Land of the Lemmings, v2

I run Gentoo on my home linux box. Generally, it’s stable enough for what I use it for: webserver, wireless+ipsec gateway, squid test machine.

Short story, it broke yesterday and I fixed it today, after much reading and typing. Long story after the break.
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Sitting up and drooling

Too pooped to play

A few more pictures on the galleries.

From the top of the Green Monster

More photos up over on the gallery.

It looks like MS has finally realized there are operations that want to deploy desktops in as streamlined a method as possible and aren’t the hulking behemoths of OEMs or very large corporate customers.

They are planning on making the Business Desktop Deployment solutions available to all, along with WinPE in the initial Vista release.

The sessions in general were good overviews of the process for install and deployment of Vista and/or Office 2007. The average deployment will have to change:

• are you using administrative install points for Office and not Local Install Source? Get ready to learn about LIS.
• Are you using multicast today? Hope your vendor catches up and releases an add on to Windows Deployment Services, the replacement to RIS, to support it
• Are you using RIS? You should be, it seems
• Did you know about the Desktop Deployment resources that are already available?

There were some great pointers in the session, though very few of them apply to an environment where you have fewer total mailboxes (~600) than MS puts on each cluster node (~4000).

I did get a bit of a relaxation moment at the beginning when the presenter asked how many people were still running Exchange 5.5, I’d say ~5% of the room raised their hands. We need to get off of it, but we’re not the last guy running it. Nobody was willing to admit they were still running Exchange 5.0, though I can’t imagine anyone is.

Many of these sessions are going to be best re-digested later once the conference DVDs show up.

Oh, and at lunch today they had Diet Mt Dew, YAY!

Server and Domain Isolation with IPSec is something to look at, MS Consulting is supporting it and starting, in the next few weeks, an engagement program to help set it up. I’d like to see them try to define our network in 3 weeks…

I can definitely see some potential applications for Housing, but the chances for a deployment anytime soon are slim.

Also, I’ve got the Vista beta running in VMWare Workstation, looks cool, but really hard to tell in the limited time I had last night and between sessions today.

There are probably a slew of these being posted to various blogs, all linked from Techedbloggers, I assume, but I’ve got to throw mine up too.

As I take more photos, I’ll post more to the gallery.