tags: Denali,Polychrome Pass,Alaska,Denali National Park,Bing,Windows 7 Theme Pack

Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components Poster Available!

In a previous entry I’d mentioned the cool AD Reference posters put out by technet. Well, there’s now a Windows Server 2008 R2 poster available. It’s incredibly detailed, something any IT pro would love to have on their wall. And a magnifying glass on a string nearby.

Thanks to Paul Thurrott for pointing it out to us.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=64a5cc28-f8a1-4b30-a4a2-455c65bda8d7&displaylang=en

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2008 R2,R2,poster

Free Lab Training On New(& newish) AD Features

Are you perhaps considering upgrading your DCs from Windows 2003 to 2008 R2, but you want to kick the tires of some of the new features available in it and Windows 2008? I’ve got a resource for you.

Doing some other research, I found that TechNet Virtual Labs has a good amount of resources on AD features in W2K8, like

• Best Practices Analyzer
• Recycle Bin, PowerShell V2
• The new Server Manager utilities

There’s also good stuff on existing W2K8 features:

• Managing AD DS
• Remotely Managing Server Core (a MUST for anyone implementing Hyper-V)
• Fine Grained Password Policy

These are well worth 90 minutes (probably less) of your time. Ironically, the Virtual Labs don’t have what I was looking for - a lab on Hyper-V virtualization :-/.

Technorati Tags: Hyper-V,Active Directory,Best Practices Analyzer,Recycle Bin,PowerShell V2,Server Core,Fine Grained Password Policy

Winding Up Connections

I’ve just finished my annual visit to the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas to speak at Windows Connections. It was a good trip, with the dual purpose of presenting sessions and catching up with my professional friends and colleagues – most of whom I’ve never seen outside of some hotel, convention center, or the Microsoft campus.

Windows Connections is a relatively small conference compared to a behemoth like Tech Ed, but that’s one of the things its attendees like about it. They get to hang out and talk to the speakers in between session, and there’s usually an attendee party where the speakers are specifically instructed to come hang out with the people that pay for them. Every year I recognize a number of returning folks. I presented three sessions covering various aspects of Active Directory troubleshooting and recovery, and shopped around version 1.0 of some AD troubleshooting flowcharts. I also did a nice little interview with Josh Hoffman for AppAssure on AD recovery. Last night I spend a little time with the Windows IT Pro crowd (a rowdy bunch!) at MiX, the nightclub at the top of THEHotel at the Mandalay. I’m not a nightclubber – this was the first time I’d been there in at least five years of coming here – but the view of the Strip from the north balcony of this southside hotel was simply jawdropping. Fortunately, a vendor was springing for the hideously expensive drinks.

On the downside, I won’t be seeing the gang at the spring Windows Connections in Orlando; the organizers had to cancel it due to the slow economy. On the plus side, I was invited to do a couple of sessions at a new conference in the spring, a virtualization summit, at the Bellagio in Vegas. So, on the road again for conference season (March and April) next spring – virtualization, (hopefully) MVP summit, possibly TEC, possibly Tech Ed. I’d like to do some European gigs like I’ve done in the past, but you never can tell what will materialize.

Technorati Tags: Windows Connections,virtualization

The REPADMIN Reference

REPADMIN is the main utility Active Directory administrators use for checking replication. It’s very powerful and can provide a ton of insight about what’s going on between your domain controllers as they merrily pass those little objects and attributes amongst each other. However, as any less-than-experienced or part-time AD admin can tell you, there are a number of pain points around working with it:

• It’s huge. REPADMIN has 69 possible commands between its old (deprecated) command set, current ones, and expert “we warned you not to break your AD” advanced ones. And most commands have a stack of switches and parameters. Even the help on how you can specify a list of domain controllers for the command prints out to three pages!
• The syntax is byzantine – even the help is. There are three levels of help within the utility, and the syntax is different for each and can change between the product releases. I mean, who ever heard of /?:<command> ? Oh, and it falls into that special category of command line utilities from hell where if you don’t get the syntax exactly right, it simply spits the general help file back at you with no hint as to what you’ve done wrong. This is clearly a case where a few hours spent by the developer will save thousands of hours administrator’s time across the globe.
• The output is equally complex and takes experience to understand.
• There are few scenario-based examples on how to use the tool – which is the handiest approach. After all, most REPADMIN users are using it to solve a specific problem.

This is okay-ish for dedicated, experienced AD admins; they can impress their geek friends at TEC with their superior knowledge :). But the majority of AD admins in the world aren’t dedicated; they have other things to do as well. (Microsoft’s TAGM – technical audience global marketing – says the majority of IT pros are generalists that have to do many roles.) These people visit REPADMIN occasionally as needed, and can remember two or three commands. They have to look up the rest, either from their own notes, an article, general searching, or trial and error. And there’s so much REPADMIN can do, even the dedicated AD admins can usually find new cool things to do.

After whining about this on a Directory Services MVP conference call with the DS team, I learned that back in 2008 Microsoft published a comprehensive (111-page!) reference document on REPADMIN, including various scenarios. The document is available on Microsoft Downloads at http://bit.ly/16xir3; every AD admin should have a local soft copy they can CTL+F their way through.

It does not include Windows Server 2008 updates, but it’s a huge help to those of us used to squinting at syntax in command prompts.

Technorati Tags: microsoft,repadmin,Active Directory,replication,Active Directory replication,replication troubleshooting

First Look & Listen At Dallas’ New Winspear Opera House

We’ve been fortunate to attend two grand openings during our time here in Dallas, once in 1989 and again today . I don’t mean gallery openings or restaurant openings; I mean the kind of opening that happens about once every 50 years for a type of venue.

In 1989 we attended the gala opening of the Morten H. Meyerson Symphony Center (aka “The Mort” for obvious reasons), a stunning design by the famous architect I.M. Pei, and the only concert hall he ever did. Twenty years later on Sunday afternoon, almost to the month, we attended the Spotlight Concert for the Margot & Ted Winspear Opera House right next door.

