Hi all,

I’ve got my first 290 book in, as I think its a good idea to start studying it whilst studying for the 270. Some of the content bleeds over between exams.
I bought the MS press training guide ( there was a debate if I should go for this of the exam cram one first), looking at the first couple of chapters I was plesently surprised. The 271-272 training guides I didnt really like very much, but i suspect that it was because I had nearly finished studying for the exams anyway so all the screen grabs etc in the book wasnt that new too me.

You get some nice extras with the book too (I got very similar things with the 271-272 books so it must be the same across the range). You get the obligatory 15% disocunt voucher for MS exams and you get trial software of the exam in question (so in this case it was 180 day trial of server 2k3 enterprise edition), You also get some Measureup practice tests for the exams and a couple of related ebooks. So I think for the £25 of thereabouts for the book I think its quite good value. Of course I wont be relying on one book for my source of info and I have been admining 2k3 servers abit at work, so i already have some knowledge of it.

Anyway I must concerntrate on passing the 270 so will mostly be swotting up on that in the comming weeks.

Hi all,

Here’s a quick update on what I’ve been up too. I’ve changed my centurion server a bit by removing the RIS role from it and have now shoe horned WSUS on to it. I only finished installing it last night so have not had a chance to fiddle with the configuration at all. WSUS has 2 pre-requisites one is that IIS must be installed and also .net must be installed on the WSUS server. The administration console has some requirements too but I have not installed those yet.

After my holiday I’ve had a new burst of energy to study the 270 which I’m starting to think I will book the exam for about a month’s time and see what happens. I’m also taking advantage of prometrics 2nd chance offer, where if you fail the first time you get a 2nd shot at it free. Hopefully I won’t need it but it is spurring me to have a go and see how I get on. Anyway I’ll write a bit more later on.

Cya!

Well, I’ve had a week off work on hols, so back to it tommorow.

well i’ve just switched off dhcp on my router and configured staic ip etc for my workgroup pc’s and everything is still up and running so thats going pretty well. this will now be a test of the DC to ensure ive configured it correctly.

I’ve also decided to virtualise an xp pro client as well so I dont have to keep swapping in and out of user accounts when things dont work quite as they should.

Hi all,

I’ve been pretty busy with one thing or another of late so have not been able to do much studying. I’ve got a little issue with my virtualised network that I shall sort out at the weekend as my router acts as dhcp, ive got to disable that and get the alternative configuration set up correctly with a static IP so that I can still have normal Inet access etc when my dhcp server is not available. So i’ve got to go round my house now and give all my non studying pc’s macs static ips in order for them not to be affected! Oh well im off to the pub in a bit anyway!

Hi all,

Well i’ve managed to figure out visio enough to draw this basic sketch of my network lab im using at the moment, as I’ve said before the 2 servers are virtualised on my main xp home box (otherwise known as the “Im just popping upstairs to have a go on some games” pc) The battlestar server is my main domain controller has DHCP and DNS enabled on it nothing too special about that at the moment. The centurion server is basically a bog standard 2k3 install with the addition of RIS role added to it just to test it out.

Im sure there are errors in my diagram and also in my set up but thats why im studying right!

PS: Can you guess which tv programme I like!

Last night I downloaded a copy of visio from my technet sub, so I’m planning to create a diagram of my current network I am using for studying. I’ll post it here too if anyone is interested.

Got my Soundcard drivers for vista working lovely, but as I expected I have not been able to find any wireless drivers for my card (that will teach me for buying a cheap card)!

Well I got a new 250GB SATA hard drive yesterday, stuck it in my pc and partitioned it as 150GB and 50GB and another 50GB partition. The 150GB partition I have installed Vista on so now my pc dual boots XP and Vista. one of the 50GB partitions I shall use for data and the other I am planning to move my virtual server directories across to (which might help, considering the theoretical increase of disk speed from PATA to SATA).

When I installed vista it picked up all of my hardware barr my soundcard (soundblaster audigy 2) and my wireless network card (which is not surprising as its not a major brand make), anyway I shall trawl the net for drivers when I get a mo, apart from that vista looks very shiny indeed!

Hi all,

I have not put an update on here for a week or so I think it is proberbly time to write a bit more. I have now got my teeth into my technet subscription and am now running Office 2007 plus on my laptop, which is pretty cool although as my laptop is fairly long in the tooth (IBM T23, with 384 megs of ram) when you first start office it does take a while to load. apart from the vista skin it doesnt really look like too much has changed from office 2003. The Microsoft Office Document Recovery feature is now called Microsoft Diagnostics which looks like it has more of a wizard feel too it as is also linked to the MS update site to automatically check for updates to fix your particular issue, I use the XP version of this tool alot at work as those user (god love em) do insist on writing documents for 3 hours without saving then wondering off to lunch coming back and breaking it! The addition of the automatic check for updates to cure a problem is welcome but as we know with other forms of this type of check normally the faults are due to temporary hardware issues or user error.

Menu’s are now presented in a different format (I suppose you could call them context driven), when you click in a menu instead of a drop down list the toolbar changes to the display for the menu which will take a bit of getting used to and I can imagine that any company migrating to office 2k7 this might generate a few more support calls than normal (especially as I have not found a Classic view mode yet so perhaps MS may well drop the drop down lists).

alot of the editing and customisation features however are similiar to previous versions of office so once you have got used to the new way of getting around, most of the stuff you are used too will be there without any great change.

On another note again as part of technet I have just downloaded Vista, I intend to install that and give it a whirl as at some point I would like to update my MCDST MCITP, so the sooner I start using it….