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I was parallel tasking with my WAIK installations and thought, “Hey, maybe I could use ImageX to apply a WIM image to a virtual machine!”  It’s often come up what would happen to a system if we applied application “X” or GPO policy “Y” to our standard machine.  More often than not, it typically works.  Sometimes, however, the system reacts violently to the change (i.e. BSOD), and we have to reimage the machine, post-config, add it to the domain, etc.  A time consuming process.

I’ve tried to apply a Ghost image to a Virtual PC with out success.  So, since ImageX is file based, could I use my WinPE boot disk, create an image from a reference machine and apply it to a Virtual PC?

Stay tuned…!

With ImageX, Microsoft has moved away from sector-based imaging, like you’ll find with Symantec Ghost, and their ilk. Instead, ImageX uses a file-based image, which gathers the filesystem off of a machine instead of scraping disk sectors.

With some impetus from these articles, PC Deployement with Windows PE and PC Deployment with ImageX, I’ve managed to download the WAIK, build a bootable CD-ROM, and begin capturing images.

One great aspects of ImageX is that it isn’t only for Vista, but can be utilized for previous versions of Windows, such as XP. As such, organizations may be able to stop relying on sector-based tools and utilize the WAIK tools. I previously mentioned my own issues with my home system, and am looking forward to using the WAIK and a bootable Windows PE disc to create my own recovery partition to avoid the headaches I had with rebuilding.

Another feature is the ability to build a single image for a multitude of hardware. At my work, we have an eclectic assortment of end-user hardware platforms, desktops and laptops, that we’ve collected from a number of vendors over the years. My group is the lead in creating images for all the currently supported hardware, and maintaining the library of CDs and DVDs of images. With the WAIK it is possible to create a single image that covers multiple platforms and manage through the Windows System Image Manager.

Current sector-based images grab an entire disk, thus for each hardware platform you have, the entire contents is stuffed into the image file. With ImageX, the additional “image” only grabs the differences, thus saving space. Additionally, if a file system has duplicate files in various locations, only one copy of the file is stored on the image, and a reference to the additional locations is stored on the image.

In the next few weeks & months, we’ll be experimenting with the WAIK. I’ll post what findings I can, any troubleshooting I had to do, or links to articles that were of particular assistance.

So, being home, I took the opportunity to rebuild my system, which turned out to be a rather arduous task. A few years worth of family pictures and my music library, not to mention game save files (NWN2 & BFME II), various virtual machines I make use of (at roughly 2GB each), and documentation and reading material on a sundry of topics, mostly IT.

Fortunately, I have had an old Compaq workstation that I’ve repurposed some time ago as my home server, having scrounged up a few 40GB harddrives in RAID5.  Taking a lesson from work, my server has been set up with a copy of Windows Server (from school), and have home drive for family members (mapped as H:), a shared folder for music/pics and other media (S:), and an InfoTech folder (the I:\ drive) where I keep all the drivers and applications that I use.

A recent perusal of some tech magazines while teaching, I came across Microsfts Home Server, currently in beta, that is meant for home users to “Connect their digital experiences.”  It mpresses upon me the fact that in our tech-connected world the explosion of digital media in the home and the integration of all this technology, from Multimedia PC’s, Xbox, PS2/3, media extenders, etc.  And now consumers need their own servers!  Microsoft’s not the only one in this niche…for roughly $500 you can get 1TB of Network Attached Storage at home, tied right into your broadband router, doubling as an FTP server, internal web host.  Some even integrate with active directory or other directory services - a boon for use in branch offices of some business’.

1TB should be a good place to start for storing DVR’d television programs, esp when analog TV goes away in a year, multimegapixel digital photographs, and 192 kbps ripped music.  Who knows what else we’ll be storing in the future.

Argument (as in collegial discourse) is something else that I learned from my father. I often, to the disgust of my ex-wife, argue and debate a topic “just-for-fun.” I enjoy the exercise of looking at a topic from all sides discussing the merits and flaws, playing devils advocate regardless of whether I am “right” or wrong.

Also, and here’s another tangent, my kids were going through a trunk that I have carried with me over the years since leaving home. In it they found my old Dungeons & Dragons books (Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual). They were intrigued and I started to roll characters and we began to play. Well, half of them (my two oldest daughters from my first marriage, and my present wife’s son) are getting to the age where they need to start writing for school and learning to write well. So, I’ve turned our D&D games into a kind of collaborative story writing – I as DM attempt to vividly describe a scene, and they must also describe what their characters think and how they interact with each other. I force them to be descriptive, not give me quick “I open the door” type responses.