Everyone associated with the Opera, whether they’re attendees or performers, has been looking forward to this event for quite some time. The Dallas Opera has been performing in the Fair Park Music Hall almost since its inception. The Music Hall is cavernous (3420 seats), dark, cramped backstage, and very difficult to hear if you aren’t in orchestra or first balcony seats. I’ve spent many hours backstage in those dingy dressing rooms, so I personally can’t wait to see how the Winspear improves on them.

In contrast, the Winspear is very sleek and modern from the outside, with a large moveable louver “roof” to shade it from the Texas sun, and glass windows that are supposed to slide up and down as weather permits. It’s almost a third smaller than the Music Hall, seating 2200 people. The structure surrounding the Margaret McDermott concert hall is covered in a hard red plastic, with red neon lights inside it to display entrance names, floor levels, and even the opera house’s name. There are cantilevered stairs with exposed steps and glass-plus-chrome railings all the way up to the fifth level; it’s actually not for someone that has a fear of heights. The concert hall inside has sort of a mid-century Modern look with a bit of a Scandinavian twist. Its most prominent feature, I think, are the sculpted metal bands that ring the concert hall and (I presume) diffuse the direct sound from the stage. It has mahogany floors that may be good for acoustics, but is very distracting when they meet a latecomer during the concert wearing heels. Tap, tap, tap…does anyone ever think of taking their shoes off? It’s a thrill to walk into a distinctive concert hall like the Winspear, or the Mort, or the Disney in Los Angeles, for the very first time. I never get tired of showing visitors around the Meyerson. And there’s an extra thrill when you know you’re among the first to see the hall, period.

The Spotlight concert was a free but only word-of-mouth advertised event, held partly to thank Texas Instruments and Margaret McDermott, widow of one of TI’s founders, for their sponsorship. We got in “legally”, but hey, I’m a fifteen year TI alumnus so I didn’t feel out of place.

The main reason for the concert, however, was to test the sound of the hall for the first time. To do this, you must have bodies in seats as any concert hall sounds very different with our sound-absorbing and scattering bodies than it sounds empty. This was made immediately evident as Bob Essert of Sound Space Design of London, the chief acoustician of the hall’s design, set up an unusual speaker on stage. Instructing us to be quiet while he held up his hand, he ran a series of frequency sweeps and bursts of white noise to document the hall’s frequency response and latency with our warm bodies in it. With that completed, the concert began with Opera Music Director Graeme Jenkins leading the Opera Orchestra, chorus, and soloists.

Maestro Jenkins had selected a range of pieces, from very intimate piano and violin chamber music to the huge finale of Die Meistersinger with chorus, organ, onstage brass and percussion, and the 85-piece orchestra. I’m guessing he selected the wide range to check out how the hall sounded in different situations. Unfortunately, the audience was apparently shy of seasoned concertgoers. I suspect many of them, with little kids in tow, were there more to see the hall than sit through a somewhat lengthy concert. Children were more in evidence than usual on this Sunday afternoon, and for a particularly quiet chamber piece the Maestro turned around and asked if the children that couldn't keep quiet be kept outside for the duration of the piece. Seems a bit harsh at first, but when you consider that the main purpose of the concert was to hear and tune the hall – not the audience – a little cooperation would have been nice. The little girl and her parents behind us did NOT leave, so we were treated to 10 minutes of torture as we alternated between trying to focus on the piano / violin piece and hearing the girl just behind us. Unless we had the distraction of ANOTHER woman clicking into the hall on her heels. <sigh>

The sound of the hall was instantly, clearly different than the Meyerson. Very crisp, very dry. I’m not an expert at describing such things, but it was also the general consensus of other concertgoers we talked to. I guess this would translate to a more dominant high frequency response than the Mort, but the sound doesn’t ‘hang’, or echo about the place. It’s much less resonant than the Mort. There’s a surprising amount of detail you can hear from the orchestra – and remember, they’re in the pit in front of and under the stage. You can hear practically every note, good or bad.

There’s work to be done acoustically and physically, of course. I thought there was a little TOO much volume out of the pit, which overbalanced the soloists. Odd sound reflections, causing us to wonder if there was an offstage band or not. Separating of woodwinds and brass across the pit from each other, which created a disjointed sound. And several people crashed to the floor that afternoon; one tripped over a taped-down microphone cable, another stepped off an unmarked 4-inch riser in rear orchestra. And I really hope they just haven’t installed the hydraulic closers on the inner concert hall doors yet; the sound of a door thudding shut should not be heard in a $354 million dollar performance hall.

Technorati Tags: Winspear Opera House,Winspear,Dallas Opera,Dallas

Why Are My Photos Required To Beat Cancer?

I just ran across a Facebook app from Intel called “Progress through Processors”. It’s a new version of the distributed computing / grid computing apps we’ve had for a long time (I had lots of SETI@Home points), directed towards combating cancer, climate change, and malaria in Africa. That took about 10 seconds to decide, “Hell yeah I”ll do that!” (despite the economy hit – it isn’t free; when the processor is pegged it does use more juice). However…ahem…there’s the question of this little warning screen before you can install the app:

Allowing Progress Thru Processors access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends' info, and other content that it requires to work.

Excuse me?? Now I may not be the identity geek my friend Pam is, but I do know my way through Kim Cameron’s Seven Laws Of Identity. Law number 2 states:

The solution that discloses the least amount of identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable long-term solution.

In other words, assume a systems breach is always possible, and never ask for identity information you don’t directly and immediately need. Why on earth are my photos, my friend’s info, and “other content” required to use my spare processor cycles to combat cancer?

Equally scary, over 104,000 people are fans of this app. If they’ve all installed it, that’s a hell of a lot of identity gathering. I realize this is pretty standard procedure for Facebook apps (which is why I don’t use them), but I’d hoped that Intel would know better.

