Another less-sysadmin-y, more code-y post today. Zend_Form is pretty handy, and takes care of a lot of the hard work in producing and validating forms. Unfortunately the default decorators aren't quite as sane in my opinion, which becomes obvious if you start using fieldsets, or display groups, as ZF refers to them - You'll see your fieldsets getting wrapped in an additional definition list which is basically crap if you ask me.

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.

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 $_.

…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.

We had a good one at work the other day. One of our customer's terminal servers, from their load balanced cluster, had run out of diskspace on C:, due to a rogue update of some bespoke software and a lack of quotas. This is something which was missed from the config, but we or the customer never noticed, as we're pretty good at monitoring this stuff and resolving the issue before it causes trouble.

Transport rules are a new thing for Exchange, in it's latest incarnation (Exchange 2007), and it allows for some pretty interesting configuration and behaviour when a mail is in transit. If you're familiar with earlier versions of Exchange it's probably best to compare them to Event Sinks, only that they're much more friendly. If you don't know what that means then a more apt description would be simple to create rules, that allow you to do anything from append text to the bottom of an email, to apply filters on messages between both internal and external users.