Anonymous Confessions of My Lunatic Friend: Windows Media Center 2005 and Small Business Server

I just wanted to revisit my Windows Media Center / Media Center Extender / Small Business Server blog entry for a couple of follow-up issues.

First, as I mentioned in my original post, I suspected that using a simple ‘NET USE \\SERVER\IPC$’ in my MCX1 logon script would do enough authentication on the domain to access all of the shares I set up. This worked well for me. Instead of defining specific mapped drives I can now access network shared folders from my Media Center Extender.

Secondly, I received a very useful tip this morning from Daron regarding my one remaining issue: accessing the administrative shares (i.e. C$) from other machines on the network. Daron’s suggestion was to disable the Simple File Sharing option in XP. I was eager to try this, so I quickly opened up my Remote Web Workplace, logged onto the Media Center PC and turned it off. I then logged onto my server (again, using RWW) and was able to open all of the administrative shares on the Loft PC. Very cool.

The Media Center Extender has a pretty high WAF, by the way. The wife (and five year old) really enjoy being able to browse through our music collection from the entertainment center. My five year old even asked for a quick tutorial on the remote so she’d know how to change songs.

Thanks to Sean, Daron, and others with the help in making this all work for us.

I ran across a bit of prose the other day that I particularly enjoyed:

From http://www.anointedlinks.com/one_solitary_life.html:

Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village. He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty. Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher.
He never owned a home. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never went to college. He never put His foot inside a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place He was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but Himself…

While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied Him. He was turned over to His enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed upon a cross between two thieves. While He was dying His executioners gambled for the only piece of property He had on earth – His coat. When He was dead, He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.

Nineteen long centuries have come and gone, and today He is a centerpiece of the human race and leader of the column of progress.

I am far within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that were ever built; all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that one solitary life.

Now, as a Christian, it’s obvious why I enjoyed this so much. There’s something quite intriguing about that last paragraph, though. You see in today’s society it is easy to find people who claim that religion is a crutch for the feeble minded, or the attitude that the truly enlightened individual knows better to believe in such ‘fairy tales’, yet year after year, century after century that one man, those three years still have a profound effect (one way or another) on our societies. Why is that? If you choose not to believe in the deity of Jesus, certainly you must wonder why history and generations of non-Christians have not been successful in expunging this man and his teaching from our Earth. What is it that causes this man and his story to remain such a dominate force in this world? Think of countless Muslims who have given their lives to eradicate the infidel Christians, or think of the misguided Christians themselves who shed the blood of millions trying to further their religion. What is it about this seemingly insignificant life that has caused centuries of warfare both for and against him.

Believe in him or not, but you cannot deny his continued influence over this world, even in this day and age. I am thankful that believers today choose to wage their battles at Target or Wal-Mart over semantics, or over a nativity in front of a courthouse somewhere rather than taking up arms on a real battlefield somewhere.

What ever happened to the Democrats of yesterday with statements such as, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”?

Today, this is the sound of the Democratic party:

“[The] idea that we’re going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong” – Howard Dean, Chairman, Democratic National Committee

“And the is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night terrorizing kids and children, you know, women breaking sort of the customes of the–of–the historical customs, religious customs.” – Senator John Kerry (D) Massachusetts

“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings.” – Senator Dick Durbin (D)-Illinois

With leaders like this, who need enemies?

When I got into my office this morning I noticed fliers posted soliciting items to send as care packages to our troops in Iraq. The flier conveniently listed suggested items, and then specifically mentioned items that are forbidden:

Forbidden: alcohol, narcotics, munitions, any food item containing pork, pornography, anything symbolizing Christianity.

I understand that our troops are serving in a predominately Muslim country, and that we need to be sensitive to that. However, the last time I checked, Muslims get pretty offended by Judaism too, but it doesn’t seem that Jewish symbols are forbidden.

I spoke up, and there are new fliers now. It took some nerve to say something, but if Christians do not speak up, who will? Are we really willing to wait and let the rock cry out for us?

There are many links out on the network to explain how to join a Media Center Edition (MCE) PC to a Small Business domain, but that’s not what this post is about. You see, I want my new MCE to play nice with my SBS network, but joining a domain breaks the two specific features I want.

After recently moving my desktop to a more accessible location in the house, I wanted to make it easy for my five year old to use, and that meant I needed the XP Home fast user switching logon style. Clicking on a recognizable name or picture is much easier for her than pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del and typing a username and password. Joining a domain removes this style of logon.

On a side track, I had been contemplating for months the idea of modding my xBox. I’m not a big gamer, so most of the benefits of a modded xBox are lost on me. What I really wanted to do was to be able to enjoy photos and music from my server on my entertainment system. Then, I was introduced (finally) to Media Center, and Media Center Extenders. I found out that Microsoft sells a Media Center Extender (MCX) for the xBox that would let me do exactly what I wanted on the xBox. MCE on the PC would give me that ‘XP Home’ look I was looking for too. One of the requirements for Extenders is that the MCE PC must be using the Fast User switching, so joining a domain would break that too.

