amongst other things...
Inserting obscure SciFi or Fantasy references into my life. Today I've managed:
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Today I noticed a page appear on technet detailing the use of Windows Home Server in a Small Business Server environment, to backup your desktops. This made me cringe.
In an environment where companies, who are or want to be total or near-total Microsoft setups, are trying to spend less money Microsoft's documentation team are advising the use of a product which many very small customers are looking to as an alternative to SBS. After all why bother with SBS when you can use WHS and Google (or any number of other hosted service providers) for mail/calendaring/sharepoint/wiki services?
For some companies WHS and hosted services might well be a good thing. For the purposes of the rest of my post I'll be ignoring this and assuming the company already has a SBS installation.
The thing that scares me most about this document is the fact that it exists. I really don't see the point of using WHS in a SBS environment. I mean, obviously, you technically can. I just don't see why you would want to. You should be educating your users to never store anything critical in an area that isn't backed up. In combination with redirected folders and/or roaming profiles, and network drives you shouldn't have a problem. By doing this early on you won't need to re-educate your users as you grow. Even if you do have a special desktop that has some magic bit of software, then you should have a special procedure just for that desktop or you should consider replacing it with an alternative item of software/hardware and eliminate the single point of failure. But what about laptops, I hear you cry? That's irrelevant as the laptops still need to be on-site or VPN'ed in to be covered by WHS.
The document strikes me as being aimed at someone who either doesn't know what SBS is capable of underneath the pretty console (in which case should the functionality not be exposed, or explained more clearly?), or as a method of bringing in more revenue.
Perhaps I'm just cynical, but the answer seems to be one of managing documentation. SBS builds on other products and perhaps it could benefit from including or referencing these other product documentation libraries more frequently? Admitedly I don't write documentation for living, but it does still seems logical to me...
In that past I've created custom live unix distro CDs for myself and although it worked I found that it was so time consuming and generally such a pain in the bum that it just wasn't worth it. Yesterday I had the need (that nerd need, not because I had to, but because I wanted to) to create a customised CD for the house1. I'd heard good things about RemasterSys and figured now was the time to try it.
Holy crap it's awesome. Customise your setup as you want it, make sure you do the necessary system wide alterations (/etc/skel, and so on) and then just fire and forget. A few minutes later you either have an ISO or the CDFS ready to be altered before you turn it into an ISO. I didn't have to worry about clearing down rubbish, then mashing it all into squashfs. It Just Worked.
If you need to create a custom Debian based live CD quickly, then I encourage you to look at RemasterSys. It's quick and works like a dream.
[1] We have an old laptop with a mostly dead hard disk, and it's been running an Ubuntu live CD for months. Sadly it means that everytime you shut it down certain things need to be reinstalled, such as Flash support. No longer is this an issue thanks to Redcatch Linux Five Thousand.
I've written about specifying drivers for redirected printers in the past, but it's not something I've had to do for a few months.
Last week we had to get a 1500 series HP PSC working on a home workers terminal server session, and it turns out that the "proper" driver isn't correct and doesn't install. Luckily it seems that a lot of the HP PSC's use the same internals as the HP Deskjet series. As most of the Deskjet series work with the Deskjet 550C driver we tried the 550C for the HP PSC 1500, and it works like a dream.
Just thought the world might be interesting in knowing.
