“No Problem,” I thought, I’ll just connect via VPN, run “klist –li 0x3e7 purge” to flush my computer’s Kerberos tokens, and refresh GPOs via “gpupdate /force”.   Instead of success, I see the following:

Since I was able to accomplish what I needed over VPN and wanted to get back to not working, I decided to just leave the computer connected over VPN, cross my fingers, and look back on it in a few days.   Things always work better after being left alone, right?   The next day, I rebooted and tried again, but saw the same message.   This left me with a difficult decision, spend vacation time troubleshooting my own computer, or turn it off and deal with it later.   I turned it off.

A few days later, I powered on the computer again and found that things hadn’t changed yet.   I connected via VPN and tried another “GPUPDATE /force”, and found that things were still no different.   This time I had some time that I could spend on troubleshooting the problem and decided to take a look.   In the Event Logs, I see an SCECLI 1704 telling me that the GPOs applied successfully.  

Frustrated that I’m getting an error in one window while another tells me that everything is fine, I do what anyone troubleshooting while on vacation does…I powered off the computer and went back to not working.

A couple of days later, I powered on the laptop and found the symptoms had not yet changed.   This time, I decided that I needed to fix the problem.   I opened up a browser and went to bing.com so that I could do a search for the error.   Between the first three results, I was able to find my solution.   I found two hits to TechNet articles which described the same message, but had a variable listed where mine had “LocalGPO”, and I also did not have the event log entries that they referred to.   Those entries were:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd392577(v=ws.10).aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd392529(WS.10).aspx

The other link was more helpful and contained the exact error, including that the problem was with “LocalGPO”.   That post was: 

It directed me to the file registry.pol under C:\Windows\System32\GroupPolicy.    I looked into that directory and found the following:

Since I was using an elevated command prompt, I tried a rename of the registry.pol file followed by re-applying of the GPOs:

Finally, the GPOs applied successfully.   I was then able to start the IP Helper service and it stayed running.   I looked and saw that my computer was now connected to work via DirectAccess. 

So after trying the tried and true troubleshooting techniques of rebooting and ignoring the problem, I was finally able to do a web search and had my answer in just a few minutes.  Maybe I should have started with that.   Maybe next time.   But spending time troubleshooting computers at home, even work computers, is just not how I wanted to spend my time-off.   The old adage is true:   The Cobbler’s children have no shoes.

With this particular customer, they have a need for the users who work within their Network Operations Center (NOC) to be able to handle that front-line sorts of tasks of the end-users within the environment.   This includes tasks such as unlocking accounts, changing passwords, joining computers to the domain, etc.   One of the steps that they took to provide these users the rights that they needed was to leverage the built-in group Account Operators.   They also have a need for users in the NOC to be able to perform these same functions against their peers.   What they discovered was that while membership in Account Operators met their needs for being able to manage the general end-users, it did not, however, meet their need of being able to manage their peers.   They also recognized that they would have benefits if the NOC could unlock the accounts of Domain Admins when those users locked themselves out.   (As happens in many customers, they admittedly have more accounts in the Domain Admins group than they would prefer and some of these accounts are only periodically used and the users with those accounts do not always remember their password.)    Their solution to these shortcomings of the Account Operators group was one faced by many customers, and generally not considered an optimal solution; they added the accounts of the NOC Leads to the Domain Admins group.   Let’s put that another way, in order to be able to manage the accounts which they’d prefer to have not put into the Domain Admins group in the first place, they put more accounts into the Domain Admins group.   If this sounds familiar to you, it is likely because you’ve either seen or worked in an environment where this same decision was made, or know someone who has.  (No judgments from me about this sort of situation, I’ve worked in places with even worse reasoning for putting massive numbers of accounts into Domain Admins.)

We decided to break their two requirements into each part and look at them individually.  There is a common component to both aspects, but we addressed them as separate parts.

