I've written about specifying drivers for redirected printersin 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.

If you've never had to run Linux under HyperV you'll know that it runs, although it could be better. You'll also be aware that Microsoft supply drivers via connect, in a binary state with official support for only a few distros. So you can imagine how I felt when I saw the announcement on the LKML. Drivers for Linux guests, in the kernel. Ok, so it's not in the mainline yet, but it is the start of good and great things.

We use HyperV a lot at work, and for small scale Windows Server platform deployments I actually quite like it as our chosen virtualisation tech. However, backing up any virtual machine, regardless of platform, can be “fun” sometimes. We actually use a script that I put together using diskshadow (VSS) and a set of batch scripts, which works really well. However I hadn't actually really put much thought into what was happening and although I've done test restores for Windows machine I'm yet to do one for a *ix box.

I've got a bit of a love-hate relationship with Powershell, but in this case it's turned into a bit of love. Importing users with Powershell is relatively easy to do when combined with ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory, from Quest, which adds a handful of rather useful functions. PSCXsupposedly has something similar, but I'm obviously missing them completely. import-csv C:\Path\To\Users.csv | foreach-object { New-QADUser -FirstName $_.givenname -LastName $_.surname -SamAccountName $_.

New Years eve the extra bits of hardware I needed for my Xenbox arrived (cheapo motherboard for VMX (Intel VT-x in my case) and power supply). As you can imagine with a house full of people, and corresponding day of pain afterwards, it wasn't the best time to be faffing with setting it all up. However, a few days later and it's all there and working like a dream. I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised and also taken back by a few things.

…redirected App data directories, and causes a crash (Visual C++ Runtime error). Unfortunately after updating one or two of our customers at work it appeared that a few user accounts still had a redirected app data directory, presumably because they weren't around when it was removed. Thankfully fixing it is pretty easy (although potentially time consuming depending on your setup), if the redirection policy isn't active and is simply a case of changing the relevant entry under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders, and then logging off and back on, and migrating the redirected files back into the local profile directory.

Here's another one that caught me out today, but I've never come across before. Under a DFS share, any linked shares are created as junctions. It appears that the permissions on these junctions do affect the permissions of the data within the linked share. Whilst this is logical, given how junction points work, what really threw me was that the wonderful, wonderful GUI didn't reflect this and the permissions on the junction point had been inadvertently changed.

I guess I've not come across this before as most of the printers we deploy use the same driver name for client side and server side drivers, but it appears that you can force a Terminal Server to use a certain driver, in place of what the client is telling the server. KB239088details the process. I found that the wizard wasn't much use at all - but it's not like the process is particularly complicated.

Unless you've been living in a hole for the past few days, or you're seriously anti-Windows or simply not into your virtualisation at all, you're probably aware that Hyper-V, the replacement for Virtual Server 2005, has gone “gold” (RTM). There's all sorts of news on this, but little in the way of unix and unix-like related info on the web. Despite having 2 customers with it at work, I've not had the opportunity to try any of the unix-like systems on it either.