We’ve all been there, yes, even us IT guys… the dreaded moment where your hard drive is full and you no longer have any more space to store your data. But is that really the case? You could swear just the other day you had a ton of space left! Well, one of the toughest things to find on your hard drive with the built in tools Windows provides you is finding the space hog on your PC. Sure, you could go folder by folder doing folder size counts, but it takes forever and sometimes it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.

The nice folks over at JAM software have made a great little freebie utility called Treesize Free which will help you find those space hogs on your PC. To find the free version of the software, head to the following link: http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/ and click on the free Download link on the page. Once installed, open TreeSize and review the menu bars. If you only have a “C” drive on your PC, TreeSize will immediately begin scanning your directory structure and give you breakdowns of the size of each root folder. Give the scanning process a few minutes to complete. Once you see the sizes have stopped growing, you can feel free to break down each folder and you will see the sizes broken down all the way to the file level if you dig far enough. This should help you uncover tons of missing space! Keep in mind, don’t go delete crazy… make sure what you are deleting is truly safe to delete. Unless you know what you are doing, we highly recommend against going into the Windows or Program Files folders and randomly deleting files as this can have detrimental (or catastrophic!) effects on your system.

For those power users who wish to have advanced search and reporting capabilities, check out the paid version of Treesize Professional, which has robust features that allow you to search by file size and type.

We hope you enjoy this cool utility, and as always, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us @ www.infostream.cc

Adobe PDF files are portable, convenient, and great for distributing documents that you might not want others to edit as it gets passed along. The format has become so popular, that Microsoft has even included the option to save documents as PDF’s in Office 2010! (Now that’s saying something..)

But what happens if your computer does not have Office 2010, and you don’t have Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional? All of these products are expensive starting at over $300 just for the standard standalone version of Adobe Acrobat. There’s no reason to spend this much just to print a PDF file here and there; several companies have come out with solutions, but the cleanest one I always find is CutePDF. CutePDF has a range of PDF creation products, but their free PDF writer installs itself as a printer you can send your documents to, which in turn asks where to be saved. You won’t be able to directly edit existing PDF’s or make other PDF items such as forms with selectable fields, but it will get the basic job done.

To obtain CutePDF, simply head over to http://www.cutepdf.com and select the CutePDF Writer “Free Download” link. Once downloaded, install the application, and allow the second application bundled with the software to be installed (it is called PS2PDF). There should be no restarts necessary.

To use your new PDF writer, simply create whichever document you wish to turn into a PDF in the application of your choice. Once ready to turn it into a PDF, select the print option and choose the CutePDF Writer printer which is now installed. After a few seconds you will be prompted for a filename and location to save; remember this location and save your PDF! You now have created a PDF you can share as needed. Enjoy!

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact the team here at Infostream @ www.infostream.cc

As a consultant who sees quite a few servers, I’m shocked at the number of offices still depending on their aging equipment running Windows Server 2003. I’m not dogging Server 2003, through its lifespan it was a very powerful operating system that brought us quite a few advancements over the years. We’ve run several versions of Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and many other powerful platforms on this operating system version; it has lasted a long time in the marketplace.

There are several issues that come up when running an older operating system. Most offices running 2003 are running either the Standard 32 bit, or Small Business Server edition, which has a limit of 4 GB of RAM. Memory hungry applications and database servers eat up 4 GB of ram like an appetizer in a four course meal. This is a physical limit set by the software itself, adding more ram to the server will not be recognized by the server. Another major issue is the age of most of the hardware still running Server 2003. If you upgraded early on in the lifecycle, your hardware is likely 5-8 years old at this point. Let’s face it, hard drives suffer extreme wear and tear, and do tend to show signs of age. You may be noticing the hard drives in your server’s storage array failing a little more often than you’d like. Parts for your older server such as RAID cards, processors, fans, and motherboards are a little harder to come by these days; they tend to come from the second hand market and are pretty expensive to acquire. Your server is likely no longer under warranty, so gone are the days of quick 24 hour turnaround on getting your server repaired.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Server 2003 hit end of mainstream support on 7/13/2010, with complete extended support over on 7/14/2015. What does this mean to you? End of mainstream support means no more service packs, and no more free support calls for technical issues. Security patches and fixes will be distributed until the extended support period expires, at which point no technical support is available.