First we looked into why the people in their NOC were unable to manage their coworker’s accounts.   This is because these accounts had transitive membership into the built-in group Account Operators.   It was the membership in the Account Operators group which caused the SDProp process to run for these accounts and remove the inheritance which would have normally allowed Account Operators to manage user accounts.   But without the inheritance, they could not manage their peers and it was because of this that their NOC Leads were added into Domain Admins.   We discussed SDProp and AdminSDHolder and they decided that to meet their business need of having these accounts be able to manage each other when required, we would leverage the dsHeuristics attribute to exclude Account Operators from AdminSDHolder.   We leveraged KB 817433 as our guide and set dsHeuristics to a value of 0000000001000001.  This excluded the accounts from the SDProp thread setting their ACE to match that of AdminSDHolder every time the thread runs on the PDC Emulator.   We then had to set the adminCount attribute of the accounts from 1 to 0 (Zero) so that SDProp would stop running for the accounts, and then finally re-enable inheritance on the accounts.   This we did in their test forest with some test accounts, but the process will be repeatable for them in their production forest.   We were then able to verify that these accounts with membership in Account Operators could now manage each other, but had no rights for any of the other protected groups (such as Domain Admins).

Before we move onto the second half of our solution, I want to share some links and references to the words SDProp, AdminSDHolder, and dsHeuristics which I so casually threw around in that previous paragraph.  

Five common questions about AdminSdHolder and SDProp
https://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2009/05/07/five-common-questions-about-adminsdholder-and-sdprop.aspx

adminCount, adminSDHolder, SDProp and you!
https://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael/archive/2008/10/22/admincount-adminsdholder-sdprop-and-you.aspx

Delegated permissions are not available and inheritance is automatically disabled
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/817433

AdminSDHolder, Protected Groups and SDPROP
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.09.sdadminholder.aspx

Description and Update of the Active Directory AdminSDHolder Object
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/232199

AdminSDHolder Thread Affects Transitive Members of Distribution Groups
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/318180

DS-Heuristics attribute
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms675656(v=vs.85).aspx

Default groups
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc756898(v=WS.10).aspx

After that bit of fun reading, we then started to look at their second business requirement.   They wanted the staff of their NOC (who are members of Account Operators) to have the ability to unlock the accounts of Domain Admins should these people find themselves needing such a task performed.   This was the last reason why their NOC Leads were members of Domain Admins.   We looked at KB 279723 for guidance and used the following command to grant the Unlock right to the AdminSDHolder object so that the SDProp process would set it onto the members of Domain Admins (and the other protected groups):

dsacls "CN=AdminSDHolder,CN=System,dc=corp,dc=contoso,dc=com" /I:T /G "domain\GroupNameForNOCUsers":rpwp;lockoutTime

We couldn’t use the Account Operators group in that dsacls command, so we used the group of their NOC Users which was nested within it.   At this point, once SDProp ran again, the users could then unlock the Domain Admins but could do no other management tasks for these accounts.   This met their needs and allowed us to remove their NOC Leads from the Domain Admins group.

How to grant help-desk personnel the specific right to unlock locked user accounts
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/279723

The customer was then able to begin looking at the other accounts within the Domain Admins group and begin to plan out ways to delegate the required rights so that many of those accounts could be removed as well.

I was onsite with a customer recently who asked me a question:

“What is 2002:836b:0F1E::836b:0F1E and why am I seeing it?”

I explained that this is a 6to4 address and is automatically assigned to the client because they use a globally routable IPv4 range for their IPv4 address range. I pull up calc.exe and in a couple of moments ask if the IPv4 address of his system was 131.107.15.30. After having a brief shocked look, his response was:

“But wait, I’ve looked at KB 929852 and it says that I can disable IPv6 by unchecking the checkbox for IPv6 on the properties of the NIC. So why am I seeing an IPv6 address?”

“Of course,” I say, “but how close did you read 929852?” We pull up the KB and look at the start of the “More Information” section (included below):

IPv6 can be disabled either through the DisabledComponents registry value or through the check box for the Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6) component in the list of items on the Networking tab for the properties of connections in the Network Connections folder. The following figure shows an example.



The DisabledComponents registry key affects all interfaces on the host. However, the check box on the Networking tab affects only the specific interface. The DisabledComponents registry value does not affect the state of the check box. Therefore, even if the DisabledComponents registry key is set to disable IPv6, the check box in the Networking tab for each interface can still be checked. This is expected behavior.

