I love Cat wash day. Nothing gets rid of a cats superiority complex like looking like a oversized bedraggled half-drowned rat..

That'll teach you to treat me like staff instead of an owner..

Now that my little Library nook is finished and all painted, I Already need to extend it. Sure I could clean out the books and maybe get rid of some of the older ones but books are our friends and I find it hard to part with them. Granted, I do have a few duplicates that i really need to get rid of but I have many more downstairs that are waiting to go somewhere...

There isn't much more room in there but I may be able to extend around the walls a little bit. However, the space I lose in putting in corners may cancel out any extension that I put in. I'm sure that I will be able to come up with something. Perhaps go the whole hog and replace those massive windows with something smaller and putting in some windows seats that have bookshelves under them...

There is another section of wall that is outside of this shot that i can stack up with shelves but first I will need to do something with the excessive sunlight that comes in before I put in a bookshelf that directly faces the windows. Some blockout curtains will probably do the trick. That will probably solve the issues with all of the windows reflecting far too much light onto my TV as well...

Woohoo. Anzac Day footy is here and what a day for the Pies... People whinge about how other clubs don't get to play on this special day and that the games are all one-sided... well, as the most-supported club ( from attendance figures of Clubs) Collingwood deserve such a day and it is always good to not only smash Essendon but to rack up a big score in doing so...  Fantastic to see Medhurst and Cloke kicking a bag each (6 & 5 respectively) and Pendlebury and Co racking up possessions in the midfield like there is no tomorrow..

C'Mon boys, let's get some back-to-back wins...

Match Details

Match Comments

• In the 14th Anzac Day clash of the pair the Magpies won by 73 points, bigger than Essendon's 66pt victory in 2003 – the score of 23.16-154 was a new high of April 25th matches – it's now Collingwood 7 wins, Essendon 6, one draw in 1995 ...
• Collingwood had its biggest win against Essendon in 37 years, since they won by 147 points in 1971-Round 14 at Victoria Park, 200-53.
• Collingwood's 23.16-154 is the equal of Hawthorn's score versus Melbourne in the opening round but trails the Bulldogs' 161 points against the Demons in Round 2 – refer Stats Update ...
• 94,825 for the 1995 Anzac Day draw remains the highest crowd at the MCG for a Collingwood-Essendon non-finals match – the 88,999 on Friday is the 9th biggest to see a home-and-away game at headquarters ...
• The Magpies opened with 5.3 – their best Q1 for the season, thus far ...
• A first half of 11.7 by Collingwood was the equal of its R3 performance against Richmond also at the MCG ...
• Captain MATTHEW LLOYD kicked three Essendon goals, and there were another nine single goalscorers ...
• In the 217th premiership meeting of the pair, the Pies had their third successive win over the Dons but no new match records were noted ...

Another one that we should have been able to pencil in for a win. Geez, our continued inaccuracy costs us dearly. Not only that, after raising our hopes cruelly in Rnd 1, Rocca continues with his meagre return of possessions, let alone goals. I guess the only good thing to come out of it was that there is no possible way for me to watch this game on free-to-air TV. Certainly not live, not eve a delayed telecast or even a replay telecast at 1am which was the norm last year...

Match Details

Match Comments

• North's 47th victory over Collingwood matches the single digits that have peppered recent Kanga wins over eight seasons – 2pts 2001-R7-Dok, 5pts 2005-R4-MCG, 6pts 2006-R3-Dok ...
• The Kangas kicked themselves to a victory by winning a last quarter for the first time this season –

7.4-46	R5-MCG	v Col 5.4-34
5.4-34	R4-MCG	v Mel 6.3-39
2.4-16	R1-Dok	v Ess 4.3-27
2.2-14	R2-MCG	v Rch 3.1-19
1.0-6	R3-Dok	v Haw 6.3-39

• 50th game NATHAN THOMPSON with North Melb (2005-08); also 119 Haw 1998-2004) ...
• no new match records were observed ...

Damn, Damn, Damn... we had a chance to put Carlton in the record books as the longest losing streak in AFL history as well as increase their streak of having 100 points kicked against them. of course, in true Collingwood style, we choked...

Every few weeks, we have one of these games, umpiring decisions appear to go against us, the players forget that man-on-man defence will stop tempo footy and that kicking to a one-on-three contest in the forward fifty is not a direct avenue to goal...

One thing i noticed, it still doesn't look like Judd is playing too much team footy. He still tends to deliver the ball to where players "should be", not where they are going to be... there were a lot of kicks that were just out of reach or over the head of the leading players.  Maybe I'm just dirty because he didn't come to Collingwood...

Match Details

Match Comments

• The Blues ended the horror stretch of 14 successive losses to register their first success in a premiership match since the win versus Port last June in R11 ...
• Carlton's BRENDAN FEVOLA passed 400 career goals in game 146 ...
• The Blues with six goals kicked their best opening of the season ...
• JORDAN BANNISTER had his 50th for Carlton 2004-08; also 14 Ess 2001-03 ...
• in the 236th contest no new match records were noted ...