I posted a comment regarding this to my old home at the Intel blogs; we’ll see what comes of it.

Technorati Tags: Intel,Identity,Facebook

Useful Active Directory Delegation Links

Delegating rights in an AD forest so that everyone gets just the rights they need – and no more – is one of the most important acts an AD administrator can take to ensure the security of that forest. In writing up an AD disaster recovery presentation, I came across several links that summarize the basic delegation recommendations, and updated features in later AD releases that make delegation a little easier. Though not exhaustive, I thought I’d simply collect these in one place.

• Windows 2003: Best Practices for Delegating Active Directory Administration
  
• Windows 2008: Administrator Role Separation on Read Only DCs
  
• Windows 2008: New “Owner Rights” Security Principal
  
• Windows 2008: Fine Grained Password Policy

Technorati Tags: Active Directory,delegation,delegation of administration,fine grained password policy,RODC

Tip: Retrieving the Prodigal Window

Have you ever worked with an external monitor on your notebook, with the desktop and applications spread out across both monitors,  then undocked the notebook and half your apps are “off the screen”? You can’t move them back on the screen because you can’t see where to place the mouse cursor to drag the windows back to the visible desktop. And if you quit and re-launch them, they go right back to where they were! Very annoying.

I helped out a coworker with this tip today and thought I’d document it. It dates back to Windows 3.1 / 3.11, back when the menu in the upper-left corner of a window was used much more. It’s still there in Windows 7, but no one seems to know about it any more.

To move a window back to where you can see it:

1. Use Alt-Tab to bring the wayward window into focus. (Even though you can’t see it, it’s still in focus.)
2. Hit Alt-Space to activate the upper-left menu.
3. Hit “m” to select the Move command. The cursor, if you could see it, turns into a four-way arrow.
4. Using the cursor keys only, move the window back to where you can see it. Use any other key or mouse click to return the cursor to normal.

Technorati Tags: moving window,cursor,use cursor to move window,hidden window,alt-space

Active Directory Reference Posters

In trolling through Microsoft downloads for some upcoming presentations, I happened across an updated version of the original Windows 2003 Active Directory Component “Jigsaw” poster published by TechNet Magazine in their March-April 2006 issue. The updated version, published in July 2007, contains the various AD feature components available in Windows 2008:

• AD Lightweight Directory Services (aka ADAM. Yes. Still.)
• AD Federation Services (ADFS)
• AD Rights Management Services (AD RMS)
• Group Policy (not strictly a feature component, though the Group Policy Management Console – GPMC – is)
• AD Management (sort of a grab bag of new AD features in W2K8, including fine-grained password policies, GlobalName zones, restartable AD, and auditing changes)
• AD Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC) – the most heavily promoted new AD feature in W2K8

If that’s not enough information to cram onto a 20” x 30” poster, one side has a list of acronyms and their translation while the other is a legend of all the pretty icons being used. This is a poster to put on the wall and stare intently at, for a while.

For you non-AD people that occasionally read this blog…yeah, it is complicated :).

TechNet Magazine Active Directory Component Jigsaw Poster

Windows Server 2008 Component Poster 

Technorati Tags: active directory,ad components,AD poster,AD jigsaw,technet,technet magazine

Upgrading Windows 7 RC to RTM

If you’re like me, when you had Windows 7 beta on your system, you more or less expected to have to rebuild to move to the release candidate. With the release candidate, based on past history you fully expected to be able to upgrade from RC to RTM.

Surprisingly, that’s not the case. I don’t know the whys and wherefores of this decision, but I do know I don’t want to go through it. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to upgrade to Windows 7 RTM from RC, courtesy of Ron Schenone. Note that, strictly speaking, this scenario is not supported by Microsoft (though I highly doubt the question will ever come up). I’ll summarize the procedure here:

1. Mount your legal copy of Windows 7, either with the physical DVD or by using MagicDisc to mount the ISO.
2. Copy the contents to a writeable location (network file share, usb key / drive, etc.). I used a network file share that was available to all clients.
3. Browse to the \support folder.
4. Edit cversion.ini.
5. Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the build you’re running. If you’re running the RC, lower the number from 7100 to 7000.
6. Save the file.
7. Run setup from this modified copy, and the version check will be bypassed.

A few other notes from my upgrade experience:

• Log off all other users on the computer.
• Deauthorize any iTunes accounts for the computer. You can easily re-auth them when the upgrade is complete.
• I don’t know this last one for sure, but I believe the upgrade goes MUCH faster if you offload non-essential files from the system during the upgrade. When I upgraded my desktop computer that had a replicated file share with about 100 GB of data, the upgrade took forever. When on my second upgraded system I moved this kind of data off, it ran much faster. I do know that the Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 upgrades are actually a sort of wipe-and-load upgrade compared to the previous overwrite-in-place upgrade method, so it’s plausible.
• Use Treesize Free to compare (and clean up!) your disk space before and after the upgrade. You may find you’ve burned some space that can be reclaimed.
• You can also reclaim space after a successful upgrade by going into Disk Cleanup for the system drive (Right-click on the drive letter in Windows Explorer, Properties, the Disk Cleanup button by the pie chart). The list of of items that can be cleaned up will include “Files discarded by Windows upgrade”, but it will NOT be checked. In my case it saved about 1.4 GB of space.
• Before you copy all those files back (and you’re in the disk properties dialog anyway), go to the Tools property sheet and defrag your nice new upgraded system!

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,upgrade,RC to RTM,MagicDisc,TreeSize Free

W2K8 Metadata Cleanup without NTDSUTIL

I just learned that when you aren’t able to normally demote a domain controller in Active Directory and have to perform a metadata cleanup, if you’re running Windows 2008 or R2 it’s become much easier.