There is one very fine point often overlooked in that second paragraph, it is the second sentence: “However, the check box on the Networking tab affects only the specific interface.” (emphasis mine) What is meant by “affects only the specific interface” is exactly what it says, it unbinds IPv6 from ONLY that particular interface, leaving IPv6 enabled within the IP stack. The result of this is that for systems with a non-Private IPv4 address, a 6to4 address will still be assigned to the system. It also means that other aspects of IPv6 are still enabled and running within the system.

So if your end goal of clearing the checkbox was to disable IPv6 across the entire system, you did not meet your goal. Don’t believe me? Run “netstat –ano” from an elevated command prompt and you’ll see your system listening to the unspecified IPv6 address (::). If you insist that you must disable IPv6, use the DisabledComponents registry key as defined in KB 929852. However, as the KB article says, “We (Microsoft) do not recommend disabling IPv6.”

After this discussion as to why he needed to use DisabledComponents instead of just clearing the checkbox, he asks me how I knew what his IP address was. I explained that the 6to4 address is of the format 2002:WWXX:YYZZ::WWXX:YYZZ where WW, XX, YY, ZZ are the hex representations of the octets of his IPv4 address. We looked back at calc.exe and changed it to “Programmer” under the View menu. This allows us to select Hex and enter 8b, clicking on the Decimal (Dec) radio button displays that the decimal value of 0x83 is 131. Repeating this, we determined that 0x6b is 107, 0F is 15, and 0x1E is 30. So 131.107.15.30 would be 2002:836B:0F1E::836B:0F1E.

This got us back to the discussions about how they can prevent 6to4 Addresses from being generated on their systems. There are 4 methods which could be used to disable IPv6 on their systems: The DisabledComponents key with a value of 0x1, The DisabledComponents key with a value of 0xffffffff, Group Policy, or manually via use of the netsh command. We discussed the pros & cons of these methods. Setting DisabledComponents to 0x1 will disable all tunneling adapters (ISATAP, 6to4, Teredo, IP-HTTPS) on the system, but leave the system capable of leveraging Native IPv6 addressing once they begin deploying it within their infrastructure; setting DisabledComponents to a value of 0xffffffff will disable all of IPv6 on the systems (except for the loopback adapter), but will have to be changed to 0x1 or deleted when they begin an IPv6 deployment within their infrastructure; Group Policy allows for any of the tunneling adapters to be disabled independent of the others and provides the most flexibility for the future of their infrastructure; Utilizing netsh to disable 6to4 would be a manual process which would not easily scale across multiple systems and would be a manual process to re-enable in the future.

We setup a GPO so that they could begin testing the behavior of their systems with 6to4 being disabled via GPO. The setting we defined in the GPO was “6to4 State” with a value of “Disabled”. We then re-selected the IPv6 checkbox on the properties of the NIC on the system we targeted the GPO to. The setting was located under:

Computer Configuration –> Policies –> Administrative Settings –> Network –> TCPIP Settings –> IPv6 Transition Technologies

As illustrated above, the state of the other Transition Technologies can also be controlled via GPO.

After this GPO applied to the computer, the computer was behaving as they had originally intended them to be behaving; there was no 6to4 Address present. Because we had replaced the IPv6 checkbox on the properties of the NIC, the system did have a Link Local Address (one which begins FE80::/64), but these are not routable addresses and do not register in DNS.

If you MUST insist on disabling portions or all of IPv6, consider either using Group Policy to disable the individual Transition Technologies which you wish to have disabled or leverage a value of 0x1 for the DisabledComponents key to disable all Transition Technologies. NOTE: Avoid deploying a value of 0x1 to mobile workstations if they will be leveraging DirectAccess as this will prevent them from having the ability to connect to the DirectAccess server as they would have leveraged these tunneling mechanisms for that connection; if it is only the 6to4 Addresses which are of a concern while on the corporate network, then disable only these adapters via GPO to these clients so that they can still leverage ISATAP, Teredo, and IP-HTTPS to connect to DirectAccess. If you MUST insist on disabling ALL of IPv6, then use 0xffffffff for DisabledComponents; the same caveat for mobile workstations attempting to leverage DirectAccess applies here as well.

