Microsoft

In best practice Enterprise environments, users have a home directory and the folders like AppData\Roaming and Documents will be redirected with Windows Policy named Folder Redirection to their home drive located on network. In AppData\Roaming folder very many applications are saving their user specific data and this allows a user to log on to any PC in your company with keeping all settings intact. The AppData\Roaming folder become larger over time and 300MB are very common in todays world. For performance reasons you should not copy this on every login/logout to the computer and back to the server. There is many banana software on the market from developers that are not aware of this technology. Notify them, this are bugs - no discussion.

It's best practice to enable the policy Delete Cached copies of roaming profiles that truncates a local user profile from disk to free up disk space after a user logs off a computer. With Windows 7 this stuff can be cached locally for some time, but the performance reasons are still the same.

If you'd like to add more languages or all languages to your Windows 7 deployment image this can be done by hand or with below script. This script requires some path configurations only and integrates all lp.cab files from the Microsoft Language Pack DVD.

Required:

• Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK)
• Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise DVD
• Microsoft Windows 7 Language Pack DVD

Steps:

1. Copy install.wim from Windows 7 DVD \sources\install.wim to local disk
2. Configure path to language packs. This is folder named langpacks with subfolders named "ar-sa", "de-de" and so on.
3. Configure all other paths
4. Run the batch file to integrate all Language Packs (may take some hours/one day).
5. Add this WMI file to your Windows Deployment Server (WDS).

Script:

Multilingual user interface (MUI) setups are really common in todays world. Mostly seen with NSIS setups. If your software is multilingual you don't need to maintain tons of setups (aka - one MSI for every language). Nevertheless the below is officially not supported by Microsoft, it's possible and widly used - also by Microsoft. The most popular software I came across in the last days is Apples Safari 5.x browser. I'm sure if you search more, you will find much more setups.

See Available Language Packs or Locale Identifier Constants and Strings for the available LangID's and cultures.

How are the multilingual user interface MSIs created?

Everytime I need to install Microsoft Orca for editing and/or reviewing MSI files or to create transforms (.MST), I'm searching again where Microsoft have hidden this tool... :-) If you do not like Orca you can also use InstEdit. In opposite of some comments on the Internet; Orca is not gone and it's still downloadable!

Required:

If you's like to install software via Active Directory it may fail with Error: %%1274.

Symtoms:

• You can reboot as often as you'd like and your deployed Software always fails with Error %%1274
• Eventlog entry:
  • Source: Application Management Group Policy
  • Event ID 101
  • Description: Die Zuweisung der Anwendung ShoreTel Communicator 16.23.5631.0 der Richtlinie ShoreTel Communicator ist fehlgeschlagen. Fehler: %%1274
  • Description: The assignment of application ShoreTel Communicator 16.23.5631.0 from policy ShoreTel Communicator failed. The error was : %%1274

Workaround:

• Explicitly set the policy Startup policy processing wait time: Activated Amount of time to wait (in seconds): 120s. This is normally not required if FastLogonOptimization is disabled, but Windows 7 seems to have a bug here.

History:

If you are running a Cacti EZ based on CentOS 4.x inside a Hyper V Virtual Machine you will see that the machines system time runs out of sync, but you have configured NTP correctly.

Symtoms:

• If Cacti EZ runs for about one hour and you may see a time difference of ~90 seconds to your NTP time.
• "ntpdate -u ntp.example.com" command shows you differences to the current time whenever you execute it.

Solution:

• Append clock=pit as kernel boot parameter to /boot/grub/menu.lst as documented in The system time runs too fast on a Linux-based virtual machine

title CentOS (2.6.9-100.EL.plus.c4smp)
	root (hd0,0)
	kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-100.EL.plus.c4smp ro root=LABEL=/ clock=pit
	initrd /initrd-2.6.9-100.EL.plus.c4smp.img