Hi all and welcome to the site.
The site has 2 main parts.

The first is my adventures in technology. To call it a blog would be a little wrong. Its more going to be rants, how-tos and code snippets from travels in the world of technology. Most of it will be fairly technical as I am a self professed geek!

The second part of the site is my adventures in the outdoors. Which will include everything from Caving to family holidays. I will be sure to include lots of photos and gear checklists and general stuff.

Most Recent Posts

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Posted In: Tech
Redirecting Documents and Settings and Local Settings on a Citrix / terminal server environment Hi All,

As most of my readers probably have gathered I work in IT for a company who supports environments for small to medium business.
Recently I've been working in a team to build a citrix server farm for around 300 users.

In this project we had a particular application that does a local install into Local Settings in the users profile and these local settings needed to be saved and roamed from one server to another.
We were using windows roaming profiles due to their ease of support and deployment into an exiting environment. How this posed a specific problem, by default windows roaming profiles doesn't roam local settings or any of the folders contained within it.

I discovered two possible solutions to this problem.

Solution 1:
Was to redirect the whole Documents and Settings folder to another location such as on a file server or a mapped network drive (if UNC paths weren't supported).
This can be done with the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\ProfilesDirectory
The default value of this key is %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Documents and Settings however this can be change to anything. Like D:\Documents and Settings or changed to a network UNC path such as \\mainFileServer\tsprofiles which is what I would have done for our citrix farm.

This will cause windows to use that path for its documents and settings folder. This would also remove the need to setup windows roaming profiles for the terminal server farm, as each server would have its documents and settings pointed to the same file server share.
It should also be noted that using this doesn't increase logon times, infact it will reduce them as it prevents the users profile from having to be downloaded from the profile server and cached locally on the terminal server itself until logoff, at which point it gets packed up and set back to the profile server.
However any file that is saved to the users profile will take longer, as instead of writing to a local disk, we'd be writing to a network share and we'd have all the network overhead to deal with.
It would also result in a lot of open files on the profile server, for example if word, and outlook where open, you'd have any outlook pst files open and words normal.dot amount other files. It becomes apparent that this number could quickly rack up.

So why is this a worry? When I file is opened via a remote share, this whole file has be able to be loaded into something called kernel memory by the kernel so the data can be fed off to the network stack. On a 32bit system the maximum amount of kernel memory possible is 2GB (yes I know 32bit OS's support 4GB of memory, however that's not native support and splits user land and kernel land apart, but this is outside the scope of this article).
If you happen to run out of kernel memory you will start getting unable to open file errors when trying to open a file over a network share or on the system itself, if the situation becomes bad enough you will find that core services like group policy processing won't be able to run and the server will lock up and have to be rebooted or have the open files closed (if that's possible).

If the 2GB max is not enough kernel memory the only option will be to go for a 64bit operating system. Current Microsoft 64bit operating systems can support up to 8 terabytes kernel memory, although in theory 64bit can address up to 16 exabytes.
See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/294418 and the table under the heading System PTEs for more information.



Solution 2:
Solution 2 certainly wins under the simple heading!
Clearing the value of the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ExcludeProfileDirs causes windows roaming profiles to copy the local settings folder and the folders under them, just like any other folder in the users profile!
The default value of this key is: Local Settings; Temporary Internet Files;History;Temp

In my case I just cleared this whole key, as I wanted all the settings to copy over, however some folders could still be left in here.
I also believe it would be possible to use this key to exclude certain folders inside the profile itself from being roamed and saved back to the profile server. Which would be handy if you were dealing with an application that had a really large and unneeded amount of data in a folder, which didn't need to be saved.

This solution has a disadvantage in the fact that if the local settings folder is large it will increase logon and logoff times just because of the amount of data that has to be downloaded and upload. However in my case the profile server didn't have the resources to support all the open files from solution 1, so this was the only decent option left.


I have included a paste and a link to an group policy template I made that will clear this key for any user who has the policy applied and make local settings roam at the end of this post.


Have fun!

Caveman


---------START RoamingLocalSettings.ADM-------------
CLASS USER

CATEGORY !!RoamingProfiles
POLICY "Enable local settings in roaming profiles"
KEYNAME "Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon"
VALUENAME ExcludeProfileDirs
VALUEON ""
VALUEOFF "Local Settings;Temporary Internet Files;History;Temp"
END POLICY

END CATEGORY

[strings]
RoamingProfiles="Enable local settings in roaming profiles"
---------END RoamingLocalSettings.ADM-------------

Download ADM file HERE

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Posted In: Outdoors
Bushwalking - Blue Mountains, out to Ruined Castle from Scenic RailwayWe had wonderful weather for our walk, not a cloud in the sky but also not too hot. Almost prefect walking weather.