The classic method for cleaning up the DC’s metadata in Active Directory has been to go into NTDSUTIL and running through a sequence of commands to point at the right computer object representing the domain controller, then removing it. What I just learned from one of the Microsoft directory services guys is that

…you can use Active Directory Users and Computers to clean up server metadata. In this procedure, deleting the computer object in the Domain Controllers organizational unit (OU) initiates the cleanup process, which proceeds automatically.

The only place so far I’ve found this documented are those two sentences in this TechNet article. Simple! Just delete the computer object! Now I need to go try it in my test lab…

Technorati Tags: Windows 2008,Windows 2008 R2,Active Directory,DCPROMO,metadata cleanup

Good Old Fashioned American Craftsmanship

A couple of years ago I sprung for a really nice bicycle floor pump, a professional tool made by Park Tool of St. Paul, Minnesota.

If you’ve ever been at all into bicycling and their maintenance, you’ve certainly seen Park tools at your local bike shop. Usually a bit pricier than the rest, the bright blue tools are almost without exception what the professional mechanics use. (One of the nice things about bicycling is that as a grownup you can afford The Best of some things. Unlike automobiles.) They’re running a “True Blue” ad campaign that points out, for example, that every single Park repair stand you’ve seen in every single bicycle shop in the United States for the last 29 years has been welded together by one man – Bradley Reid.

One morning the gauge on my pump stuck at 60 psi. Now I didn’t know if I could simply pump my tire up to 160 and get 100 psi, or if something very bad would happen. Since the tools have a limited lifetime warranty, I gave Park a call. For such a well-known presence in the cycling world, they’re actually quite a small company.

I explained my problem to the operator, who responded, “Oh, you want to talk to Mark.” Really? No phone menus? No overseas call centers? Nope. “Hi, this is Mark. Leave a message and I’ll call you back.”

Mark called back very shortly. Before I’d even finished explaining my problem he knew all about it. “The earlier pumps use brass gears with teeth as small as 1/4 mm. If it got knocked over too many times, sometimes it will skip a tooth or to and stay stuck there.” I hadn’t knocked it over, but I wasn’t going to point this out as he was going to send me an updated gauge. “Be sure to recycle that gauge; under the case it’s a solid brass body.” Really?? People still do that?

I just had to ask, having had so many dodos on the other end of the phone for some many years: Does the new gauge fit the old pump? 

There was a moment’s silent on the other end of the line. Then Mark said, in a slightly offended tone, “Of course it does. This is Park.” You’re right, and thanks for demonstrating it to me.

Mark mailed me a new gauge (and a little Park sticker) for no charge of course, which I easily swapped for the old one. I haven’t been able to bring myself to get rid of the old gauge though. Now I have a second paperweight, alongside my ‘70’s Campy Nuovo Record rear derailleur :).

Technorati Tags: Park Tool,bicycling

A Really Interesting Look at W2K8 R2 Seven Days Before Ship

Windows IT Pro has just aired an interesting interview (if you’re an IT pro that focuses on operating systems – aren’t we all?) of the daily “ship” meeting for Windows Server 2008 R2, a week before it went RTM (released to manufacturing). The overall program manager Brian McNeill is the main interviewee, and the always colorful Iain McDonald also has a cameo.

My colleague Karen Forster, who handled the project, has a good blog post about it.

For those of you that still have old doubts about how reliable the Windows server product is, check out these numbers:

Those reliability statistics McDonald was looking at were noteworthy. The Microsoft study shows that the new release significantly exceeds the reliability goal that was set for its predecessor Windows Server 2008 (WS08) at its RTM. As the graph in the video shows, WS08 R2 RC demonstrated availability of 99.9987 percent (~ 7 minutes of down time per year), which exceeds WS08’s RTM availability of 99.9978 percent (~12 minutes of down time per year)."

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/102593/exclusive-video-inside-the-windows-server-2008-r2-ship-room.html 

Technorati Tags: Windows Server,Windows Server 2008 R2,R2,Microsoft,Windows IT Pro

Up to Exit

After getting just a taste of Exit Glacier from yesterday’s short hike, we vowed to do the much longer Harding Icefield trail. This  trail basically parallels the glacier up to its source in the Harding Icefield, through forest, then meadow, then up steep switchbacks to subalpine meadow, then alpine, then to the edge of the miles-wide icefield itself. The National Park Service recommends “at least 6-8 hours”.

Naturally, we didn’t get started until almost noon :-/.

There’s an interesting aspect to the two-lane highway drive up to the Exit Glacier entrance of the park: signs by the side of the road with numbers on them – years, as it turns out. We finally read, or figured out, that each sign marks where the terminus of the glacier was for that year. In the late 1800’s it was so far down we still had a good 15-minute drive at 50 MPH to get to the entrance. it shows how much Exit Glacier has receded over the last century. It also shows how young the land is in this valley; nothing’s been growing there for more than 100 years because it’s been buried under countless tons of ice. And much of it is much, much younger.

As usual, Connor was strongly against going on the hike. As usual, Sharon prevailed on him to go with us for a little while before heading back to the RV for his real goal of the trip: watching the entire first season of “24” before we left for home.

It was buggy down in the forests, as usual. Not too bad if we kept moving, but god forbid you should have to stop and tie a shoelace. I counted five seconds before I had lots of flies at me. (Yes, I had on 100% DEET bug spray. They didn’t actually bite, mostly, but what an annoyance!) This is about where Connor abandoned.

We also heard about a fair amount of bear spottings on this trail, but they were all in the morning and traffic was pretty high – sitting still you’d see someone about every 5 to 10 minutes – so I wasn’t too worried about it. Soon we were up higher into light brush and meadow, with lots of subalpine flowers.

We decided, reluctantly, to cut the hike short to rejoin the kid so we wouldn’t spend the entire afternoon alone in the RV. (Not that he’d care.) Sharon turned around, and I headed up a bit farther to see if I could get some good photos of the icefield. I wasn’t able to reach the icefield unfortunately, but got to the top of the cliff we were switchbacking, and there was a magnificent view of Exit with the icefield at the top. It was just breathtaking (literally, with the katabatic wind you can hear in the video).

