My torn data pages - Wednesday, July 18, 2007

MCSA/MCSE 2003 invited to beta WS2008 transition exams...

Just scheduled mine, going to have a shot at 71-649 August 3rd (if I don't have to reschedule). The exam is called Transitioning your MCSE on Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 Technology Specialist. Smart move, not calling it upgrading, even though you get three MCTS certification from this one exam. Important to note, this exam is fully tied to your MCSE 2003 status. Don't have one? Don't go for this exam, you won't receive any credits from it.

Similar, there is a transitioning exam for MCSA 2003 as well: 71-648. It credits you for two MCTS certifications (yes a subset from the MCSE transition). Again, be MCSA, or you'll be wasting your time.

Want more details or the promo-code, go check out Trika's blog.
Meanwhile I've no time to delay building my Windows Server 2008 image Virtual Server and start looking for resources to aid me with my studies (as always, the prep guide will not be spelling out all you need to know, but I'll be checking it out anyway).

 

Hmm, did this about half a year ago and didn't blog about it... stupid, because now I had to figure it out again. The unfortunate event was the phone on my PDA (T-Mobile MDA Vario II) had a bit of a malfunction. It either didn't connect to the GSM-network or when it did, calls would be disconnected after a couple of minutes. So I called T-Mobile and after having determined the problem was the phone (not the SIM), they collected it for repair. Naturally, I made a backup of my personal stuff and then removed the personal stuff and security settings from the device before it was picked up (hey, I do security training occasionally).

Well today I got my device back... software update, all information gone (but I have a backup)... I just had to restore my stuff and configure network settings and Exchange synchronization again. No problem until: 0x80072FD; indicating the certificate on the Exchange Server (my Small Business Server) was invalid.

The solution is to add my SBS self-signed certificate to the trusted root certificates of the PDA. How?

Well first make sure you environment is set up for synchronization. Not my issue, but it never hurts to check on it. See Petri for the overview.

Now obtain your SBS self-signed certificate, in all cases this will be located on the virtual directory Exchange on your web server. From IIS Manager you can directly export the certificate (without private key) to the required DER encoding. Execute following steps, which are derived from kb841060:

1. Export the root certificate to a computer that is running Microsoft Windows in DER encoded binary X.509 format with a .cer file name extension.
2. Create a root-folder Storage on the Windows Mobile device.
3. Download and extract SmartPhoneAddCert.exe package on your Windows Computer.
4. Use ActiveSync (Windows XP and earlier), Windows Mobile Device Center (Windows Vista) or the storage card to transfer the DER-encoded certificate and the SPAddCert.exe (from the downloaded package) to the \Storage folder on your Windows Mobile device.
5. On your Windows Mobile device, start SPAddCert.exe from the \Storage folder. It will give a warning that the application is not verified (or something the likes), ignore the warning and proceed. The application will now show you the certificate you exported, continue by confirming all actions.
6. Restart your device.

You can check the trusted root certificates under Settings, System, Certificates, Basic (in my case (Dutch) Instellingen, Systeem, Certificaten, Basis). After executing above procedure you should see the SBS-cert here.

I'm not sure if Windows Mobile 5 really required the restart, but that's because before I restarted I received the error 0x85010014 from ActiveSync on my SmartPhone. After restart (still the same error) it turned out to be a connection issue. Due to firewall restrictions I had to use another interface on my multi-homed SBS Server (hey, it's been a couple of months!!).

Next error I encountered from ActiveSync was 0x85020013, but since I had that funny feeling I mistyped my password (big fingers, small keys), that one was quickly resolved.

Device details:

Windows Mobile 5.1.195 (Dutch)

T-Mobile MDA Vario II (device modelnr: HERM300)

From Mary-Jo's blog: SQL Server 2008 ("Katmai") will be released launched February 27^th 2008, together with Windows Server 2008 ("Longhorn") and Visual Studio 2008 ("Orcas").

Read also Microsoft's Press release.

<Update date="2007-07-12">

Old title: SQL Server 2008 release date: 2007-02-27

Something very stupid happened to me in the title before the update! I put in the current year, shame on me!

But wait, that's not all. There is also something about the distinction between launch and release (aka RTM), thanks to Euan Garden for pointing that out on his blog. The release of SQL Server 2008 is set for somewhere in the second quarter of 2008 (source Michael J. Murphy). So mixing up the words launch and release was my second stupid thing.

