jonoble.com

After over 80 attendees enjoyed the North East Bytes launch event in January, we've got another great event lined up for this month.

Direct Access has been the most requested session topic recently, so I'm very pleased to have two presenters to cover it at this meeting. We're glad to welcome Dr Dan Oliver (Managing Director of Sa-V Ltd a Newcastle based Infrastructure Optimization Microsoft Partner) back to speak, and coincidentally the day after I'd confirmed Dr Dan, Conrad Sidey from Microsoft also offered to do the session. I'm happy to say that they're going to collaborate to present Direct Access together.

From speaking to people in the IT pro community, I don't think that people are as excited about Direct Access as they will be when they realise what it gives them...

While an IT pro may sell Direct Access to the management as a "better VPN", where drives can be automatically mapped at logon and all the good stuff that the user gets from logon scripts that connect to resources on the LAN, users are pretty much used to "getting by" with the VPN they're already using. Where the story is really improved by Direct Access is that laptops hooking up to various connections around the world now stay under the scope of management, the same as any other domain computer that's wired to the LAN. I'm sure I don't need to go into detail about all the benefits of that!

There are a lot of people who appear to be scared of the requirement for IPv6, and in fairness if you don't currently have any IPv6, that isn't an insignificant barrier to entry, however you don't need your whole network to be IPv6 enabled in order to use Direct Access.

And for developers, Oliver Sturm is an experienced presenter who really knows his stuff, so his session on Dynamic Consumption in C# 4.0 should be a good one.

It should be a really good event, so grab your ticket:

If I lived in the South East of England, I would've been going along to meetings of both the Active Directory User Group and the Windows Server Team. For those of you who do live an easily commutable distance from London, you might be interested to hear that these two groups have merged and now exist as the Windows Server User Group (WSUG).

The site is a little bit basic at the moment, but there are online forums there covering a range of Active Directory and other Windows Server topics, and knowing Mark Parris and Mark Wilson who are running the group, there'll be lots of good things to come. Even if you wouldn't find it easy to get to the group's meetings, if you work with these technologies, it may be a site you'll want to check out.

Last month we had a VBUG Newcastle meeting for IT Pros with two great presentations (it would've been three but we've had to re-schedule one - more news on that when I have it). The first presentation was from Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, Richard Diver, called Implementing the “Black Box” – Performance Monitoring and Analysis for proactive and reactive support, server baselining and capacity planning and covered a number of tools...

If you haven't been using them, you should take a look into:

• The Windows Sysinternals tools, which can be run without downloading, via Sysinternals Live by mapping a drive direct to \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\
• IT Pros should especially look to Process Explorer to give a more comprehensive view of what's happening on a system. You can even replace Windows Task Manager permenantly with it.
• Many people who have opted to stay with XP until perhaps an upgrade to Windows 7 may not have seen the newer features of Performance Monitor (perfmon) and the Reliability Monitor (which was introduced in Vista and Server 2008).
• Windows 7's fabulous Problem Steps Recorder, which allows users to easily record screenshots of the issues that they're having to send to the support teams (or to let you see exactly what the relative that always calls you up for tech support is doing wrong!).

...and some of the other useful links that Alex put in the TechNet UK Newsletter, after she and Sarah joined us on the night.

One of the questions that came out of the audience, regarding Problem Steps Recorder, was "can you run it from the command line?" At the time I think there were a few chuckles as people thought about how it might be used as a tool for spying, but after a while I started to think about the possibilities of automating around PSR...

Out of the box, if you want to use Problem Steps Recorder, you have to tell a user (let's imagine they're on the phone) to open the Start menu and type "psr" or "psr.exe" or some part of "Record steps to reproduce a problem", which is how it is officially surfaced in Windows 7. You then have to tell them to start recording, go through the steps that are causing them the problem, stop recording, name and save the PSR output file somewhere and perhaps email it to you.

I thought, what if I could have them launch something that would automatically decide on a file name (based on the username, machine name and time), start recording and pop up a cut down UI that just had a button that would stop recording and save the file to a network share, or potentially email it straight to me. I know that's not really saving a lot of steps, and they aren't especially complicated steps anyway, but I'm a great believer in technology being as invisible as possible, so if something can be tailored to suit a particular environment, to make life a little bit easier for specific users, then I think it's worth doing.

It turns out that there are command line parameters for Problem Steps Recorder, but they aren't all that easy to find. Once I've written my script I'll post it here, but in the meantime, here's the help for psr.exe:

psr.exe [/start |/stop][/output <fullfilepath>] [/sc (0|1)] [/maxsc <value>]
    [/sketch (0|1)] [/slides (0|1)] [/gui (o|1)]
    [/arcetl (0|1)] [/arcxml (0|1)] [/arcmht (0|1)]
    [/stopevent <eventname>] [/maxlogsize <value>] [/recordpid <pid>]

/start            :Start Recording. (Outputpath flag SHOULD be specified)
/stop            :Stop Recording.
/sc            :Capture screenshots for recorded steps.
/maxsc            :Maximum number of recent screen captures.
/maxlogsize        :Maximum log file size (in MB) before wrapping occurs.
/gui            :Display control GUI.
/arcetl            :Include raw ETW file in archive output.
/arcxml            :Include MHT file in archive output.
/recordpid        :Record all actions associated with given PID.
/sketch            :Sketch UI if no screenshot was saved.
/slides            :Create slide show HTML pages.
/output            :Store output of record session in given path.
/stopevent        :Event to signal after output files are generated.

PSR Usage Examples:

psr.exe
psr.exe /start /output fullfilepath.zip /sc1 /gui 0 /record <PID>
    /stopevent <eventname> /arcetl 1

psr.exe /start /output fullfilepath.xml /gui 0 /recordpid <PID>
    /stopevent <eventname>

psr.exe /start /output fullfilepath.xml /gui 0 /sc 1 /maxsc <number>
    /maxlogsize <value> /stopevent <eventname>

psr.exe /stop

Notes:
1.    Output path should include a directory path (e.g. '.\file.xml').
2.    Output file can either be a ZIP file or XML file
3.    Can't specify /arcxml /arcetl /arcmht /sc etc. if output is not a ZIP file.

I'm pleased to say that Richard enjoyed presenting to the group as much as we enjoyed his presentation, so he's coming back to do another session on 25th November on Advanced Troubleshooting with Sysinternals Tools. I'll post more details shortly.

Last Wednesday we had a great evening covering some of the great enterprise features of Microsoft's upcoming OSs. In a last minute speaker change Richard Fennell did a great presentation that was very well received by an enthusiastic audience (it seems over half the crowd are running Windows 7 RC as their main OS right now, and all of the others had at least tried it!).

We're hoping to record future presentations, but unfortunately couldn't make it happen on this occasion. You can see the slide deck though.

We're going to take a break in August, so there won't be a VBUG Newcastle event next month, we are going to be working on putting together a great set of events for developers and IT pros from September onwards. Keep checking here and Andrew Westgarth's blog for details.

If you're a Windows sys admin, the biggest contacts on your approach radar right now are Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, due to release later in the year (but be complete and released to manufacture next month). This free event, on the Newcastle University campus, couldn't be much more timely then.

Rik Hepworth, the IT Director at Black Marble, will cover some of the great new features of the two operating systems, including BranchCache, XP Mode and what I personally think is the number one feature (after PowerShell V2 of course), DirectAccess.

This is bound to be a popular event, so sign up early over at the VBUG site.