And there were a couple of leaders for a Backroads tour that went up to the icefield, running “sweep” to make sure all their clients got down. Late 20’s, perhaps? Kind of bored with it already. They got our their camera, so I offered to take a photo of the two of them. They declined and said their camera had a special setting for the arm’s length shot. Which they did, and then remarked on how it looked just like all their other arm’s length shots. I literally said, “GIVE me the damn thing!” and proceeded to take a decent photo for them. They headed down then, one ear in their ipods in this magnificent silence, nattering about the people they worked with the whole time. I certainly didn’t have to worry about the bears.

While up there, I shot some video with my little Canon:

…and scrambled back down in about 45 minutes, “Excuse me, excuse me…” so we could get to the beautiful Seward Sea Life Center before they closed. In total, we got about 2/3 of the distance and 75% of the elevation in four hours up and down.

I fell asleep waiting outside the Sea Life Center gift shop.

View Full Album

**********************

My trip photo album will be posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.deuby; I’ll put my very best photos also on http://flickr.com/photos/shorinsean.

Technorati Tags: Alaska,Seward,Kenai Fjords National Park,Exit Glacier,Seward Sea Life Center

Glacier Wind

Well settled in the oceanside RV park in central Seward, we putzed around on Saturday morning. I spent a lot of time trying to get our  AC generator working, but was never able to. Calling the rental place (Great Alaskan Holidays) and talking to a mechanic, we basically figured our generator has crapped out. Though we were in a “dry” site – no water or power – it wasn’t as much of a hardship as we first thought. We could run everything in the RV except

• The 120V AC outlets – which means the coffeemaker and other devices that use them. Our main hardship: no recharging computer and camera batteries without bothering a neighbor. Connor was in serious withdrawal because he had no DC adapter to charge his phone and can’t text his friends. 
• The microwave.
• The coach air conditioner.

We realized it would have been nice to have unlimited water though; we figured that our showers, even the Navy shower style where you get wet, turn the shower off, soap, rinse off, still used about one-third of our fresh water  supply. So, because we were doing active things like hiking and biking, we’ve been showering and therefore visiting the fresh water station pretty much every day. It’s a bit of a pain, but we liked our small but clean shower over the campground showers. Plus it’s much closer to the bedroom.

Fortunately, we didn’t have a lot planned for the day; our main excursion was to the only driveable entrance to Kenai Fjords National Park: Exit Glacier. Exit Glacier is one of 35 glaciers that come out of the Harding Icefield. Its unromantic name comes from the fact that the party that first crossed the icefield used it to exit.

There are several hikes of different difficulties around Exit. We were coming up late in the day (well, at least by down south standards where the sun actually goes down) so we were looking for a short hike. We took the Glacier Edge trail, which is the longest of the trails at the glacier’s base and took us up alongside one edge (obviously). It was a buggy in the woods, but well worth it at the end! The glacier was beautiful, but there was a side benefit I hadn’t planned for. A katabatic wind blows down the glacier from the icefield, cooling off all the hikers with a fresh breeze. It was amazingly invigorating to me after the warm and fly-infested hike up to the edge. I literally had extra spring in my step.

We had an Alaska-style surprise this afternoon while getting water and   gas. We’re standing at the pump at the local gas station, watching our 401K disappear into the tank, when we realize there are eagles literally across the street! Not just one, but five! We drove across the street to a park where we uh, parked, the RV and I ran over to take some more exposures. It looks like the eagles “commute” from these trees on one side of the road about 200 yards to the waterfront. I have to say I never expected to take wildlife photos bracing on top of a gas pump! I took a LOAD of photos; due to the grey skies and low light combined with a relatively slow zoom lens, unfortunately most of them didn’t turn out. But there are a few good ones.

We spent probably an hour and a half situating ourselves to a waterfront spot that opened up, but wasn’t level enough for us to be able to run the propane refrigerator. We ended up driving to the only lumberyard in the area, only to find it just closing. A fellow that happened to be picking up his friend that worked there offered to   give us some scrap wood from his backyard, so we drove the RV up to his place, played with his dog (a stick-and-ball obsessed German Shepherd like our own) and left with a good assortment of wood. With this we were able to drive up onto about 8” of boards and get ourselves set up. It turns out our new next-door neighbors, Adam and Hania, are professional pianists from Canada and Poland respectively, living in Miami,  so we hit it off big time that evening! Among other things, we got to introduce them to their first campfire-cooked s’mores. You can judge their reaction for yourself :).

*******

My trip photo album will be posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.deuby; I’ll put my very best photos also on http://flickr.com/photos/shorinsean.

Technorati Tags: Alaska,Seward,Kenai Fjords National Park,Exit Glacier,bald eagles,Great Alaskan Holidays

Seward and Kenai Fjords

After spending the night in Talkeetna, we made the long drive down to Seward, ultimately spending three days and four nights there. Seward’s the largest town on the east side of the Kenai Peninsula. This actually isn’t  saying much, as there are only two other towns of any size – Whittier and Valdez – anywhere in the area, and it’s a long drive around the mountains to get to them.

Seward is situated at the head of Resurrection Bay, an amazingly fertile part of the ocean. It used to be one of the biggest commercial fishing ports in the world, and it still does pretty well. Now however, much of its income is provided by tourism for its beautiful surroundings. It’s a cruise ship transfer point, where ships touring the Inside Passage up from Seattle or Vancouver debark their passengers to ride trains to Anchorage or Fairbanks.

