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Windows 2000

Windows 2000. Ah.

w2kboot

That takes me back.

Building more Vista migration stuff for the Sales kickoff; and I’m shocked how different Windows 2000 and Vista are in terms of resource requirements.

I’m running Windows 2000 quite happily in a machine with 196MB RAM on a VM; Vista takes at least five times that for the same performance.

Windows 2003 services on a stressed VMware workstation; aka fixing the ZCM Utopia services startup

Novell has a fantastic demo suite known as Utopia – listen to this Novell Open Audio Podcast for details.

One issue that was reported by the field was that running Windows 2003 server on VMware workstation with ZENworks Configuration Management would sometimes cause the ZENworks services not to start.

I’ve never really seen this issue; I saw one VM that was broken – but only saw that everything was slow.

For the sales kickoff I built a set of VMs and was testing them. Moving from ESX to VMware Workstation on SLED running on a Thinkpad T42p laptop I saw the issue.

In short the workstation service was being slow to start; the server was stressed – and the service timed out. The dominos started to fall; Net Logon failed etc etc etc.

My fix is simple. Make the workstation service dependant on something that is relatively benign but that will start with some reliability. I chose the DNS service (it’s a single server) – because that ultimately provides the DDNS underpinning to Active Directory and other services.

Here’s how:

sc config lanmanworkstation depend= dns

That simple. Reboot and you should now have a working ZCM Utopia demo.

For the internal Novell people – did this fix your problem?

Code names.. something stinks

I blogged last year on ZENworks project code names.

We recently almost announced a project codenamed “Brown Trout”.

Innocent sounding to the US reader; I’ll let the rest of the English speaking world share what the context is.

Hint: It’s brown, streamlined and lives in water. But it’s not a fish.