My SharePoint Life and other stuff

 

This is just annoying.  This morning I find out I fell for the oldest trick in the book and clicked a link from Tweetdeck and it took me to Twitter - or so I thought.  It actually just looked liked twitter and had a different URL.  I was duped and should have known better. 

 

So I had massive SPAM Tweets sent out on my behalf for half the day. 

 

Learn from me if you can.  Verify what you are doing before you put in your username and password.  Lucky for me it was just twitter and not something more important.  For me - lessond learned.

 

 

 

If you are going to be in the Phoenix area on Saturday, November 21st I will speaking on Upgrades and Migrations to SharePoint 2010.  Please come join us for SharePoint Saturday in Phoenix.

 

http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/phoenix/default.aspx

 

 

So you want to boot from VHD to run SharePoint 2010. This was a little bit harder than I expected.  First time through anyway.  I recommend using Sun Box to create the Server 2008 R2 .VHD that you will be booting from.  Once you can boot to Server 2008 R2 you install SharePoint 2010 and SQl as usual. See bottom of post for links to installing Sharepoint 2010.

 

Once you do it it becomes very easy.

 

Because this information is all over the place I will just add links to where I got the most useful information.  I am just addig for those that want to use this for a SharePoint 2010 demo/dev box.

 

FROM - http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone/archive/2009/08/17/how-to-boot-from-vhd-vhd-booting-re-visited.aspx

 

How to Boot from VHD (VHD booting re-visited.)

Some while back I wrote about boot from VHD. To re-cap, in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 (including core, and Hyper-V Server R2) the boot loader is capable of mounting a VHD file and booting from it as though it were a physical disk. There is no virtualization going on, just the necessary smarts to use the same format. If you try use this to boot older operating systems the boot process will start, but the machine will crash quite early on when it finds the system/boot device(s) aren’t really disks (virtualization hides this fact).

So for it all to work first you need the BootMgr from Windows 7 / Server 2008-R2 (it lurks in the hidden System partition). Obviously you have this if the main OS on the machine is Windows 7 or Server 2008-R2, but if you want add a VHD as a second OS on a system running  Vista / Server 2008 you can just update BootMgr (the easiest place to get it is probably the install DVD) . It supports some new features but the Boot Configuration Database file (BCD) your system already has remains valid – it just doesn’t contain any of the new features so this should have no unwanted side effects.

Second you need a VHD image, into which you have installed an OS which understands boot from VHD. This is easy enough to build in Hyper-V but there are other ways. There are TWO preparation steps which I forgot: the first is that VHD needs to be sysprep’d (%windir%\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe) otherwise you’ll create conflicting clones. This can be fixed once you have got the OS booting from VHD, but you won’t get it to boot unless you create a boot configuration database on the partition where the OS resides in the VHD. You should be able to do this when you’re building the VHD, or you can mount the VHD and do it after the fact, either way you are looking for  %windir%\system32\bcdboot.exe, you’ll find it on Windows 7 and Server 2008-R2 , but NOT on Hyper-V server and not on older OSes. Run it as bcdboot V:\Windows /s V:   where V: is the volume letter for a mounted Vhd , or the drive letter of of the boot drive if the OS is running in hyper-V. I omitted this step when updating my release candidate set-ups to final code last night and it throws an ugly error. That led to my second mistake: I thought the problem was with the BCD. 

Since I wasn’t thinking clearly (I thought ‘I just do this before I go to bed’ ! ) I went to edit the BCD. Now… after the explanation above you’d be able to work out that you need to edit the BCD with the latest tools (BCDEdit). If you’re working on Windows 7 / Server 2008-R2 you don’t need to worry. But if you’re adding a VHD-Booting OS to a machine running Windows Vista/Server 2008 (which I was) and try to manage boot from VHD with the tools those OSes provided you’ll be on path to frustration, and (in my case) insomnia. After much puzzlement, I ended up back at BCD which would only boot Windows Server 2008, with the right version of BCDEdit.
So I was ready for the third step. I had my files in C:\VHD\Win7.VHD so the 3 commands I needed were to clone the existing entry and modify it for boot from VHD, thus

bcdedit /copy {default} /d "Windows Server 2008-R2 From VHD"

/d specifies the description you’ll see in the boot menu, the command will copy the default entry and return a guid e.g. {cbd971bf-b7b8-4885-951a-fa03044f5d71}, copy the GUID you’ll need it in the next 2 commands. If there is no OS on the drive you can copy the boot folder from the windows setup disk and modify the {default} entry in the same way as you’d modify the copy, just use {default} in place of the guid.

bcdedit /set {cbd971bf-b7b8-4885-951a-fa03044f5d71} device “vhd=[locate]\vhd\win7.vhd”

bcdedit /set {cbd971bf-b7b8-4885-951a-fa03044f5d71} Osdevice “vhd=[locate]\vhd\win7.vhd”

(use your own guid, obviously)

You can check any of the other settings for booting the OS with bcdedit /enum. If they need changing it’s back to bcdedit /set but if it looks right, it’s time to reboot and see if it works. I put this last part into a video I have on TechNet edge which shows some of the other uses of VHD files, but I glossed over making the VHD and getting the right versions of the tools. 

Incidentally in my last post I mentioned the announcement Hyper-v Server now boots from flash provided you have made a bootable flash device the steps above will let you set this up. Be warned though, that to be properly supported the setup will need to be “blessed” by the hardware vendor.

 

I never thought it would happen, but I was asked by a client to add a Twitter widget to SharePoint.  I never really thought of this before, but ultimatley it is really simple.  In fact I did it on the fly in the middle of the demo.

 

So here it is in case you want to add Twitter to MOSS 2007 at some point

 

Go here while logged into to your Twitter account - http://twitter.com/widgets/

 

 

On the next page make any changes you want then click next.

 

Copy the code and go to SharePoint.  Add a Content Editor Web Part and past the code into the "Source Code."  That is it.  Very simple.

 

 

 

 

 

I got a MiFi from Verizon today so I can connect to the Internet while at certain airports and the large amounts of places I am going that are no longer allowing visitors to connect. 

 

It's actually a pretty cool device.  I can connect up to 5 WiFi devices to it without cables.  So I connected my laptop and then used WiFi instead of Bluetooth to send photos from camera that was upstairs to my laptop.  Not sure why I cared about that, but it made me happy.

 

All and all it's a good device and i will have to see how it works this weekend at the airport.  Maybe I can charge people to connect to MiFi?