While they’re there, some cruise passengers take a side excursion to Kenai Fjords National Park. This park has only one section accessible from land, Exit Glacier (more on that later). For anything else you must go out into Resurrection Bay by boat. The dominant tour operator is Kenai Fjords Tours, and they do a really good job. We took a half-day kayak / half-day boat tour with them. We hopped on a KFT fast catamaran, the Aialic Voyager (look that word up), to get us to the kayaking area on Fox Island out in the bay. It was a low, overcast day in the Bay, but it was just fine for us. (Remember it was well into triple digits in Dallas.) Sunny Cove Kayaks actually did the tour, and we were a small group: Our three and a father and his two daughters, and our guide Tom. Sadly, Connor ended up with the cute high school senior. He manfully faced up to his fate.

We saw lots of seabirds, but – perhaps fortunately – no encounters with the larger fauna of Resurrection Bay. Tom said that the local pod of orcas (killer whales) would occasionally beach themselves on the exact same gravel beach on Fox Island that we launch from to scratch themselves. Wouldn’t that be a sight! Part of me would have loved to have seen orcas out kayaking, but that primitive part of me, the back of my brain, would have been screaming bloody murder. We also saw LOTS of bald eagles; we became pretty good at spotting them by looking for those white heads in the green fir trees. We kayaked a total of about five miles in the bay, an easy excursion because to our (and the guide’s) surprise the water wasn’t even very cold.

As part of the excursion we had lunch back at Fox Island: fresh salmon or prime rib. Are you kidding? I took the salmon! It was good but just a little bit dry in places, as it was served in chafing dishes big-hotel-conference style to our little group…and about two hundred other people from other KF boats! Suddenly we were surrounded, swamped by people, 99% of which were from cruise ships. It was a rather jarring welcome back to civilization. It was at least an international crowd, so that was interesting.

On the boat trip back to Seward, we saw sea lions, humpback whales, Dall’s porpoise, and sea otters. It was pretty busy out there!

********

My trip photo album will be posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.deuby; I’ll put my very best photos also on http://flickr.com/photos/shorinsean.

Technorati Tags: Alaska,Seward,Kenai Fjords National Park,Kenai Fjords Tours,cruise ships,Fox Island,Sunny Cove Kayaking

Flightseeing Denali

Our big adventure on Wednesday was a flightseeing tour with Talkeetna Air Taxi (TAT) around Denali, including the summit and a glacier landing.

Talkeetna’s a pleasant little village, very tiny. Basically one main street and a couple of side streets with a few shops and restaurants. It was a pleasant change of pace from the touristy Denali park entrance. Talkeetna’s biggest claim to fame is that it’s the departure point (and hopefully, return) for almost all the Denali summit expeditions. They fly them in and drop them off on a glacier at 9,000 feet. As I said, Denali is BIG. The pilot said their saying is “A week’s walk or an hour’s flight”. Expeditions on foot run into logistical limitations too; they have to carry supplies for the trek up to base camp, and that limits how much they can carry for the actual climb. (Incidentally, this is also one of the big challenges for expeditions to K2. K2 is the world’s second highest mountain and almost without question the deadliest. It’s so far up into the Karakoram it’s more than a week’s trek up the Baltoro Glacier. The expeditions must use large teams of porters to carry all their stuff.)

In Talkeetna I was fond of the West Rib Bar and Grill, a casual place where the food is pretty good, the climbers hang out, and the beer is excellent. This is where I had that Ice Axe Strong Ale at 9.2% ABV.  It was good, but not nearly as memorable as many Belgians I’ve had at 8%. I did taste the beer again in Anchorage at the Glacier Brewhouse, who make it for West Rib. They call it simply “Glacier Blonde”. They also sold really tasty caribou dogs (hmm, doesn’t sound quite right) on the street.

I just heard today that there was trouble in Talkeetna for the annual Moose Droppings Festival. A large crew of rowdies came in and basically overwhelmed the town and filled the street with people. One person went into the Susitna river right next to town and was never found, and another fell from a railroad bridge. It’s quite a shock to imagine this happening in a sleepy little town just a couple of days after we left, whose population seems to normally be doubled only by gray-haired tourists debarking from cruise ship tour buses.

But – the flightseeing trip was fabulous. I sat in the back of the plane and took photos and videos from both sides. Hundreds of photos; it will take me a while to get through all of them and cull the very very best. For example, as we passed the summit I simply hosed it down with the auto shutter in hopes of getting some climbers up there. I definitely got some nice ones of climbers enroute to the summit though!

What really made it special was a landing on the Ruth Glacier, high up in the Denali massif. The landing and takeoff was exciting, certainly (even my son reluctantly acknowledged it was okay), but actually being out on the quiet glacier in the pulverizingly bright sunlight, mountains all around was, was really an experience.

When I was younger, I was captivated by a Galen Rowell photo of Concordia in the Karakoram. Concordia isn’t a town; it’s simply a place where the Baltoro and Godwin Austen glaciers meet and flow down to their terminus. But around you are like 10 or 12 of the highest mountains in the world including K2. It’s a stupendous photo, and landing on the glacier gives me a little bit of an idea what it must be like there – without the arduous trek and existence at 18,000 feet.

My trip photo album will be posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.deuby; I’ll put my very best photos also on http://flickr.com/photos/shorinsean. I have over 1500 photos to choose a few from, so it’ll take a few days!

Technorati Tags: Denali National Park,Denali,Mt. McKinley,Talkeetna,Talkeetna Air Taxi,West Rib Pub

Into the Park

We had reservations for the 7 AM shuttle bus into the park, so even taking advantage of our three hour jet lag it was a bit of a scramble to get there on time. Fortunately, the bus was about 20 minutes late. No, they aren’t owned by an airline; the buses will stop for wildlife viewing. You’re encouraged to shout “STOP!” and the driver will screech to a halt. Then it sounds like the White House press room with all the cameras going off! So, the buses often run a bit behind.

It was a cool and pleasant – but dusty – drive to Eielson Visitor Center, punctuated by our animal stops. Thanks to Mike Longfellow for letting me borrow his 70-300mm zoom with image stabilization, or 90% of my animal photos would have come to naught.