So I worked out this issue that was preventing the Exchange 2007 Installation from continuing. After all that, it was nothing more than a simple firewall issue. the two domains are firewalled from each other, hence why it couldn't connect. How embarrassing.

the way i worked it out was via using DCDiag to connect to particular DC's and checking that DNS test could be carried out. When i couldn't get to the same DC's that Exchange installation couldn't see, I finally twigged.. Duh.

Of course, since then, i have since broken it again, couldn't uninstall, tried a manual uninstall ( NOT Recommended  ). to recover i ran the command - Setup /m:RecoverServer - and it was failing halfway through in relation to the Microsoft Search (Exchange) Service. I browsed to the MSI file ( C:\program files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Mailbox) and then ran the msfte.msi /uninstall and restarted the setup. Bingo, it went through and reinstalled and Exchange was Working again. Woohooo..

I guess I have tested the Disaster recovery process enough now...

We are trying to install Exchange 2007 test intallation os we can check out the UC components to see if it will suitable replace our existing CTI installation. That doesn't sound too hard does it... noooo...

We try to run the setup, everyhting checks out, well sort of... So far we have the following issues:

• Single label domain

But the biggest issue that we have which to me, shouldn't be an issue at all. First off, a bit of background. We have a child domain that is does not contain Exchange in any way. It has 1 Windows 2003Sp2 DC and 2 Windows 2000 SP4 DC's. When we run the Exchange 2007 setup we get the following errors:

Extending Active Directory schema

Progress   .................. FAILED

Domain abc.xyz.com cannot be reached. Please verify the connection to this domain and run PrepareDomain for this domain again.

Why is it trying to contact the Child domain at all? I don't any part of Exchange in the child Domain. Everything else can see the child domain, what the hell? I added the preReq xml file that changes the requirements for the Ex2007 SP1 install and everything. the Parent domain xyz.com has had all the domain prep stuff run and i figured it would work just find.

Any tips would be appreciated..

So now the Server is all set up and hopefully ready to go. I am now testing the Boot PE image that i burnt to CD to test the setup. that way i can see if the image will connect to the deploy point.

Should that be successful, I shall then move the Boot PE image to the WDS Server and then test from there. Once that works OK, i will work on finalising the Image that i will deply. I am mkaing an existing XP one and will follow that up with a Vista one. All going well, i will look at a Windows Server 2003 and a Windows Server 2008 image that i can then deploy.

UPDATE: Automated boot was unsuccessful ( i think due to NIC Drivers) but Lite Touch Installation  is currently under way...

Here is a fantastic article from Aaron Parker on how to do Terminal Server Start menu re-direction. We currently have some archaic application called Startbuild that does it at the moment, for the most part. i will be rebuilding our TS servers soon and i can tell you that this will be the first thing i implement.

This is another great post in a long line of posts that i have found of great use for setting up my environment. Great work, keep it up.

How's this for a dodgy install. I am looking at installing the Microsoft Deployment toolkit and the Windows Server 2008 (and Vista SP1) AIK on a test server to see if it is useful here at work. So far i found the following odd things:

• MS Assessment & Planning  requires Word & Excel 2007, Word and Excel viewers are no good as substitutes
• It also requires SQL 2005 express, even though i already have SQL 2005 on there.

That is as far as i hae gotten so far... Why you wouldn't provide an option to use and existing SQL installation is beyond me. I can either download or use a previous download.

Perhaps i should just stick with Ghost...

What a brilliant Game! and i got to watch it on TV live!! Collingwood kicked 11 of the first 13 goals to jump out of the blocks. Richmond finally got started an provided a contest but the game was gone... Go Pies!

Match Details

Match Comments

• JOHN ANTHONY on debut for Collingwood kicked two goals with his first two kicks ...
• 100th KANE JOHNSON (Richmond 2003-08) adding to the 104 games with Adelaide 1996-2002 ...

We have being having all sorts of trouble adding our third Domain controller into our child domain. It just would not be able to replicate correctly and establish the SYSVOL share or anything. It was resolvable through its A record but just wouldn't join the gang. So this morning, we sat down and decided to fix this once and for all. We went through and checked that we had done all the correct steps and permissions first. Yep, we had done everything the right way but just not the right result.

We were getting a lot of Event ID 1925 errors - DNS Lookup failure caused replication to fail - so I check it out on TechNet and got this article which gives various specific dnsdiag commands to run. we started with dnsdiag /test:dns /s:DC3 /dnsbasic from our and found that there were errors from DC3 as it wasn't updating it's DSA_GUID._msdsc.dns_domain entry. I then ran dcdiag /test:dns /dnsrecordregistration command to double-check and it failed also.

I then went and checked the DSA_GUID._msdsc.dns_domain entry that was there versus the one it was looking for and ,lo and behold, they were different. I deleted the wrong one with extreme prejudice and manually entered the correct value and Bingo, it started doing all the things that a DC does...

Somehow, there was an incorrect entry in the _msdsc.dns_domain_Name zone that was causing the issue. I'd say it was an old entry from before my time. Once gone, i was back in business... and i did the dance of joy..

Next Stop.. why won't our Exchange 2007 Test box get to the next stage of installation..