τεχνοσοφια

For users who have neither access to Microsoft Office nor desire to dive headfirst into OpenOffice*, Microsoft provides freely downloadable viewers for Office documents. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010449811033.aspx Most of these viewers are at the Office 2003 version, e.g., Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Others, like Access, are at the 2002 version. * For the record, though, OpenOffice 2.0 is fabulous. I've exclusively been using OO at home for at least a year or two, and the new version is tres magnifique.

Not quite sure you grasp the subtleties of difference between load-balancing (NLB) and server clustering (MSCS)? After all, both are technologies that allow distinct server nodes to be externally visible via a virtual server, and support failover. The fundamental similarities might overshadow their concisely stated difference:

Server clusters – uses a shared-nothing architecture, which means that a resource can be active on only one server in the cluster at any one time. Because of this, it is well suited to applications that maintain some sort of state (for example, a database).

Network Load Balancing (NLB) – uses a load balancing architecture, which means that a resource can be active on ALL servers in the cluster at any one time. Because of this, it is well suited to applications that do not maintain state (for example, a Web server).

Note: This information is copyright © 2003, Microsoft Corporation, gleaned from the freely available documentation on cluster quorums for Windows Server 2003. I provide it here for the sake of convenience and exposure.

The Windows Script File, .wsf, allows one to mark-up in XML different blocks of scripting. One can, in effect, write a script hooking VBScript, JavaScript, and PerlScript together. This looks to be quite powerful for scripters, especially within the domain of systems administration. Often one knows one scripting language better than another, and even more commonly one may exploit the strengths of multiple languages. Imagine combining the ease of Windows operability in VB with the regular expression power of PerlScript with… whatever it is that JavaScript does well. Could be quite a nifty tool.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/script56/html/wsAdvantagesOfWs.asp

Here is a link describing how one might use ASR — the new term for Emergency Repair Disk — in Windows Server 2003.

Of particular note is how to use ASR when a server does not have a floppy drive, a predicament I now find myself in.

http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/1196

Here's a list of all the free software I'm running on my Windows XP workstation, or least the subset that I deem noteworthy. Rather than annotate the list, which would be far too helpful, I will merely provide links.

Foundstone Vision 1.0 (system util)
Process Explorer 9.25 (system util)
Microsoft PowerToys XP (OS pimpage)
Notepad++ 3.3 (text editor)
Cygwin 1.5.18-1 (X server / *nix tools)
FileZilla 2.2.17 (FTP client)
FileZilla Server 0.9.11b (FTP server)
Mozilla Firefox 1.5 (WWW browser)
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 (mail client)
Trillian Basic 3.1 (multi-network chat client)
PuTTY 0.57 (SSH client)
Semagic 1.5.5.6U (blog client)
iTunes 6.0.1.3 (aural pleasure)

P.S. I do have Firefox installed but I don't use it. Internet Explorer is the only way to browse.