My favorite stop on the way in was Polychrome Pass, so named for the type of rocks in that area. Very colorful, and exciting too – the pass is carved into the cliff face with no railings, and is just barely two buses wide. The mountains of the Alaska Range were visible across the valley, and in fact a stunning photo from this very place was featured on Bing’s home page not more than a few weeks ago.

To our delight, when we got to the Visitor Center the smoke from much of the northern wildfires had cleared AND it was an otherwise clear day (it’s said that Denali is only visible about 30% of the time through the clouds that form around it). It was just terrific being out there, and a reminder of how BIG the mountain is and how small we are. There two peaks adjacent to Denali, and the most insignificant of them is the same height of the mighty Rainer.

As I mentioned, on the return trip we hopped off the bus at both the pass and a drainage just west of it that allowed us down into the valley a short distance. As I’ve always said it makes a HUGE difference to get out and away from the masses (though the masses were quite small in this case) to have a sense of what the place is really all about. Unlike any park in the lower 48, Denali really is Wilderness punctuated by little dots, little outposts of civilization.

If you are planning to take a shuttle bus into Denali, here are a few tips.

• The better valley views are on the left side of the bus, as the road generally hugs the mountains to the right. But you might see animals upslope as well.
• If you get a handicap-equipped bus, if you sit in the back row, you can move to the very back to shoot photos. It’s about a 5 foot area with big windows that probably won’t have anyone else, and you can move back and forth to both sides to shoot.
• The drawback? The farther back in the bus you go, the dustier it gets. Protect your equipment.
• No food or water on the bus, so be prepared!

My trip photo album will be posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.deuby; I’ll put my very best photos also on http://flickr.com/photos/shorinsean.

Technorati Tags: Denali National Park,Denali,Mt. McKinley,Eielson Visitor Center,Polychrome Pass

Getting Acquainted with Denali

Since we’d given ourselves in this trip a little time to look around (rather than simply dash from place to place), Monday was a day to reconnoiter the Denali park entrance and its trails.

Alaska has two-thirds of all the national park land in the nation, and most of it is deserted. Just chartering a plane to get to some of these places costs as much as most people spend on an entire vacation. Denali National Park is one of the most accessible, but it’s still vast: 7400 square miles. Other than the buildings at the park entrance, and the Eielson Visitor Center 62 miles into the park, there are only a few other buildings. No one is allowed far into the park in their own vehicles, only in buses. Even at that point, Mt. McKinley is still far, far away. And the park service shuttle buses will allow you to get off and on anywhere in the park, so you can go off and hike for 30 minutes or 30 days. Of course, 99% of the relatively few visitors that take a bus into the park actually get off at an unscheduled stop. So of course we got stares when we did it :).

After knocking around the Visitor Center and Wilderness Access Center, we – Sharon and I – hiked up to the Healy Mountain overlook, about 1600 feet in two and a half miles of trail. Great views, but there are wildfires burning free north of the park so it was hazy from the smoke.

Tomorrow is the bus into the park.

Technorati Tags: Denali,Denali National Park,Alaska,Mt. McKinley

Northward Ho!

In sort of an extreme measure to dodge Texas summer heat, we overcompensated and flew to Alaska for 10 days. It's a long story, but add bonus Alaska Airline tickets, no Hawaii availability, fluid work schedules, and a dash of teenage angst, shake in a 31 foot RV...and here we are.

Because we left on the evening of the 4th, we missed the usual fireworks - and extreme fluid loss in the 3-digit temperatures - but we did get to see Seattle's fireworks from above as we started on the second leg up to Anchorage. Who knew there were so many local fireworks?

As we flew north to Anchorage, weirdly it actually grew lighter until it was twilight. We were headed much more north than west. So, even though we arrived at 1 AM and didn't get to sleep until 2, it felt like about 9 PM. And the airport was active, shops and restaurants open, people milling about. We didn't explore the town any, but I got a little of the feeling I experienced in Norway: It's summer, get your living done NOW! You can sleep in the winter.

Of course, even though we'd gotten catnaps on the flights, the three hour jet lag ensured we all woke up after about 4 hours of sleep at 7 AM. This worked out fine as we had a busy day full of trip preparations: shuttling back to the airport, pickup there by the Great Alaska Holidays shuttle, check-in, intro video, paperwork, loading the RV and unpacking, hitting Best Buy for an emergency notebook AC adapter (my bad), $300 worth of groceries, bike shop rentals and fittings, then FINALLY the 4 1/2 hour drive to Denali. Good thing it never got dark!

The Denali Riverside RV campground is nothing more than a graded wide spot in the Parks Highway road. Not a scrap of vegetation, nothing but dirt and gravel. Its one saving grace is that you back right up to the Nenana River canyon, with the rushing, glacier-milk-colored river right below you. It's quite a contrast between looking out the front of the RV and the back.

Technorati Tags: Alaska,Great Alaskan Holidays

Where’s My White Shirt And Cigarette?

I’ve been getting into presentation recording and screencasting a bit recently. It’s been an interesting experience. My first pass at it used a small mike I scraped up from my musician wife, and it was a pain trying to get it sound just right. (This is besides all the logistics of trying to make a quiet recording in a home office for the amount time necessary to record an hourlong presentation – stuff the dogs in a room, generally alone in the house, not a time of day with school buses roaring past, etc. etc.)

On the recommendation of my friend Dan Holme I bought a Samson Podcasting Kit, which comes with a prosumer (professional / consumer) quality cardioid USB microphone, a professional-looking vibration eliminating suspension mount (below), a stand to put ‘em in, and a shiny silver carrying case that makes me feel like I should be handcuffed to it.

Get Camtasia set up, get the mike level right, start up a VM and run the preso from it so you can run Slide Show in a contained size, capture that screen, put on your headphones so you can review the recording, open your printed notes if you’re a perfectionist like me…and be damned if I don’t feel like Edward R. Murrow or something! (With dogs barking in the background instead of bombs dropping.)

