Thanks to our friends at Windows 7 Center for this post
I’ll break it down for you!
Windows 7 RC2 scheduled for May 2009 release.
Windows 7 “scheduled” RTM/Release looks like November of 2009 (Whoa!?!)
Office 14 RTM is looking like March 2010 (Which means Exchange should be in alignment with that)
Wow, two more totally rocking books! I even actually own the Server Core book!
Windows Server 2008 Core Administrator’s Pocket Consultant
By Mitch Tulloch with the Windows Server Core Team at Microsoft
ISBN: 9780735626263
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services Step by Step
By Paul Turley, Joe Kasprzak, Scott Cameron, Satoshi Iizuka, and Pablo Guzman
ISBN: 9780735624054
It’s a dark night, you’re in a cold murky alley. There’s a random file found in the root of your drive (or mount point). Suddenly, your cluster goes offline. WTF!
If you’re thinking, “Damnit, what did my storage vendor do now!” You’d be mistaken.
There’s this little doozy out there:
“A physical disk resource may unexpectedly fail or go offline when the IsAlive function is executed on a Windows Server 2008 cluster node” to the tune of Q953652
Microsoft declares it to happen when you meet the following scenario:
- You have a Windows Server 2008 cluster node.
- The IsAlive function is executed on the cluster node while a file is being accessed in the root folder of the cluster disk.
In this scenario, a physical disk resource on the Windows Server 2008 cluster node may unexpectedly fail or go offline. This behavior occurs randomly.
Or otherwise read as: If you have a file in the root of Drive letter or Mount point, the drive may ‘disappear’ when you have this configured in a cluster (This does not apply to Server 2008 single servers)
Quite often this is blamed on the storage (regardless of vendor) so be sure to keep your clusters up to spec and make sure to apply this Hotfix from Microsoft, especially if you meet this criteria!
Good luck Clusters, and those cold dark alleys won’t be so bad.
Every so often I get asked by people for help improving their skills, making them more marketable as well as ways to get access to training and resources.
And more often than not, I lead them in directions with the huge cost of $0.00 associated with it. Whether you’re looking for Certification, access to Labs, E-Books, or Training information.
I’m a BIG fan of Free!
So, can you afford freE-Learning?
Thanks to our friends at Microsoft, here is another resource available to you!
By visiting this lovely site, it will display all of the available courses being offered by Microsoft Learning for Free!
What relevant topics are available on there at the moment:
…And more!
Seriously, there is a motherload of information here, so much training to wrap your teeth into!
If you saw my previous post about the voucher to get the Hyper-V training for free, this training is very complimentary to that and more! (Especially since that voucher seems to be faulty at the moment)
So get out there, get yourself something Free for this season. It’s your education, do something about it!
For those of you who have not seen this newly released Out of Band Critical Security Update, you should check out MS08-078 What does this mean exactly? Here is Microsoft’s Take:
This security update resolves a publicly disclosed vulnerability. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.
This security update is rated Critical for Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, and Internet Explorer 7. For information about Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, please see the section, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Related to This Security Update. For more information, see the subsection, Affected and Non-Affected Software, in this section.
The security update addresses the vulnerability by modifying the way Internet Explorer validates data binding parameters and handles the error resulting in the exploitable condition. For more information about the vulnerability, see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) subsection under the next section, Vulnerability Information.
This security update also addresses the vulnerability first described in Microsoft Security Advisory 961051.
Recommendation. Microsoft recommends that customers apply the update immediately.
What does this really mean?
Update any and all machines which have Internet Explorer installed on them, in order to prevent the Remote Code Execution attacks from being successful against your machines.
Just because you don’t use IE does not limit your vulnerability, so DO Upgrade!
This applies to all versions of windows (2000, XP, Vista, 2003, 2008) So get that update!