So, I rebuilt the PC with MCE and got the MCX up and running. Very, very cool. Now comes the fun part: getting it to play nice with the rest of the network.

I set the MCE up with a workgroup name that matches my domain name, and then defined local users with the same passwords as their domain counterparts. Pretty straight forward stuff there. That left me with three things I needed to work around to get the MCE where I wanted it.

First, one of the cool things about SBS Server 2003 is the Remote Web Workplace, which allows you to securely access the network from the internet and establish Remote Desktop connections to client computers. I wanted to be able to do this with the MCE machine, but because it wasn’t a domain member, it wasn’t accessible. After some googling, I found some blog writers that seemed to know SBS and MCE, so I shot off a couple of emails. I got a reply from Sean Daniel, and he suggested I try a method that I had been contemplating. I set up a dummy machine with the same computer name as my MCE (with the MCE offline at this point) and joined that computer to the domain. Just joining to the domain doesn’t unlock the Remote Web goodness, however. You have to run through the SBS Add Computer wizard on the server as well. Once I did this, the computer name I chose (“Loft”) showed up in the Available Clients list. Cool! I shut down the dummy computer and brought the real “Loft” back online. My first attempt at connecting through RWW was unsuccessful. Just as the aggrevation started, I remembered that blasted Windows Firewall. Once I turned that off, the RWW connection worked GREAT!

The second issue I wanted to overcome was having my Media Center Extender access my already established Shared Music and Shared Photos shares on my server. Lucky, Sean’s blog had an entry on how to do exactly that. I followed Sean’s instructions and they worked like a charm. I think they can be tweaked, however. Since my MCE is a member of a workgroup that is named the same as my domain, once I authenticated my MCX1 user to the domain, I could see all sorts of shared folders when configuring the MCX. I suspect that if the login script for MCX1 just had a ‘NET USE \\SERVER\IPC$’ statement in it, I wouldn’t necessarily have to map drive letters to the shares. I may try this at some point.

Two down, one to go. The only thing I don’t have working yet is access to the administrative shares on the MCE. Even though my domain user name and password match my local username and password on the MCE PC, and even though I’m a member of the local administrators group, I cannot access \\LOFT\C$. I get prompted for a username and password, but nothing works. Not even ‘LOFT\Brad’. I’m not sure why this is yet, but since remote desktop is working, I’m not sure if it’s really that big of an issue any more.

I ran across a great Small Business Server blog while searching for an answer to a question I have. I sent this guy an email, hopefully he can help me. If not, I’m glad I found his site. It looks lilke he has some useful stuff in there.

SeanDaniel.com on SBS 2003 & other Tech-stuff

I should start blogging all the bizarre, trivial, and fun facts I have searched for and found using Google.

For example:

• I now know how much human waste a 747 can hold.
• An uncle I never met owned a plane in the early 60′s. That plane is now in Missouri, owned by a man who is an acquaintance of a good friend of mine.
• How tall is a wind turbine, and how does that compare to a TV transmitter in Rockford.

You know, that kind of stuff.

I ran across an error today when trying to copy a 3 GB file off of my Pocket DJ:

not enough storage is available to complete this operation

It turns out that Microsoft has a hotfix for this problem: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;895316

A quick install and a reboot and the problem went away.

Remember reading these words in the 5th grade?

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Of course most people will recognize these words from the Declaration of Independence. These are the very words that launched not only our country, but our governing philosophy as well.

Our very country was formed with the belief that we were ‘created’ , or in other words, intelligently designed. Now, the very notion of teaching this outrageous idea to school children is villified as an attempt to introduce religion into the classroom. I wonder how History teachers will explain that phrase “endowed by their Creator” without touching on Intelligent Design.

The fact is, you can’t. Our founding fathers held the belief that we did not just happen here by chance and evolution. They believed we were designed, and I suspect they felt very strongly that each of them were designed for a very specific purpose, that is to launch this wonderful experiment in Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Last week I got another reminder that I’m not as young as I used to be: Last week was parents/teacher conferences at my daughter’s school, our first conference as parents.

In the past, just hearing the phrases, “teacher conference”, or “report card day”, would give me that unmistakable feeling in the pit of my stomach. You see when I was in school nothing good ever came as a result of those phrases, and now they have re-entered my life.

My daughter is in Kindergarten, so it’s not like there would be any bad news shared with us or anything, but that didn’t keep me from being nervous. What would the teacher say? How does she compare with the other kids? Is she making friends? Does she talk too much? A dozen questions filled my head, which I suppose was a welcomed distraction from the bizarness of it all.

It turns out that my daughter’s teacher had nothing but positive things to say about her and the progress she is making. Not a day goes by that I’m not absolutely proud of my daughter, and marvel at how quickly she is growing into a bright, creative, expressive little girl.