The customer then asked me what can they do to prevent visiting computers which are on their network from being able to connect to DirectAccess servers from their own networks. We discussed how the connections to a DirectAccess server will connect to their own DirectAccess server via IPv6 and that they would require either a Native IPv6 address or a Transition Address to connect to their DirectAccess infrastructure. Since the customer’s network isn’t yet providing Native IPv6 addresses, they only have to worry about people leveraging Transition Technologies. Both ISATAP and 6to4 utilize IP Protocol 41 to encapsulate the IPv6 packets as payload of the IPv4 packets, so blocking outbound IP Protocol 41 at their network egress points will prevent ISATAP and 6to4 connections originating from their network. Teredo utilize UDP packets at port 3544, so blocking outbound UDP 3544 packets will block Teredo traffic from originating from their network. IP-HTTPS encapsulates the IPv6 packet as SSL encrypted payload of HTTPS packets (port 443), since their network allows for unfiltered outbound SSL traffic, IP-HTTPS connections could originate from their network. We discussed utilizing things such as either a separate VLAN for guests/vendors which doesn’t route to the corporate network and leveraging IPsec within their corporate network to provide domain isolation as some possible methods of protecting the internal network from unmanaged computers (but that sort of planning is another topic for another day).

Before I left, the customer asked me how they’ll be able to re-check the IPv6 checkbox on their systems once they’ve deployed a GPO with their desired settings for IPv6. This was one of those times when I did not have good news to give a customer. There is no programmatic way that I know of to directly determine the value of the checkbox and no programmatic way to toggle the value of the checkbox. They will be manually placing the checkbox back over time as they connect to systems and update their system images to no longer have the checkbox unchecked.

While I did include this link on one of my previous posts, I’m including it again because I’ve seen many questions asking about Microsoft products and their support for IPv6. Here is the link to the Common Engineering Criteria:

Microsoft Common Engineering Criteria Overview
https://www.microsoft.com/CEC/en/us/cec-overview.aspx#data-ipv6

Microsoft Common Engineering Criteria Scorecards (IPv6 Support is under "Data Center and Enterprise Readiness")
https://www.microsoft.com/CEC/en/us/cec-scorecards.aspx?display=tech#

Well, starting today, my life should become a lot easier.   A beta of a standalone version of System Sweeper was available here:  https://connect.microsoft.com/systemsweeper and is now available here:   https://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/what-is-windows-defender-offline    In conjunction with Microsoft Safety Scanner (which released last month) from https://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx, I’ve now got places to point people that hopefully means I won’t have to head over to as many houses.

I ran across this info when an e-mail at work referenced a ZDNet posting about the release of the beta of System Sweeper.

In my mind, the cool thing about our AV products is that they all share the same AV engine, be it Windows Defender, Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool, Windows Live OneCare (retired), Forefront Client Security, Forefront Endpoint Protection, the MS AV engine in the Forefront Server Security for <insert app here> products, Microsoft Security Essentials, or Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper.   So once the AV team includes something in the appropriate portion of the definitions leveraged by that particular product, all the products leveraging that portion of the definitions can detect/remove the offending software.   Why reinvent the wheel and make inefficiencies that don’t need to exist.     When I go to fix a friend’s computer, I’ll just download the full definitions for Microsoft Security Essentials from here via the Microsoft Security Portal and load them into System Sweeper once it is running.

This will save me a TON of time with my friends & family able to solve their own problems.

UPDATE:  4/13/2012   The Beta of System Sweeper has now released and is called Windows Defender Online.     URLs in the post updated to reflect this change.

Arguments against disabling IPv6
https://blogs.technet.com/b/netro/archive/2010/11/24/arguments-against-disabling-ipv6.aspx

How will it affect your business if you do not embrace IPv6?
https://blogs.technet.com/b/erenturk/archive/2010/11/17/how-will-it-affect-your-business-if-you-do-not-embrace-ipv6.aspx

IPocalypse Now
https://blogs.technet.com/b/canitpro/archive/2011/01/31/ipocalypse-now.aspx

IPv6 Forums
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ipv6/threads

US Federal Directive to Support IPv6
https://blogs.technet.com/b/ipv6/archive/2010/10/01/us-federal-directive-to-support-ipv6.aspx

Why do I need to care for IPv6?
https://blogs.technet.com/b/erenturk/archive/2010/10/22/why-do-i-need-to-care-for-ipv6.aspx

Microsoft Common Engineering Criteria Overview
https://www.microsoft.com/CEC/en/us/cec-overview.aspx#data-ipv6

Microsoft Common Engineering Criteria Scorecards (IPv6 Support is under "Data Center and Enterprise Readiness")
https://www.microsoft.com/CEC/en/us/cec-scorecards.aspx?display=tech#

Also be aware of World IPv6 Day and Windows post from the IPv6 team.

