I mean, who can blame them, it took Microsoft 20 years (1985-2005) to finally make a stable version of Windows, and now they’ve gone and replaced it with “ME Version 2″ otherwise known as “Vista”.

Anyways, if you’re running Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5 you can see your “Shared” computers on the sidebar of your Finder. Mac computers show up with a Light Blue Apple Looking ™ icon, and Windows computers show up with a Dark Blue icon.

However, if you examine the icons closely, you’ll notice that the Windows icon actually shows an old-style CRT monitor with a Windows 98 style “Blue Screen” or crash screen!!

Awesome!

Here’s a few pictures, so that you can see what I’m babbling about:

You can see the difference between the top system “melchior” a Linux-based SMB (Windows) file server, and the two bottom ones, that are Macintosh computers.

If you do a “Get Info” (the equivalent of Properties, in Windows) on the Mac computers, you see a nice shiny Apple LCD screen, with the “Tiger” background on it. It just so happens that these two Macs are actually running Tiger… I can’t wait to see if the background changes when they run Leopard, in a week or so.

On the other hand, a Get Info on the “PC” server clearly shows a Windows 98 style “blue screen of death”. Zoom in if you have to. Very nice!

I can’t imagine that this will stay around too long, as Microsoft is one of Apple’s largest partners. Either way, I’m sure it’s “all in fun”.

I went to Beaumont again, and worked for Hardin-Jefferson ISD and East Chambers ISD while I was out there.

I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, and normally they are pretty good, but this one didn’t have working Internet the first night. The second night I was there, it worked for a while, and then stopped working.

At Hardin-Jefferson I got the opportunity to setup two Windows 2003 Terminal Servers. Most of my clients don’t run TS, ’cause it’s too expensive, but it is a neat concept. The only thing that really sucks is that TS Licensing is so horribly difficult. My client already had two existing TS servers previously, but since he lost the AD controller that hosted TS Licensing, we had to call Microsoft to get permission to re-install it. The first two MS reps we talked to had no idea what we were trying to do, and the first one actually hung up on us. I guess he was confused. Can’t say I blame him, Microsoft’s licensing & constant changing of licensing confuses me too.

They are also running a pilot program for their elementary school involving Macintosh laptops. The teachers who’ve gotten them so far really like them. It’s kinda cool how well the teachers can use them, considering that before they used Windows machines, and they haven’t received their training yet. They got to take the laptops home for the summer.

I also worked for East Chambers ISD. I did a standard server checkup & cleanup for them. I did have to install Sequoia View on one of their servers to find out where all of their disk space had gone.

Sequoia View is a cool program that graphically shows you what files take up the most space on your hard drive. Grand Perspective does the same thing for Mac OS X, it’s the one I use.

I traveled to the Tyler area this week, and worked for a couple of customers out there. One of the primary things we worked on was implementing virtual servers on VMWare Server.

If you don’t know what VMWare is all about, and you are in the IT industry, I urge you to do a serious evaluation of it, or of a competing product.

Here’s a rundown of the (as I see them) key points…

• Host pre-installed “appliances” for single-task servers.
• Convert existing out-of-date or failing physical servers into virtual servers on a brand-new host.
• Export periodic “images” of your running servers for off-site backups and disaster recovery solutions.
• Consolidate servers, and free up server room rack space, and save on electricity and cooling costs.
• Separate different “third-party” software solutions onto their own virtual server, so that said vendor has a more difficult time “pointing fingers” when something goes wrong.
• Install a server OS once, customize it, and then deploy that image again and again for new “servers.”
• Evaluate new or different solutions, such as Linux, in a risk-free environment.
• I’m sure there are other benefits, but that’s about all I can think of right now.

One of this week’s customers hadn’t really heard of virtualization, and now she is running five (5) virtual servers! One was converted from a physical machine, and was her school districts’ existing web server. On that particular machine, their SCSI backplane was failing, and they were down to a single drive, with no redundancy. Now that server’s image runs on a brand-spanking new Dell, with eight (8) “cores” and eight (8) gigabytes of RAM.

The other customer had done some virtualization, and needed far less help using the software, but had some other nagging network problems regarding DNS. We think we’ve got those solved. One of his domain controllers had been off line for a time, and he didn’t realize that it hosted backup DNS, as well as the schema FSMO role. He took it off line originally, because it hadn’t been replicating in some time.

I also stopped off at Mike’s in Austin on the way home. We spent a few hours just chatting about, um, VMWare and stuff. He’s playing with running a certain popular BSD-based OS on his VMWare Workstation. He was showing me that he was able to get it up and running, although it wasn’t optimized to run in a VM, and certainly not on an AMD machine!

I got back home to a ton of postal mail… I guess that’s what happens when you travel near the end of the month!