Competent Man

Bug in the SBS 2011 Migration Preparation Tool, FRS & DFS

Jason Nelson — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 21:55:05 +0000

My service lead found a bug in Microsoft’s SBS migration tool yesterday. Here is his report on the issue. Great work Brendan!

I’m sort of proud to report that we’re responsible for
discovering a bug in the SBS 2011 Migration Preparation Tool – MS will work to
either write a rapid-response blog post outlining the issue and/or update the
tool to accommodate the issue… which is:

In a 2008R2 domain that’s had its functional level raised to
2008, FRS is deprecated in favor of DFS Replication. You cannot start the FRS
service at all. Unfortunately, the migration tool checks to make sure that the
FRS service is running – if it’s not, the tool fails.

MS worked with me on the source server to verify that the
schema version is at the right level, then made some registry edits on the
source server so that the SBS 2011 installation will proceed without saying,
“The migration prep tool hasn’t been run on the source server, blah blah blah…”

Kind of an interesting case to work on.

The things we checked for and/or edited were:

Edited HKLM\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\SMALL BUSINESS SERVER\MIGRATION\
ErrorsFound -> changed from 1 to 0
MigrationReady -> changed from 0 to 1

And…

Verified Schema version:
HKLM\SYSTEM\Current Control Set\Services\NTDS\Parameters
Schema Version left at 0x0000002f (47)

IT Nation 2011 Conference: Day 1 Keynote

Jason Nelson — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:30:39 +0000

This morning has been great. After adjusting to the crazy time difference (getting up at the equivalent of 3am my normal time) I grabbed a quick breakfast and found a seat for the first keynote.

The main presenter was Dan Burris, a technology futurist who’s hired by the highest echelon of corporations to help them determine hard trends in technology, and adopt accordingly. The man had some great analogies about how we can often be blind to coming change in both our industry and in business abroad. One way he put it…

“You know, often times the excuse I hear from those who have either failed to change quickly enough or even seen the need to change is this, ‘I was just sooo busy with things…blah blah blah.’. The truth of the matter is that we’re all busy. The top 20 execs of GM we’re ‘super busy’ as their meltdown in 2008-2009 fast approached, but they did little to prepare their company for the things to come. We’re all busy, the choice we need to make is this, are we willing to slow down for a moment to really consider what the future will look like and how our ‘busyness’ fits into preparing for and taking advantage of it.”

Needless to say I was inspired to some extent. However, I’m also proud. I see Allixo doing this exact thing to phone system competition. They continue to tell their prospects and current customers that VoIP ‘isn’t a mature technology’ or that it ‘isn’t for small business’. Not only are they wrong, their actually hurting their ability to stay in that market in the near future. Some of them are nimble enough to get dragged kicking and screaming into VoIP effectively, but others will move on or go out of business. We have awesome technology partners and I’m hoping to improve those relationships. This will result in us staying ahead of the curve and being a ‘visionary’ tech company in Skagit Valley and beyond. I know Allixo is a quality IT company in Skagit Valley, and part of that is due to our ability to see what’s coming and adapt quickly.

There are of course areas in which we are likely stuck in poor thinking too, so I hope to find the worst offences and deal with them quickly with the help of my team.

Dan Burris’ resounding theme for this whole conference? Two thoughts: a) foresight b) the fast will eat the slow. I want to give a hat tip to Brendan, our Service Lead at Allixo, for expressing early on in his time here a desire to remain nimble. We can expand on that desire to be a ‘nimble’ company by looking forward and constantly adjusting our roadmap to what’s going to be most effective vs. what we’ve always had success with. I know we can strike the balance of old and new that will keep our growth well ahead of the curve.

Dynamic & Spacious Songs – Part 1

Jason Nelson — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 04:19:31 +0000

I’m been working a lot lately, and consequently have listened to a tremendous amount of music. Over the next week I’ll be posting some blog posts reflecting on choice favs from the past 2 weeks along with explanations from what made them ‘stick out’ to me. For some it’s the music in and of itself, and for others a combination of both the music and mixing.

1) Ricky Martin, Fuego de Noche

Most would see that title and move on (or flame me) thinking back to his ‘Livin’ La Vita Loca’ days. I honestly really disliked his music growing up. However, 4 years ago I was flipping through the music stations on our TV looking for some background noise for a late night work session and found this. I had no idea how profoundly good a musician Ricky was. I was blown away by the emotion in his singing and the way hey carried his voice in and out of the song. This is also one of the best piano/cello/vocal songs I’ve ever heard, both musically and technically. It’s extremely dynamic, to a point where it sits as a high up example of how powerful musical expression can be when done with nuance and care; it rises to great heights and plummets into quiet reflection, all with only 2 instruments and one vocal! It’s unfortunately very normal in our culture for constantly loud and unendingly ‘in your face’ music to be everywhere…in the church, our school kid’s iPods, in clubs, etc, etc. I think it’s for this reason I’m drawn to live or ‘unplugged’ versions of artists music lately…they are forced to give some space to music they wouldn’t otherwise under the thumb of a record company in the studio. All that said, get over your dislike of ‘sentimental’ music and listen to this song. Listen to/watch it at the 480p quality setting if you can.

