Preparing for Microsoft exam 83-640, Windows Server 2008 Active Directory, Configuring
Since I finished up my exam 70-642 right at the end of 2009, for one of my resolutions going into 2010 would be to finish up my MCITP this year. In that regards, I am giving myself 45 days to prepare and pass the 83-640 exam. I am going from today (Jan 3rd 2010), so I am going to set my exam for Feb 17th which will work well for my schedule as luck would have it.
This exam replaces the 70-640 exam in the US because a part of the exam uses the performance based testing that I did the pilot for.
I am going to use the following resources to study:
- Train Signal’s Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Training
- Transcender Practice Exam
- Microsoft Self Paced Study Guide
I will start by going through Train Signal’s video courses first, then using the self paced study guide and virtual machines to get more of a hands on feel to deal with more of the performance based testing.
I feel this schedule will be tough, but I just got done designing and implementing a Server 2008 Active Directory network for a small business not to mention I have been working on Active Directory since 2000. I am going to document regularly here as I go through the study material.
Passed 70-642 Windows Server 2008 Network Infrastructure, Configuring
![mcts[1]](http://www.davelawlor.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/mcts1.png "mcts[1]")
I have been so busy at the office that I have been putting off taking some of the exams I need to get done, when I noticed that one of my vouchers was going to expire I quickly registered to make the expiration date.
With the holidays and family commitments it was tough to get studying in but I managed to squeeze some on. Today even though I was knee deep in drama at the the office (another post on that in the future), I managed to squeak at a 850 to pass. This adds another line to my MCTS.
The next exam on my list is the 70-640, hopefully it wont take 6 months for me to get around to taking that one!
Block Yahoo Web Chat
Another set of users were using the Yahoo web chat instead of doing what we are paying them for so I needed to block them also. There are a lot of useless and out of date messages posed about this but I finally figured it out, and the answer was close to what I did to disable gmail chat:
I setup my DNS with two primary domains for:
- httpcs.msg.yahoo.com
- webcs.msg.yahoo.com
I then set a host record for those to go to 127.0.0.1
After that they couldn’t chat no more!
Block Gmail web Chat
Because it seems lately I am more a babysitter for users than a network admin, we have had some new employees abuse the google gmail chat feature. We also use Google Apps, but I had already disabled chat through the settings interface for the domain.
Unfortunately these users were logging in to their personal gmail accounts to chat it up. Google will give you the answer you want at the following URL: http://www.google.com/support/chat/bin/answer.py?answer=161980 which will tell you to:
- To block Gmail chat: chatenabled.mail.google.com
- To block iGoogle and orkut chat: talkgadget.google.com
- To block the Google Talk client and other desktop clients: talk.google.com and talkx.l.google.com
So I plugged this into my router web content filter and it worked, except it leaves a little help link to a help article that tells you to login through a secured connection https:. For some reason my router would not block that, so I went in to my DNS servers and created a primary zone for chatenabled.mail.google.com and pointed it to 127.0.0.1 and jsut like that it was blocked for both http & https.
Next up…. Yahoo Chat!
Xander’s Christmas Program
I don’t often do many personal posts outside of tech, but my little man was in a Christmas program this morning and I want to share!
QuickBooks 2009 & Windows 7 Part II
So I tried everything I could think of to overcome the PDF printing issue that Intuit caused with the R9 update of 2009, to no avail. On a lark i went in and tried it on the 32-bit version of the image I use and amazingly enough it works again. Luckily I only on have 3 users that use QB and 2 of them will go away soon as I implement the new order processing system. Not the best solution, but for the users and myself it works and is easily fixed at a later time once they get their act together.
Quickbooks 2009 & Windows 7
I will be the first to admit that I am not a big fan of Quickbooks. I think Intuit has some serious issues in its business ethics and I have vowed to never personally use their products. I am in house at a small company in Chicago that has used Quickbooks since about 2004, and was currently using QB 2006. We use it for payroll and was notified earlier in the year that we would have to upgrade to Quickbooks 2009 to support a payroll change they were rolling out. If we didn’t change payroll would stop working, as I like getting paid I started the ball rolling on making the change. We purchased the upgrade and were merrily on our way.
Now the fun part… we are doing a roll out of Windows 7 in conjunction with a hardware refresh. I am now coming to find out that QB 2009 will not support Windows 7, you will need to upgrade to QB 2010. I call foul. Intuit goes ahead and forces everyone who uses online services to upgrade to QB 2009 in the first half of the year, but doesnt mention that it wont support an OS whose launch date is in the same year. Not only that, but I have had a beta at on my machine since early Jan, so Intuit had all the time in the world to notify its user base this would happen.
The best part is I HAD Windows 7 and Quickbooks 2009 running well together and with no problem. UNTIL….. QB pushed out R9 and now all of a sudden it no longer works for my users and Intuit refuses to support QB 2009 and Windows 7 telling us it is a mandatory upgrade. FUN! I think I might have a work around for the problems I am having now with the R9 update, if it works I will post what it did. After that I will try to find if there is an equivalent product that we can move to that isn’t quite as unethical as Intuit.
Windows 7, Configuration Certified! Passed Beta Exam 71-680
So I got the email this morning that proudly states:
Congratulations on earning your Windows 7, Configuration certification!
If you remember from a previous post I took the 71-680 beta exam back in early June. I was glad to get confirmation, and it didn’t even take that long really. Im just happy to have it out of the way, and I was glad to be able to give feedback on the exam and hopefully help refine the process.
WordCamp Chicago Recap (Day 1 at least)
On Saturday I spent the day at the UBS tower in donwtown Chicago, hanging out with a bunch of Wordress geeks and soon to be Wordpress geeks at the Wordcamp Chicago event. I was originally supposed to head down with Kasia from TrainSignalTraining.com, but she had a schedule conflict so I headed down all by my lonesome.
Since I live in the suburbs, I had about a 40 minute drive and parked at the Zacuto offices, which was almost a huge mistake, but more on that later. A quick walk over to UBS tower and up to the second floor, to a nice assortment of breakfast type foods and registration. Read more
Windows 7 Beta Exam 71-680
Well it has been quite a while since I started playing with Windows 7 by installing it on my main production machine, and recently I have reinstalled it to put RC on. I have to say that I am very much liking Windows 7 on almost all fronts. When I heard about the beta exam for 71-680 from the MS Learning blog Born To Learn, I called in to secure one of the limited spots available. I was lucky to grab one and quickly scheduled for today May 6th.
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