<Update/>

Clinic 7045: What's New in Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008

While I was over at Arlindo's Blog for VRMCplus, I couldn't resist clicking SQL Server 2008 in his tag-cloud. Next I grabbed my passport (euh LiveID) and headed to the 1.5 to 2 hour eLearning module (content will be available on your LiveID for a year).

Little topic overview:

• A lot on Database Engine and SSRS, less on SSIS and SSAS.
• FILESTREAM and spatial datatypes, as well as the other datatype enhancements/additions.
• Mentioning the new management capabilities and how this fits in with MS-initiatives like DSI.
• Mentioning the development features and integration (think ORM, EDM and LINQ).
• New to me (hadn't noticed it before); Security Auditing for Data Protection. This will be quite useful when you can't (due to vendor support restrictions) implement auditing based on altered table definitions, check constraints and triggers. Or now don't want with SQL2k8 because it will be faster to implement ;).
• Improved integrations with Office 2007 (and SharePoint).

Found and installed it two hours ago, a must have for working with Virtual Server 2005, it combines the functionality of VRMC and the Admin-site in one easy to use application. For more info and download, visit Arlindo's Blog. Don't forget, on Vista (with UAC) you still need run as Administrator, just like the "normal" VRMC and the Virtual Server Administration Website.

Just returned from two weeks of relaxing under the Spanish sun and yes, I've had a few jealous remarks on my tan already. But if it would just have been for relaxing, why take a plane? Besides relaxing (beach-time), we've visited some places as well, Santa Pola, Alicante and my favorite Elche (written as Elx in Valencian). Elche is mentioned twice on the official lists of the UNESCO; in 2000 for the Palmeral and 2001 for the Mystery Play.

Just to remind myself of Elx, a few pictures;

Yesterday I enjoyed the webcast by Hariharan Sethuraman and Chris Haslam, both from Microsoft. They talked about ICE, which stands for Information Security Consolidated Event Management System. ICE collects the in- and outbound e-mail traffic, login events and web browsing (web proxy and firewall logs) and stores it for 60 days, to provide an audit-trail in case of security events. The webcast was about how ICE 3.0 was designed and built on top of the infrastructure below.

Imagine the numbers; 40 TB designed -- 27 TB allocated (FibreChannel SAN-)storage, designed to load 60 GB/hour into staging tables -- currently receiving max 1.2 TB daily with 600 GB as daily average, table partitioning, 4 (multi-core?) x64 processors & 32 GB RAM for the Database Engine + 4 (multi-core?) x64 processors & 8 GB RAM for the Integration Services. Accessing all that data via Ad-hoc queries and Report Server reports.

Already ICE version 4.0 is envisioned, however again only for internal usage, ICE is not (yet?) planned as a commercial product. So with ICE not being planned as a product, I just had to ask "Sounds like a great reference project for SQL Server 2005 and is a very useful application, are you planning a white-paper?"... Turned out the webcast is a precursor to the white-paper!!!

I'm looking forward to update this post with the link to that white-paper. For now I can only point you to the on-demand webcast: How Microsoft IT Uses SQL Server 2005 to Power a Global Forensic Data Security Tool (Level 300) (~60 minutes)

/* UPDATE 2007-11-22 */ Link to the afore mentioned white-paper.

 

Earlier I posted about pingback spam and a little tool I created to remove the spamvertised links, today I upgraded the tool from version 1.0.0.0 to version 1.0.0.1. So what's changed;

• The updated version doesn't leave empty Tracking elements after removing the spamvertied entries. From the dasBlog Eventlog I suspected that too many empty Tracking elements were causing errors in the trackbackList macro.
• An XML file is only written back if something changed in the file.

Source and executable files have been changed.