Speaking of others…

Jason Nelson — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:32:49 +0000

I had a discussion with a friend recently where they overspoke, sharing too much about how they felt about another person we both knew. It wasn’t offensive and frankly I hardly considered it a bad thing until later that night they texted me apologizing for the extra words. It hit me that, although I can hardly claim objectivity or innocence on the matter, we much too often will discuss the lives of our peers, colleagues, family members and such in far too negative a light.

Further, I think how we talk about others says much about ourselves and the condition of our heart. It reveals much about our insecurities, jealousy, contempt and other emotions that drive our actions. be cautious and wary when those around you give opportunities to go down this road. “He who despises his neighbor lacks sense, But a man of understanding keeps silent. He who goes about as a talebearer reveals secrets, But he who is trustworthy conceals a matter.” ~Proverbs 11:12-13

Hokey = Good (occasionally)

Jason Nelson — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:34:33 +0000

At EBC we’ve had this ongoing issue with our PA that’s been bugging me something fierce; a 3-5 db cut needed at both 900Hz and 180Hz for many months. Since I’m not there every week, I had yet to do anything about it until today I finally gave in to the ‘awesome monster’ inside me. Our main venue is still running a mega analogue setup, so I only have 2 Mackie Onyx PEQs to work with, and end up cutting in these frequencies far too often. I often feel that I never having enough PEQs to get things sounding smooth as I’d like.

Our PA is an all EV setup installed by the awesome folks at Lift A/V, and we don’t touch our NetMAX controller for fear of tarnishing something that generally sounds amazing. I’m not sure why it never struck me to ask them to make this fix for me before today. None-the-less, here comes the hokey: I unplugged our main sends to the PA from the board and put them in the output of a Peavy 31 band GEQ, made the needed cuts, and ran a balanced line from the board to the Peavy’s input. We were worried about excessive noise, and this change up definitely added some ‘hiss’ with how our gain structure is set up (PA is really hot). Peavy is my second least fav make of audio equipment, so this was difficult to follow through with.

I’m happy to report though today was one the best mixes I’ve been able to put together in that venue. I was able to ignore those common trouble area frequencies and focus on the other things that needed to be cut. The overall result sounded really different and I wasn’t sure if I liked it at first. The music was powerful and smoother at the 90dba we run at, and this was confirmed by a handful of people who mentioned in passing that the sound was really ‘good’ and ‘powerful’ today. I also have to attribute much of that to the band doing really well, especially the bass/drums/e guitar being really tight.

Now to make the phone call to the A/V system vendor so I can undo this hokeyness…

~Jason

Reverb in Daughtry’s Latest

Jason Nelson — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:56:09 +0000

It seems like reverb has had limited use in the last 5-6 years for mainstream pop and rock music, except for the every now and then occurrence. Even in mainstream studio recorded worship music, it’s used somewhat sparingly in a historical context. It’s been very dry, compressed, loud, busy, etc…but not very ‘spacious’. I guess bands like Coldplay don’t fit that description, but you know what I mean?

Listen to Chris Daughtry’s latest single, ‘Crawling Back to You’ and the space the producers/engineers gave it:

(Listen at higher quality if u can)

It’s a different sort of space and I think it sounds awesome, especially on quality speakers. Other effects in this track aside, I really like its use of reverb. For his voice it sounds like a couple verbs, one of which has a time sync’d pre-delay (so it it’s on/off beat). The drums sound equally awesome, with a perfect amount of decay on their medium-large room sound-you don’t really notice it during the chorus or bridges…but definitely in the verses. The overall sound seems like a throwback to the ‘Celine Dion sound’ for my mixing ears. That’s all for today.

Dell Precision M6600 Display Issue

Jason Nelson — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 02:26:11 +0000

I’m trying to disable the onboard and integrated intel graphics processor in my Dell Precision M6600 so I can run 3d apps on the local display. External displays appear to be inherently powered by the NVidia Quadro GPU, but I can’t get it to work with the local display!

UPDATE:

Finally fixed this. You need to disable the nVidia ‘Optimus’ feature in the BIOS. It’s what enables on board Intel adapter and let’s you use 3+ monitors. Since I game/run 3d apps on the LCD frequently it made sense for me to turn that off!