I took a chance with the first generation 4 Port USB Server from Keyspan, and I'll be a monkey if it didn't work just like they said it would. The software required to administer the device is very small, and easy to use... in fact, as soon as I connected to the device it warned me that the firmware was old and asked me if I wanted to upgrade it. I clicked [Upgrade Firmware], and it took care of getting the update from the web and installing it for me. After the server drivers are installed, you can install devices as if they were connected directly to your machine. Simple.
So what am I not thrilled about?
- Defaulted to DHCP (this may not be bad if you have a dhcp server running).
- Only guaranteed to work with USB-Printers for now, although I have it working with some other devices.
- Not recommend for Epson printers, but with the amount of software required to setup Epson printer ports (evil), this shouldn't be a surprise.
I received email notification this morning that an application I submitted for Winmo certification had passed testing and was ready to wear the Windows Mobile Logo. I have to admit that the certification process was far less painful then what I had expected, in fact, it was downright simple. I used NTSL for the testing/certification, and while I can only speak as an individual developer, I highly recommend them for the certfication process.
Let this also start the trend of people calling Windows Mobile, WinMo ;)
While I am in the midst of a rather complex network upgrade project (W2k to W2k3) that has already taken about a month, I figured I might as well make some comments about it.
Exchange 2003 still irks me with its lack of support for HTTP Mail Connectors (Hotmail) and “Catch-All” accounts. Equally, I don’t like that NDR’s are still tied directly to recipient policies, making it that much harder to work with them. On the mobile end, Exchange 2003 really makes it easy for administrators to setup and deploy mobile solutions.
Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 Server seem to be just fine together for almost all of the backwards compatibility stuff we needed to do in the forest, with the exception of a 2000 RRAS/ISA Server having some problems with LDAP access to a 2003 DC.
Windows XP SP1 still has that annoying setting that causes havoc with group policies and several other things.
2003 RRAS has some useful new criteria to check for would-be connections. Somewhat related, it seemed like setting up IPSec/L2TP connections was a lot friendlier then it used to be.
The new Group Policy tools make managing GPOs a billion times more efficient then it used to be, although I would still like to see support added for binary registry values. Specifically, I would like support for client power settings.
.NET Pre-Installed on 2003… hope this is a trend that continues ;)
The new default security levels are certainly encouraging, not to mention administrative friendly.
AD Schemas could still be easier to work with.
IIS 6 has set a positive new direction for future IIS versions.
And finally, there is no better music to listen to when setting up networks then Motown ;)