On the properties of the NICs, removing the checkbox binding the IPv6 protocol to the network interface should not be cleared as it will cause IPv6 to become unbound from the network interface.   In addition, the Link-Layer Topology Discovery Mapper I/O Driver and Link-Layer Topology Discovery Responder protocols should also not be uninstalled from the systems.   While this is often done with the desired effect being to disable IPv6 on the systems, this behavior does not have that effect on the systems.   This action only unbinds the IPv6 protocol from the physical network interface while still leaving it enabled within the Operating System, which continues to attempt to utilize IPv6 for communications and can experience unexpected and unpredictable behavior without IPv6 bound to a physical network interface.   Link Layer Topology Discovery provides device discovery via the data-link layer to determine the topology of the subnet.   While the results obtained from LLTD is similar to those obtained via the ARP protocol, LLTD provides additional information.

Versions of the Windows operating system beginning with Windows Vista prefer the use of IPv6 over IPv4.   However, if IPv6 is not utilized within the network infrastructure, leaving IPv6 enabled on the systems will not have an impact on internet communications, web browsing, etc. as the NIC would only be configured with a Link Local address, which is a non-routable address and can only communicate with systems on its same subnet, bounded by a router.   IPv6 is an integral part of the operating system and several Windows components rely on it.   IPv6 should be left enabled.   While KB 929852 describes the use of the DisabledComponents registry key to disable specific IPv6 components, most environments should leave all IPv6 components enabled.   The tunnel interfaces can be disabled while leaving the native IPv6 components enabled by using a value of 0x1 for the registry key, however, as discussed below, blocking the tunneling protocol at the point of network egress will be a more effective way to prevent the tunneling interfaces from establishing connections with their particular relay on the Internet.

The checkbox binding IPv6 to the network interface should remain checked on all systems running Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and any future version of the Windows operating system.

Another type of IPv6 address that may be present on the systems are either 6to4 or Teredo addresses.   These are tunneling protocols that are used to allow for connection to an IPv6 network over an IPv4 routing infrastructure.   These 6to4 and Teredo addresses are routable addresses and will be registered in DNS.   

When the IPv4 address is in the public IPv4 range, a 6to4 adapter would be leveraged to communicate to IPv6 over an IPv4 infrastructure.   This is done via IP Protocol 41 and will be calculated without any external network connectivity.  Systems with a 6to4 address will be able to communicate to other systems within your IPv4 network that also have 6to4 addresses, but do not use this address to communicate to external IPv6 resources as the default 6to4 server utilized by Windows systems is only a 6to4 Server and not also a 6to4 Relay.  The easiest solution to prevent the establishment of 6to4 connections is to either set the DisabledComponents registry key or leverage the netsh.exe command to disable the 6to4 adapter.   (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4)

When the IPv4 address is in the private IPv4 ranges and when 6to4 is unavailable when a system is in a public IPv4 range, a Teredo adapter would be leveraged to communicate to IPv6 over an IPv4 infrastructure.   This is done via UDP packets at port 3544 to the Teredo server teredo.ipv6.microsoft.com.  Systems with a Teredo address will be able to communicate to other systems within your IPv4 network that also have Teredo addresses, but do not use this address to communicate to external IPv6 resources as the default Teredo server utilized by Windows systems is only a Teredo Server and not also a Teredo Relay.  The easiest solution to prevent the establishment of Teredo connections from the internal network is to block UDP 3544 at the point of network egress.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teredo_tunneling  &  https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4380)

The 6to4 & Teredo adapters can also be disabled by running the following from an elevated command prompt:
netsh int 6to4 set state state=disabled
netsh int teredo set state type=disabled

The MSPress book Understanding IPv6 (Second Edition) is a great read for learning more about IPv6.  