What is the current upgrade path? Windows Server 2008 R2, which was released in late 2009, is the most current Windows server operating system available. A complete package with Exchange 2010 and Sharepoint Foundation 2010 is available by purchasing Windows Small Business Server 2011. Here at Infostream we have been migrating servers and networks with minimal downtime for our clients since the first release of Windows Server 2008. If you are ready to move on from your current server solution, please don’t hesitate to give us a call, or check out our site at http://www.infostream.cc

If you have ever wondered how you can access your office PC from home or on the road, rest assured there are quite a few options to let you connect to your workplace. As always, before installing anything on your PC, or attempting to work from home, contact your systems administrator to make sure this is an acceptable practice at your company.

Free services such as logmein.com allow you to connect to your office computer for free, but charge a small fee for advanced services such as printing from your home printer or sharing files back and forth between the two PC’s. Logmein has an online portal which you log in to from any browser, and allows you to pick your PC from a list of choices and remote control as needed. Logmein.com is a great, simple tool for offices which have no type of gateway set up for users to connect remotely.

If you work in an office running any recent version of Windows Small Business Server, your company already has a gateway available for you to connect. This web portal will allow you to check E-mail via an Outlook-like web interface, connect to your assigned office PC, or check your company’s internal Sharepoint website (if available). Check with your network or system administrator for details on how to access this powerful web portal, called Remote Web Workplace.

Another option available for remote access is known as Terminal Services, recently renamed my Microsoft as Remote Desktop Services. This setup generally consists of a dedicated server that users connect which displays their own private desktop used for accessing company resources remotely. Generally you will be advised by your network administrator if such an option even exists in your firm.

Here at Infostream, our very own Toffi takes advantage of Remote Web Workplace to access her office PC. She is currently working from outside the country, overseas! With her office PC left on at all times, she is able to log in remotely to our internal network to perform her invoicing and billing work during business hours that coincide with her hours at her current location. This solution has been so seemless for us, that most will probably be surprised to find out she’s not working right here in our office with us!

Having work from home is never fun, but it’s nice to know there are plenty of resources available when the time comes! As always, if there are any questions, please feel free to contact us here at InfoStream: http://www.infostream.cc

GPT or MBR? BIOS or UEFI? What do I pick when setting up my server? This has probably come up quite a bit, especially for those of us in the consulting field installing Small Business Server 2008 or 2011.

With large capacity drives (> 1TB) being the norm in server deployments these days, the decision to go with GPT or MBR partitioning comes into play. And with this decision, you must also decide on setting up your server with UEFI or traditional BIOS. Be aware that this decision should be made early in your server deployment planning stage. Your RAID array configuration, volume layouts, and backup strategies will all play a large part in your planning.

Without going into too much detail, the maximum volume size that MBR can handle is 2TB. In theory a GPT partition can handle partitions of up to 18 exabytes in size. GPT and MBR partitions cannot reside on the same physical disk or logical array. Another detail to keep in mind with MBR partitioned disks is that while you can create partitions on disks larger than 2TB by creating multiple partitions, a physical disk with a boot partition will never be able to access more than 2TB of total space. This may sound confusing, but a good example would be a 3TB RAID5 array with a 300GB, bootable C: drive. In theory one would have approximately 2.5 TB of usable unallocated space, however, due to MBR limitations on a bootable drive, you would only be able to format 1.7TB, the rest of the space would always remain unallocated and unusable without reconfiguring the disk partitioning scheme. The image below describes the situation.

A solution to the above scenario would have been to set up the server as a UEFI based system (if supported), and to have formatted the above partitions using GPT. This would have allowed for splitting up the drive as desired, such as the 300GB bootable partition, and a 2.5 TB large data partition. Another solution would be to have installed the operating system on a RAID1 array comprised of a smaller MBR partition, and kept the data on an isolated RAID5 array for data storage purposes.

As far as operating system support is concerned, GPT partitions can be used as data partitions under Server 2003 SP1 and higher, Windows XP x64, Vista, Windows 7, Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2. The 32 bit version of Windows XP cannot see GPT disk partitions.

Booting from a GPT disk is only supported on a UEFI system with 64 bit versions of the above mentioned operating system (except Windows XP x64, which only supports GPT for data partitions).

Earlier in this article I had written about planning around your backups as well. GPT partition support from popular image based backup products such as Symantec System Recovery and Acronis Backup and Restore are questionable at best. An article from Symantec regarding their System Recovery line of products states: “GPT Boot (uEFI enabled) is supported in BESR but only for non-bootable partition backup and restore only” it does not clarify whether the newer SSR version will work correctly or not. Infostream will be doing further testing at some point in a lab environment to confirm. Acronis’s support page is rather vague as well, so at this time I cannot confirm whether it works or not; possible future testing will confirm this as well.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us here at InfoStream, we’ll be glad to answer any questions.

Javier Trilla, MCSA, MCTS
Infostream Network Engineer
http://www.infostream.cc