One of WindowsNetworking.com sponsors SolarWinds is holding a trivia challenge which started on June 7, 2011 and ends on July 7, 2011. One potential winner will be drawn every week to win an iPad2. You can take the quiz multiple times, and for each quiz you answer adequately, you will receive a sweepstakes entry. They are giving 7 iPads, movie posters and more! For a chance to win check out the contest page here…
Dedicate the 8th of June to IPv6. The Internet-Society together with major organizations like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others will be testing IPv6 for 24 hours. The ultimate goal is to get the attention of all stakeholders and motivate them to prepare their infrastructures for a smooth transition to IPv6 from IPv4. If you already started your IPv6 test implementation I suggest that you participate and join the test flight by visiting this page. If you are participating in the IPv6 Day, then testing IPv6 access to websites requires some configuration such as, setting quad-A records in DNS but I suggest that you plan ahead and inform your users or customers that might be affected by this transition. Make sure that your help desk is equipped with the necessary information and have a fall-back plan in place. It is important to coordinate your plan with your upstream ISP and tackle any issues beforehand. One final suggestion is to avoid performing works or changes to your network setup during this day. For IPv6 and Windows go here. Here you'll find an FAQ about IPv6 tests and a utility that tests your environment.
CA Technologies and Microsoft join forces to offer Cloud backup services. CA Technologies well known for their enterprise backup solution ARCserve will piggyback onto Microsoft's Azure services to compete with its rivals CommVault, Symantec and others. On the other hand, Microsoft would benefit from a wider portfolio of cloud services which gives them a competitive advantage as a complete cloud provider. The new cloud service is aimed at small-to-medium businesses where both vendors are strong. Together they can provide a local backup, a remote backup and a hybrid backup solution or some elements of a disaster recovery plan. Although, the beta version will be released this summer it is understood that it will include encryption to protect data and data deduplication methods to save bandwidth costs. However, one would assume that they would come up with other services later on. Other vendors offer portable backups which is a service that allows customers to copy their data onto disk drives and have them shipped. So far, CA Technologies has committed itself to Microsoft's Azure which means that its customers can only use Azure as the backup backend where other backup providers such as, CommVault allows its customers to move data off to their choice of cloud providers. For more information go here.
Moving services from server to another is an extensive job, especially if a resource has a long list of items to move such as, a long list of printers. With Virtualization migrating resources has been simplified in a way, however, some specific tasks remain the same. That is, they don't benefit from available tools at the virtualization layer. When performing a migration of a print server from one computer to another or copying the same printers to multiple computers you can export the list of printers and drivers from an existing print server and then import them into the new server. The steps below show how to migrate all configuration settings including Active Directory properties if the printers are published in AD. You can export print queues and settings to a file as follows: Go to Server Manager, right click Print Management and then select Migrate Printers – you should get the Printer Migration wizard. From the Getting started with printer migration page, select Export printer queues and printer drivers to a file, click Next. From the Select a print server page, select a server and then click Next. From the Review the list of items to be exported page, click Next. From the Select the file location page, type a filename and then click Next. Click Finish. Additionally, you can try the command-line tool printbrm. To get a full list of options type printbrm /?
Veeam's product has evolved into one of the fastest secure copy software available out there and it's free! This is not a paid advert; I am an active user of WinSCP but lately I decided to try out the latest version of FastSCP and was surprised with the speed and additional features it has. I used previous versions of FastSCP and was convinced to switch to something else but now, I decided to go back to Veeam's free product. FastSCP uses the full network capacity which makes it very fast but one needs to be cautious when triggering large data transfers as these may saturate the network. I suggest that you should assess your network environment and find the best times to perform bulk copies. In fact, some products do specifically have limitations on bandwidth usage. On the other hand, FastSCP has additional features that improve file copy performance and can provide secure connections. Frequent users of such utilities know that security is achieved through SSH as is the case with this product, but FastSCP does not require any modifications on the server side (ESX & ESXi). The file management supports drag and drop functionality similar to windows explorer and can send you an email to notify you that a file copy was completed. To download a free copy you need to register using your email address. Go here to register and download a copy.