Additional Resources:
Disabling IPv6 Doesn't Help, by Sean Siler, IPv6 Program Manager
https://blogs.technet.com/ipv6/archive/2007/11/08/disabling-ipv6-doesn-t-help.aspx

Development and Deployment of IPv6: Good for Internet, Technology
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb726954.aspx

Link Layer Topology Discovery Protocol Specification
https://www.microsoft.com/whdc/connect/Rally/LLTD-spec.mspx

929852 - How to disable certain Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) components in Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/929852

IPv6 Blog
https://blogs.technet.com/ipv6

IPv6 for Microsoft Windows: Frequently Asked Questions
https://www.microsoft.com/technet/network/ipv6/ipv6faq.mspx

The Cable Guy - Support for IPv6 in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.07.cableguy.aspx

My first Media Center PC was home-built using Windows Media Center Edition 2004 using a Dell desktop computer and a Hauppauge analog tuner card that was connected to Time Warner Cable in the Cincinnati suburb that we lived in at the time.  This system was later upgraded to Media Center Edition 2005 and a dual-tuner Hauppauge analog tuner was installed.  This system became my platform for testing Windows Vista and began running the first Public Beta of Vista and later was weekly reinstalled with the current Daily Build of Vista as we moved closer to RTM.   After the RTM build was installed, this system also became my test platform for pre-release builds of SP1 and later SP2.   Once the public builds of Windows 7 were released, the system continued its function as my test platform running public builds of that as well.

Throughout this entire time, my Media Center box has been physically located in my home office.  Shortly after I began running the beta builds of Windows Vista, I obtained an XBox 360 and began using it as an extender for Media Center.   This allowed my son to watch the recorded episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine and Bob the Builder on the TV downstairs instead of in my office.   Its native ability to function as an extender for Media Center was the primary reason I purchased the XBox 360.   Once I began using the XBox as an extender, I began running the Media Center machine headless (ie. without a keyboard or monitor).

The system continued in its configuration as we moved home to the Seattle area and connected the Media Center PC via Comcast cable.    When Comcast stopped broadcasting their signals for the Extended Basic channels in analog, I made 2 changes to my configuration.   The first change was that the original single-tuner Hauppauge card was brought out of storage and connected with an IR Blaster to the Comcast Digital Tuning Adapter so that I could continue to tune all of the Extended Basic channels in their analog format within Media Center.   The second addition was a SilconDust HDHomeRun dual-tuner device so that I could record the ClearQAM signals for the local HD channels.  I also added a 1.5TB hard drive that I had acquired online at a Black Friday sale.

For the most part, the system has served me well.   Except for the new hard drive, the computer is over 6 years old and performs its duties well.  Its only limitation that I have experienced with it was unable to record multiple Extended Basic channels because I had no more single-tuner Analog Tuners and no more IR Blasters.  This led to missed recordings of some shows due to schedule conflicts.  It also only had 2GB of RAM and a single-core Hyper-threaded CPU.  While it performed its function well, it did not have enough power to do any transcoding when I was testing out MyMovies.

My concept of what a Media Center system could do improved greatly when Ceton Corporation announced that they were in development of what would become known as the InfiniTV product line.   These cards utilize a single CableCARD m-card to decrypt the signals for multiple tuners.   The current cards have 4 tuners on a single card.   The card utilizes a PCI-e slot to connect to the PC and is automatically detected as a CableCARD tuner by Media Center once it and its drivers are installed.  I placed my pre-order for the InfiniTV 4 and anxiously awaited their release and the shipment to arrive.   When the card arrived last month, I found myself needing to leave the card sitting unopened in its box for about a week.   This delay was due to me traveling for work to customer sites, and that my current Media Center system pre-dated PCI-e slots and another piece of hardware was going to need to be repurposed as my new Media Center PC.  I had previously purchased a Quad-Core HP desktop with 4GB of RAM which I decided to rebuild.   I installed another of the 1.5TB hard drives that I had previously purchased and hadn’t installed anywhere yet to provide me storage space for the recordings. 