After leaving SafeHarbor, I ended up mired in the fallout from the dot-com implosion, and had difficulty getting out – due in part to familial and professional constraints at the time. The position I am in now (both professionally and with family), however, has giving me the openness to explore again. The “raison d’etre” of the group I am in at my agency is to take a lead in shaping the organizations future direction with Enterprise Solutions. My primary focus is server/infrastructure and project management.

Having worked in the field at my agency, we lower echelon IT personnel cried and begged for training, more often than not being denied, either because there wasn’t money in the budget or at our level, we were not important enough to warrant training – someone higher up learned how something was to be done, then wrote a check list for us to follow. No insight how it worked, or what to do if it broke.

In my present position, seeing a need for field training, we began developing an internal training academy. I was tasked with writing the first training manual to teach the field how to install, configure, and troubleshoot Symantec’s Storage Exec. It was profoundly enjoyable – every one of the “students” commented on how professional the manual and training was. So, even though they are all intelligent IT folks who could’ve figured Storage Exec out for themselves, they still appreciated a peer teaching them (I will stress “peer” because they will run into things with this or any other app out in the field in daily use that I won’t, but can learn from their issues and roll it over and coalesce their collective experiences).

I had tried blogging before, but was befuddled, anxious that I didn’t have anything new to say that hadn’t been said before, so why would anyone want to read my blog? I didn’t want to get stuck only with “woke up and fed the cat” type posts. I didn’t feel that I was so technically savvy that my solutions would impart any new knowledge. Chris Sanders in his WindowsDevCenter blog posted 5 things to do to optimize Virtual Server – again, many in IT could have discovered those, and I often write procedures of a similar nature internally for my organization. I have recently acquired access to a Windows Longhorn beta, and the chance to “play” and explore. I might actually have something to contribute – what a concept. Why not share with everyone else? I can do this too!

So back to why. There’s more to IT than I’ve been left with for the last five years and I want to jump back in with verve and alacrity. I’m in a position now to explore and learn, and what I learn might be of use to someone else, even if I don’t have a massive following. Blogging is allowing me an outlet for my intellectual aspirations; I have musings about things and though I might be way off-mark or disagree, would welcome insight from my IT brethren that I can practice the art of writing and argument.

I’ve taken an introductory look at the Longhorn beta and one of the things that I am most excited about is it’s built-in Virtualization, which will only be available in the x64 editions.  With the advent of Intel’s VT technology and AMD’s “Pacifica” hardware assisted virualization features, virtualizatition on comodity hardware is going to be big.  Virtual Server 2005 R2 is able to take advantage of these features now, and is a free download from Microsoft.

Some other things to look forward to with Virtualization are:
Live migration – move running virtual servers from one Virtual Server to another, running Client OS such as Windows XP on Virtual Server, support for Linux, and Legacy App migration with the “P2V” (physical-to-virtual) tool.

As they indicate in their posts, there are a number of ways to accomplish those things with regard to writing about the IT industry, including blogging, articles for websites and magazines, and responding to message boards.

I’m a prolific reader, and often have multiple books that I am trying to slog through on various topics, not to mention the audio books I listen to in my car and on my Treo while in my vanpool.  All good authors read.  One of my favorite quotes, from Mark Twain, states “The [person] who doesn’t read good books, has no advantage over the [person] who cannot read.” 

In a effort to to live up to that, specifically as it relates to technology, I’ve persued another alternative to the ones listed about, Technical Editing/Reviewing.  Being a technical editor grants some of the same motivations.  The money is decent, though not quite the level of royalties.  Often paid per word or by project (up to $1000/book). 

There’s nothing like seeing your name in black and white, albeit buried inside the book and not blazoned upoon the front cover.  If you’re just getting started, then tech editing might offer the fabled “foot in the door” with a publisher, should you decide to go on to write your own Widget Configuration Explained tome. 

Besides, what could be more enjoyable than tearing apart someone elses work, pointing out the inadequacies of his use of language and examples, that the flow is completely wrong, and – oh wait, that’s just me.  }: )

Lastly, and this is what got me into technical editing in the first place, is the ability to learn more about a topic, often something new or relatively so.  I used to do trade-show support for Microsoft a decade ago, and we often saw lots of cool stuff long before the general public.  Technical Editing a book can offer some of the same benefits.  You get a copy of the manuscript before (almost) anyone else, you have a hand in shaping its direction, and often get a free copy when it’s release to show off to you co-workers.