I had arranged to meet everyone at the Maple Grove car park, which is just back from the Scenic Railway and normally doesn't have many cars in it. It's also close to the end of the Furber steps which was the planned walk out route.



From the car park we walked along the Prince Henry cliff walk to Echo Point and then onto the start of The Giant Staircase. This was probably a couple of KMs and took us around 30 minutes to complete. The descent down the Giant Staircase was straight forward and done without incident while enjoying some of the great views over the Jamison valley.


The Giant Staircase sounds worse than it really is. Yes it's steep and narrow, but it's not that long. The descent for us took around 20 minutes and that was with a lot of traffic. The climb back up would take longer. I'd allow 45 minutes to an hour. Less if you're really fit!



Once at the bottom of the stairs we started out for the Scenic Railway which is around 3KM from the base of the Giant Staircase.
We stopped for lunch in a beautiful spot at the base of the Katoomba falls. A short distance before the base of the Scenic Railway. We even celebrated the birthday of one of the group members with cake and all! Much to his surprise.



From the base of the Scenic Railway we walked along the new(ish) boardwalk until the dirt track turn off to Ruined Castle, Golden Stairs and Landslide.

The first part of the track before the Landslide is straight forward. However, when the main fork is reached the lower one needs to be taken or you'll end up against the rock face near Malita Point. The track also cut directly through one of the coal seams in the area. The Scenic Railway was in fact built to service the mines down in the valley long before it became the tourist attraction it is now. When the mines closed up, the railway remained and continues to operate to this day. The base of the railway now has lots of exhibits and signs talking about the old mining days. If you've never been down that way before its certainly worth a look.

I also found what looks like an old mine air shaft between the Landslide and the Golden Stairs. I grabbed the torch and had a quick look in the entrance and found the cutting was almost a prefect rectangle continuing dead straight into the rock for as far as I could see. I would love to know more details if anyone out there has some knowledge about what it is and what shafts in the mountain it connects to.

I should add here just in case someone is dumb enough to get silly ideas. Mine shafts are not something that should be explored. They can be highly unstable and a real death trap for the inexperienced.

Next we came to the Landslide, which I have to say isn't the nicest of walking. Its a lot of small loose rocks which is all too easy to slip on. The path over the rock pile is sign posted with arrows and yellow panted stakes in the ground however inexperienced walkers do need to be careful, its easy to miss a few.



Once we were past the landslide its mostly flat walk, past the bottom of the Golden Stairs until the turn off to Ruined Castle. The turn off is signposted with the other track continuing on to Mt Solitary. The track up to Ruined Castle was a bit of a killer! It's got a serious climb that lasts for probably 1KM. Once past this it's mostly flat across the ridge to the castle.
From the bottom of the rocks which make up the Ruined Castle, is a short climb to the top of the rocks for the view.

Ruined Castle itself is well worth the walk, the 360 degree views over the Jamison valley are a real treat.









The walk back was uneventful aside from us all starting to get tired and that Landslide rock pile seeming harder on the way back! Once back at the scenic railway, we walked back up the Furber steps to the car park as we'd missed the last train out. It was starting to get dark around this time (about 6PM) but there was enough light to see us out of the valley, although we did have torches just in case we got caught. We got out of the valley, three very tired and sore walkers!

All up, we covered somewhere between 20 and 24KMs in around 6 hours which I think isn't bad going for one day!

I highly recommend the walk, although you may want to cut the distance down a bit by skipping the Giant Staircase and getting the Scenic Railway down, unless you're after a real workout. However, unless you have at least one experienced leader in the group, I wouldn't recommend the walk as it is not a walk to be taken lightly.
The Blue Mountains website grades the walk as for experienced walkers only and says the following:

"Experienced walkers only - High level of fitness and navigational skill required, minimum 3 in group. Advise friends or police of route and destination times".

I don't really agree with the navigational part unless they class reading signs as that. Either way, treat the walk with respect and make sure you have plenty of water as there isn't any to be found that's safe to drink on the walk itself.

Caveman