I performed a clean install of the x64 edition of Windows 7 Ultimate onto the system.  I then installed the Ceton card and its drivers.   While out running errands the next day, I went to the local Comcast Customer Service Center and picked up the M-Card CableCARD and brought it home.   I inserted the card and powered up the system. I opened the Ceton configuration utility and called Comcast with the information for the system so that the card could be paired.   This process took about 5-minutes to complete.   Once the configuration utilities showed the card properly paired with Comcast, I opened Media Center, ran the Digital Cable Advisor, and began the TV Setup wizard.     It automatically detected the Ceton as 4 CableCARD Tuners and downloaded the guide data for my area.   I spent a few minutes disabling the channels that I do not subscribe to, and began watching TV channels from the Extended Basic lineup that I subscribe to.   Much to my surprise, in addition to being able to tune the SD versions of the channels, I was also able to tune their HD versions as well.

I disconnected my XBox 360 from the previous Media Center system and paired it with the new one.   I am now able to watch the HD streams of all of the Extended Basic channels downstairs on my 47” LCD TV using the XBox 360 as an extender.   I also record the HD versions of the shows I watch and stream them to the TV via the XBox as well.  Since the channels I receive are not premium content, the signal is sent with the Copy Freely bit set, so the recordings are not protected and I can also copy them to my laptop to view while I am traveling.  It has been nice watching the Star Wars: The Clone Wars (and everything else) in HD.  I now use my XBox 360 as a Set-Top-Box for watching Live TV as well (and honestly, I prefer the guide in Media Center over the one in the Comcast STP anyhow).

Overall, I am EXTREMELY SATISFIED with my Ceton InfiniTV 4 and Windows 7’s Media Center.   For anyone with Digital Cable or FIOS, the Ceton card is something you should be considering.  The ability to leverage a Ceton card is what will keep me on Cable vs. Satellite.  I am seriously thinking about returning my current STB as it is no longer being used on the main TV as well as the DTAs used elsewhere around the house and replacing them with XBox 360’s.   The new Kinect bundle could replace the 360 on the downstairs TV and allow me to move the current XBox upstairs for that TV. 

The only remaining steps for me to complete is to decommission the previous Media Center PC and install the HDHomeRun drivers on the new one so that it can leverage those two tuners for the ClearQAM HD signals freeing up the Ceton’s tuners for the other channels.

Here on Day 1 I’ve seen some interesting things about Windows Phone 7, and I think I’ve found my next favorite thing…Windows Intune!!!!!   Checkout the homepage for Windows Intune at https://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsintune/default.aspx for additional information about the product, and to sign-up for the beta.   Just about every one of the customers that I’ve visited over the past year or so could have benefited from Intune.

As with everything else at TechReady, it is up to the appropriate Product Groups to release information about their particular product, so you won’t get any secrets from me.   But if I see something cool this week, I’ll post links to the public information here.

In addition to some sessions on Windows Phone and Intune, I’m also going to be attending sessions on Hyper-V (W2K8, W2K8 R2, and what is coming in W2K8 R2 SP1), as well as DirectAccess (both with & w/o using UAG).   More to come later in the week…

Since I should have some semblance of a technical slant in the post, I’m passing along some pictures that I took from my hotel room and used Windows Live Photo Gallery to create some panoramic photos from the individual stills that I took.

Here are some of the pictures.   The first is the photosynth of the mountains from my hotel, this was about a 120 degree view:

And the same picture cropped:

Some of the mountains a little closer:

And some lighted trees in what might be a park a couple of blocks south of my hotel:

All of these photos were stitched together with Windows Live Photo Gallery.  

I’m hoping that my next post will be about why you should leave IPv6 enabled on your Vista/Windows Server 2008/Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 systems (my fingers are crossed that the IPv6 team will have their post or whitepaper out soon so you have more than just my word to take on it).  But in the mean time, I’m happy to have seen this post about the Digital Cable Advisor being released and making OCUR tuners available to Windows 7 media center machines.   I’m still using my HDHomeRun tuners for the ClearQAM channels and am looking forward to the release of the Ceton tuners.

This was the situation for me this time around, my previous laptop hits its 2-year mark in December of this year, but I was pleasantly surprised when in early October I get an e-mail letting me know that I was due for a refresh and to please reply back to the e-mail and let them know which of the 5 models to choose from that I had decided on.   My first reaction was, “But my current laptop is working out fine for me, well OK, the battery is past its shelf-life and can’t hold a charge as long as it used to, but other than that, it is still rock solid.”   For about 2 weeks I held off on replying because I was still happy with my current machine.   But then I realized that Microsoft is little different than any other corporation and that if I didn’t utilize the allocated budget for my laptop within the quarter it was budgeted for, I’d likely be using my current laptop for quite awhile.    So I chose the HP EliteBook 8530w from the list of choices that are available to my team.   It arrived on Friday afternoon.