I found I even ended up holding up the notes exactly like radio announcers do, because there’s a very narrow sweet spot where your mouth is positioned at the mike correctly and you can still see the notes. The only thing Ed didn’t have is the copy of 64-bit Windows 7 in front of him :).

Technorati Tags: podcasting,camtasia,Samson,Edward R. Murrow,Murrow

Native OS Boot from VHD: The Windows 7 Way

Those of us that need to use a server OS from what’s normally perceived as a client (e.g., demonstrating a Windows Server feature or application on our notebook during a breakout session) have had to work with different ways to achieve it, and none were all that convenient.

Usually it entailed taking a SWAG* at the amount of disk space you needed for your primary OS, then splitting the volume to leave room for the second OS. In the days of small notebook disks, these estimations were precious indeed. Another option was to install a second hard drive – usually requiring you to lose the CD/DVD-ROM drive. (Hey, you usually worked rather than watched movies on the airplane anyway, yah?) The more daring of us simply installed the server OS and used it as we would a client OS, generally sacrificing device support and power management in the process. I could never quite do that; I valued the notebook-specific features too much when I traveled.

The situation has gotten a whole lot better with Windows 7. (What hasn’t?) With Windows 7 on virtualization-compliant hardware like my ThinkPad T61P, you can boot directly to a .VHD file.

What does this mean?

• No more partition guessing. Your second (or third, or fourth) OS simply resides in a .VHD file on your primary partition.
• It’s flexible. You can add and remove OSes as easily as moving the files around and modifying the boot menu with BCDEDIT.
• It’s fast. I’ve not run any tests, but it sure seems to be as fast as right off the metal. I wouldn’t have known the difference from a “real” boot. (What is real any more, anyway?)
• Your other partitions appear as  D:, E:, etc. on the VHD-booted OS. All your physical disk volume data is visible; I change the location of My Documents on the secondary OS so it points to my primary documents folder.

Steps to book a second OS from VHD

1. Create a .VHD containing an OS of your choice. I probably wouldn’t bother with Windows XP, because if you’re running Windows 7 you can install Windows Virtual PC for free and have a bootable XP image. You can build your image on either Hyper-V or Virtual PC.
   
2. Make a copy of the VHD in case something goes wrong!
   
3. run SYSPREP:
   
   %windir%/system32/sysprep/sysprep.exe /generalize
   /shutdown
   
   to create an image that will customize itself according to the new hardware it finds itself on. If you don’t run SYSPREP, be sure to remove the integration add-ins from your VHD before you copy it over.
   
4. Copy the VHD to your notebook.
   
5. Configure your boot menu to recognize the VHD. For this, I lifted – er, “reused” -  the following from a TechNet article:

To add a native-boot VHD to an existing Windows 7 boot menu

If you are deploying the VHD to a computer with an existing Windows 7 or Windows Server® 2008 R2 installation, you can use the BCDedit tool to make the new VHD bootable and add it to the boot menu. For more information about using the BCDedit tool, see this Microsoft Web site.

Note : Before you begin, you can back up your BCD store using the BCDedit tool with the /export option. For example, at a command prompt, type: bcdedit /export c:\bcdbackup

1. Copy an existing boot entry for a Windows 7 installation. You will then modify the copy for use as the VHD boot entry. At a command prompt, type:
   bcdedit /copy {default} /d "R2 VHD Boot"

   Where “R2 VHD Boot” is what will appear in the boot menu. When the BCDedit command completes successfully, it returns a {GUID} as output in the Command Prompt window.
   

2. Locate the {GUID} in the command-prompt output for the previous command. Copy the GUID, including the braces, to use in the following steps. (I recommend enabling QuickEdit in the window’s properties so you can easily cut and paste the GUID. )
   
3. Set the device and osdevice options for the VHD boot entry. At a command prompt, type:
   bcdedit /set {guid} device vhd=[c:]\VMs\windows7.vhd
   bcdedit /set {guid} osdevice vhd=[c:]\VMs\windows7.vhd
   

   or whatever you’ve named the VHD. Note the syntax for the VHD location.

4. Set the boot entry for the VHD as the default boot entry. When the computer restarts, the boot menu will display all of the Windows installations on the computer and boot into the VHD after the operating-system selection countdown completes. At a command prompt, type:
   bcdedit /default {guid}
   

   (Being conservative and not familiar with BCDEDIT, I went into the System properties on my Windows 7 boot and made sure that Windows 7 was the default, in case something went horribly wrong.)

5. Some x86-based systems require a boot configuration option for the kernel in order to detect certain hardware information and successfully native-boot from a VHD. At a command prompt, type:

   bcdedit /set {guid} detecthal on
   (I did this on my x64 system too.)

   
   

That’s it. You should now be able to shut down and reboot into your secondary OS. It will complete its installation from the sysprep, and you’ll be ready to go.

There’s one more really useful step if your secondary OS is Windows 2008 R2. Even though it’s from the same code base as Windows 7, R2 doesn’t seem to automatically recognize range of hardware. So, when you open up Device Manager (devmgmt.msc from the Run menu for the lazy like me) you’ll probably end up with a collection of yellow exclamation points for hardware that isn’t recognized. You can correct most of these errors with this trick: Right-click on them, choose Update Drivers, and point the update location to d:\windows\system32\DriverStore\FileRepository. This is where the Windows 7 drivers for your hardware are stored. If the hardware works on Windows 7 you can make it work on R2 with this trick. You can also update drivers that did load on R2 – but with the generic Microsoft drivers -  with the manufacturer-specific drivers automatically downloaded from Windows Update while you were booted in Windows 7.

* Scientific wild-assed guess.

** Update ** Boot from VHD will only be available in Windows 7 Ultimate Edition.

Technorati Tags: Boot from VHD,Windows 7,VHD,Windows Server 2008 R2,R2