1) PowerShell

If you are involved in Systems Maintenance and the systems are Windows-based (pref. OS: Windows Server 2003+), you owe it to yourself to check out Microsoft Windows PowerShell. This is a .NET 2.0 shell, yes, but architected from the ground up to enable automation, and it enables all sorts of WMI-interfaces and reflection and so on. Very neat stuff. Go look, go play, go have fun. It’s free, as long as you don’t mind installing .NET 2.0. Also, if you like what you can do at the command line, but are more comfortable with GUI, check out the free project/software PowerGUI, which uses PowerShell’s objects’ reflection to provide a very flexible, extensible PowerShell GUI. You can even easily extend the interface with plugins and tied actions (written in PowerShell) and can easily share those with the import/export functionality.

2) Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server 2007 VHD

I have finally made time to download this thing (over a couple of hours). It comes in 6 rar parts of 700 MB (the last part is more like 516 MB). I have said before that MS is great at providing downloads and crap at providing things that UNIXers and Crypto nuts have provided for years: Checksums. Why are these helpful? a) You can tell whether anyone’s fiddled with the bits since the original provider uploaded them or b) You can tell whether the bits you were intended to download are the ones you got. This kind of thing is helpful in determining, as in this case, whether you need to re-download the whole 6 part 2 hour festival or just one part. I have downloaded the parts. I am about to uncompress them, and when I do, if successful, I will post the checksums here for each part:

WIN03_MOSS_V1.part01.exe – Size: 734,003,200 bytes – MD5 Sum: 68b5470c605320228f588abe13af4e62
WIN03_MOSS_V1.part02.rar – Size: 734,003,200 bytes – MD5 Sum: 5a309da7ab473921a808298ff293b7fe
WIN03_MOSS_V1.part03.rar – Size: 734,003,200 bytes – MD5 Sum: ddd98c59425b704c37fc43bacacdc418
WIN03_MOSS_V1.part04.rar – Size: 734,003,200 bytes – MD5 Sum: 5549c847e02481ff3eebab2a43f9df3e
WIN03_MOSS_V1.part05.rar – Size: 734,003,200 bytes – MD5 Sum: e423cddc6064aa95624b398ecfeebcfb
WIN03_MOSS_V1.part06.rar – Size: 624,600,967 bytes – MD5 Sum: 64c0d290a32e8f445a3f8992d64198a0

Running the exe and answering the EULA in the affirmative yielded the following four files (unpacking took about 30 minutes on my 2.0 GHz non-hyper threaded Centrino with 2 GB of RAM):

Distributable VHD Image EULA.doc – 101,376 bytes – MD5 Sum: 9a5d93625bd1b42a9e7b65c7e52c8bea
ReadMe.htm – 37,435 bytes – MD5 Sum: 44196d20e67c174cd809734aa79eefe4
WIN03_MOSS.vhd – 10,968,818,688 bytes – MD5 Sum: 6ec5e3d177b1682c28815fd6a2f0e401
WIN03_MOSS.vmc – 14,516 bytes – MD5 Sum: c15ba5b037ceec9d1a4efdce44a99193

Now, these MD5 sums are only what I’m calculating on my end. I can’t guarantee to you that the files are not messed with. I can only tell you that it’s a reasonable certainty that if your MD5 sums match mine, you and I are looking at the same sets of files.

Anyhow, with all that, the files seem to be working properly with Virtual Server (though I must admit I’m new to Virtual Server 2005).

A good MD5 summing utility for Windows GUI (that lets you set a Send To target) is Nullriver’s winmd5sum. It takes a lot less time to sum a small file than a big one. The 10 GB vhd took about 5 minutes.