My first task after unpacking it was to burn a Windows 7 x64 ISO file to a DVD so that I could do the install.    My current machine is running the x86 installation of Windows 7 and I had decided that the next time I installed the OS on my laptop, I’d give x64 a shot.   Much to my surprise, the early refresh allowed me a chance to do this.   Last week I had finally gotten around to updating my Hyper-V host with Windows Server 2008 R2 and had been pleasantly surprised to find that fully functional color print drivers for my HP Color LaserJet 2840 were included in-box, so I knew that going with x64 for my laptop would still allow me to print in color while at home.   That printer was a big splurge for me a couple of years ago and the lack of x64 drivers had been holding me at x86 for quite awhile to avoid turning it from a nice networked Printer/FAX/Scanner into a giant paperweight.   While onsite with customers, I find many of them making the same x86 decision on their print servers for the same reasons; lack of x64 drivers for some printer models.  

So as evening approaches, my son & I are watching Star Wars – Episode I and as he drifts towards sleep I head upstairs to grab the laptop and the DVD I burned.   I boot to the DVD and begin the install while the cast is still on Coruscant, by the time they’re back on Naboo, the install is finished.   Enough of the major hardware devices had in-box drivers, and by the end of my visit to Microsoft Update, I had nearly all of the rest.   The only 2 devices that didn’t have drivers after that were the media card reader and the hard drive shock protection device.   But both of those were easy to get.   I was happy that the wireless drivers were in-box because the docking station was on back-order and I was doing the install without a wired connection.   Even the SmartCard reader worked fine.   We have the option of logging into our workstations with the SmartCard on the back of our badges, and I’ve gotten in the habit over the past year of doing that instead of using my username/password.  

Once the OS was installed, I downloaded Forefront Client Security and the VPN software so that I could connect to work and join the domain.   I installed the Office 2010 Technical Preview, Streets & Trips 2010, and a few other applications that I use for work.  I configured BitLocker and set it to leverage the TPM chip + a PIN.   Nearly everything is working as well or better than it did on my old x86 Windows 7 laptop.   While I didn’t install it that first night, I’ve also installed Windows XP Mode so that I could install the software to allow for network scanning using my LaserJet 2840.   The Vista version of the software did not consistently function as expected on the x86 installation of Windows 7 and I had previously resorted to this method for being able to scan receipts when I get back from customer visits.   And they do not yet have x64 drivers, so XP Mode provides me with the ability to continue to benefit from running x64 Windows 7 while still utilizing applications that work best under older versions of Windows.    I leverage Microsoft Office 2007 and the Microsoft Document Imaging application from Office to do my scanning from within XP Mode.

With the exception of XP Mode, I had finished the installation of the software on Friday night before going to bed.   On Saturday evening after my son went to bed I was able to give the new installation its first real test of practical use…Writing the ADRAP report from my visit earlier in the week.   While I had heard from other engineers that they had experienced no issues running the tools for this under x64, I didn’t want to get too comfortable with the installation if I was going to then have to re-format and re-install with x86.    I was thrilled to see that with the x64 OS and the x64 installation of Office 2010, I was able to complete my reports for the customer without any issues.   It was because of that success that I took the time this morning to complete the move-in process by installing XP Mode and configuring that VM.

As I said at the beginning, I’m still happy with my previous laptop.   That Lenovo T61P w/4GB of RAM has served me well.   I’m now debating on if I will keep it as x86 Windows 7 or if I will install Windows Server 2008 R2 and use it as a mobile Hyper-V host.   I may utilize Boot From VHD and have it do both.  But I see another 2-years of good experiences ahead of me with this HP 8530w.   It looks like I’m 3 for 4 on work-issued laptops that have gotten a thumbs-up by me; my original Toshiba M1 that I was issued in March ‘04 ran great and I almost didn’t want to replace it (but its video card has no Vista drivers), another model which I was less thrilled with, the T61P which couldn’t come fast enough to replace its predecessor, and now my 8530w.