--- So how does the tool work? ---

First create a config file

RemoveSpam "C:\My Config Folder\RemoveSpam.xml" /config

Look in your dayfeedback-files for the spamvertised PermaLinks (or you may already know about them if you have Notification Settings enabled for pingback and trackback). It's the PermaLink pattern that matters:

<Tracking>
   <TargetTitle>Today's bad start</TargetTitle>
   <TargetEntryId>70e036a5-ce3f-4fa0-9463-816983848a48</TargetEntryId>
   <RefererTitle>http://9uams-le-informazioni.info/52600366/adempimenti-trasformazione-ditta-individuale.html</RefererTitle>
   <RefererExcerpt />
   <PermaLink>http://9uams-le-informazioni.info/52600366/adempimenti-trasformazione-ditta-individuale.html</PermaLink>
   <RefererBlogName>http://9uams-le-informazioni.info/52600366/adempimenti-trasformazione-ditta-individuale.html</RefererBlogName>
   <TrackingType>Pingback</TrackingType>
</Tracking>
<Tracking>
   <TargetTitle>Today's bad start</TargetTitle>
   <TargetEntryId>70e036a5-ce3f-4fa0-9463-816983848a48</TargetEntryId>
   <RefererTitle>http://9uane-free-porn.info/91478222/weight-and-height-for-celebrities.html</RefererTitle>
   <RefererExcerpt />
   <PermaLink>http://9uane-free-porn.info/91478222/weight-and-height-for-celebrities.html</PermaLink>
   <RefererBlogName>http://9uane-free-porn.info/91478222/weight-and-height-for-celebrities.html</RefererBlogName>
   <TrackingType>Pingback</TrackingType>
</Tracking>

The pattern for the second Tracking entry is already included in the default config file, so you would only have to add the pattern for the first Tracking entry. To do so, you only need to add the following XML-element in the Configs section:

<Config Pattern="*-le-informazioni.info/*" />

With the updated config file, you can now run the tool to clean all XML-files in your content folder.

RemoveSpam "C:\My Config Folder\RemoveSpam.xml" \\MyWebServer\My_dasBlogShare\content

Next is figuring out why Akismet isn't working for me.

A little while ago Howard Dierking (MSFT, Certification Planner for developer stuff) shared his thoughts on doing exam development different. I liked the idea which aims to both lower the cost of building an exam and at the same time increase the quantity and quality of the questions. I added some feedback, so exams can be kept up to date, thus improving the quality of certification.

Recently I had a lot of pingback spam coming into my blog and I can tell you, it's more annoying than in your mailbox (Shift + Del and it's gone again). With dasBlog, it takes a little more effort, either via the admin interface or by deleting the spamvertised tarckings from the dayentry xml files. I even disabled trackback and pingback, temporarily!

Also I searched for solutions to this and came up with a several other affected blogs and akismet.com. With Akismet being the most promising, I tried, but spam kept coming in and Akismet was timing out (currently running dasBlog 1.9.7067.0.).

Error:
The external spam blocking service failed for pingback from http://9qk-information.info/56369818/index.html. Original exception: System.Net.WebException: The operation has timed out at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetRequestStream() at Subtext.Akismet.HttpClient.PostRequest(Uri url, String userAgent, Int32 timeout, String formParameters) at Subtext.Akismet.AkismetClient.SubmitComment(IComment comment, Uri url) at Subtext.Akismet.AkismetClient.CheckCommentForSpam(IComment comment) at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core.AkismetSpamBlockingService.IsSpam(IFeedback feedback) at newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Services.PingbackAPI.ping(String sourceUri, String targetUri)
while processing /ssb/PermaLink,guid,e63313c2-6f4d-434f-8a62-09f82a4b534c.aspx.

Hmm, if someone has some suggestions, I'd be happy to read your comment.

-----

And that was about the spam coming in, I also had a nasty amount already polluting my blog. I could resign, disable *back permanently and clan manually once more... or fire up Visual Studio and write a piece of newbie/n00b code. Well the newbie pulled it off, his first useful C# program. At least, it removed the spammings from my blog.

So if you want to get rid of;

• http://9??-free-porn.info/*
• http://9??-information.info/*
• or whatever disliked pattern of tracking permalinks on your dasBlog.

And you know that you try the followig stuff at your own risk and made a backup of your blog's content folder.

• Compiled file (console application, run without parameters to see what you have to do to get it working. Then make the config file and if needed, edit it.). Requires .NET Framework 2.0.
• Source-code (Visual Studio 2005, C#)

Disclaimer: It worked for me (dasBlog 1.9.7067.0.), it may not work for you and you use it at your own risk. However, feel free to comment with question, suggestions or other stuff.

<UPDATE date="2007-06-18">Version 1.0.0.1 released, learn more here</UDPATE>