Recently I have upgraded all bar one of my Windows servers to server 2008. This included upgrading a Windows 2003 Active Directory controller. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that everything went perfectly well with absolutely no initial issues. However after a couple of days one very odd issue began rearing its head.
My Windows 2008 DNS server (PDC upgraded from 2003) occasionally decided that it can no longer resolve .uk domains. It doesn’t matter if it is .co.uk, ac.uk or whatever .uk it just flat out refuses to resolve them unless I restart the service.
A second Windows 2008 server that I installed DNS on as a secondary server has the exact same issue. After a couple of days it will just stop resolving .uk domains!
After plenty of head scratching and searching I finally discovered this article on technet.
It requires a bit of registry editing but what puzzles me is that if the problem has been fairly well known for almost a year (that technet article is dates 29th January 2009) why is the fix still a registry hack?
Apparently Windows Server 2008 can be configured to be used as a desktop operating system. You can even enable the Aero desktop effects and by all accounts the performance is only blazing when compared to Vista. Now it is being dubbed “Windows Workstation 2008″.
Information week have a brief article on it here which in turn links to an actual Microsoft employees blog and another site which tells you all you need to know about how to convert Server 2008 into a workstation.
Given that Vista gives me nightmares just thinking about it I figure this might be worth a whirl. All I need now is a copy of Server 2008
Microsoft is getting a lot of flak lately for the speed of their website. It seems to have reduced itself to a crawl. What have they done that could have caused this? They migrated their web servers over to Windows Server 2008 is what.
It is a fairly big assumption to make if you think Server 2008 is solely responsible but it seems to be a case of coincidental timing too as this started around the same time as they started trying to foist their Silverlight technology on us.
Information Week had an article recently that delved into the nitty gritty behind their site where they seem to think the problems with Microsoft’s site lies squarely with the developers. However what about those of us who actually have to administer servers sometimes numbering into the hundreds? I came across an open letter to Microsoft that deals with exactly this.
Since Vista was released into the market exactly a year ago, I made an attempt to use it as my day to day OS which lasted approximately two days. Whatever its shortcomings at least I could fall back to XP. However with server 2008 almost upon us I’m starting to feel the same dread all over again that I had with Vista.
The thought of having to work with both Vista and Server 2008 on a daily basis is actually enough to make me reconsider working in IT. So far the only exposure I have had to Server 2008 has been by way of a 90 minute demo on a virtual machine on Microsoft’s rather excellent Virtual Labs site. From the 90 minutes playing around, it doesn’t look good.
