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Today is the first day of our vacation at Walt Disney World and we were treated to some early evening fireworks courtesy of NASA. Space Shuttle Atlantis launched this evening at 7:38 pm. A guy was on the phone with someone watching it on TV and gave the word when it cleared the tower. After a few seconds we could see a bright dot heading skyward over Tomorrowland (appropriately enough) with a white trail billowing behind it. An awesome sight even from that far away. Everyone cheered as it faded from view. Very cool.

Update!  I’ve posted the photos of the launch in their own album so you don’t have to dig through my Magic Kingdom photos if you don’t want to.  Remember, we watched the launch from Disney World, over 60 miles away, so don’t expect to see astronauts waving from the cockpit windows in the photos.  Here are a couple of photos, including one photos zoomed in to show the shuttle right after the solid rocket boosters separated.

Technorati Tags: Space Shuttle, Atlantis, STS-117

This is it, the end of TechEd 2007… for me at least. I won’t touch on the bag check mess this morning as I covered that in a previous post. I attended two sessions today, both repeats from earlier days. The sessions were:

• SVR315 Server Core: Running a Minimal Server
• CLI311R Building the Perfect Master Image: A Universal Image Strategy

Server Core is a welcome addition to Windows Server. I have a few servers back home that are perfect candidates. For systems such as domain controllers, DNs servers, etc., I think you’re going to see Server Core become the de facto way to implement these boxes. The lower resource requirements as well as an improved security posture are two factors for this.
p. According to the speaker, most third-party agents such as backup agents work in Server Core today in their shipping versions. I’ll be interested to test that out for the agents we’re using.

The Universal Image session was recommended to me by an individual I ran into from the University, and it was dead-on. With all of the BDD2007 sessions I attended, this was the last component needed to be able to go back and really implement this in our environment. Originally I had put much more emphasis on scripting application installs on top of a few base images, but it is so easy to fall into the trap of building monolithic images, that we wound up doing more of this than we probably should have. Recently I had reduced our image count somewhat and used scripting for installing hardware specific items. But I think it is time to swing the pendulum back even more and see if this will help simplify and streamline how we deploy systems. I have a feeling that some of the glitches we run into are related to building images on top of images as we’ve been doing.

Now I’m off to lunch, and then my vacation begins. I’m relocating over to Disney’s Wilderness Lodge. Kristin will fly in later this afternoon and then we begin six days at Walt Disney World! After a week of TechEd, it’ll be good to give my brain a rest, turn off email on my phone, and relax a little.

Ran into the first logistics mess of the conference this morning. Like most people, I planned to check out of my hotel this morning and check bags at the convention center for the morning sessions.

When I arrived, I found a long line that wasn’t moving very fast. Turns out they had one line for airline check-in and one line for regular bag check. That’s all they had for everyone checking bags. It took over half an hour to reach the front of the line, and the line behind me had grown to over an hour wait. Would have been much more efficient to use the huge empty space in the registration area and setup a roped off area to place bags instead of hauling them from the line, around the counter, and into a room behind the registration desk.

Nearly missed breakfast and my first session. I expect this is a convention center screw-up, but the show organizers need to address this for next year.

Day Four of TechEd. Always a popular day because it means one thing… Attendee Party! No matter the venue or the featured entertainment, everyone seems to enjoy the party. Since we’re in Orlando and surrounded by theme parks, no concert this year, instead we all visited Islands of Adventure. Bur first, the day’s wrap-up.

Today’s sessions:

• UNC308 Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Storage and Design Considerations
• MGT306 Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007: Managing Servers
• SVR300R How Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Impacts IT Infrastructure
• MGT320 Microsoft SoftGrid and Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003/System Center Configuration Manager: Better Together

I skipped one session period in the afternoon. Had a couple things to take care of for work and the topics didn’t really do much for me. Figure I’ll check them out on the DVDs when they arrive.

The Exchange session was presented by someone from EMC. It started late because he had been told to go to a different room, and it must have been on the other side of the convention center they way he came into the room. Very good coverage of design tools available for Exchange storage systems. A lot of the content wasn’t necessarily new, but it was all brought together into one place and will prove useful this summer as part of our deployment prep.

The Windows Server 2008 session was one of the best of the conference. I hadn’t really done much with Windows Server 2008 at the conference since System Center sessions occupied most of my schedule, but if I only went to one, this was the one to see. So many of the features he covered, from the new Terminal Services features to SMB 2.0 are all gong to be put to good use in our organization. One thing I didn’t hear anyone talk about much though was Storage Server. I’m curious whether Server 2008 will be available as a Storage Server upgrade at the same time as general release or whether it will lag somewhat. Since it has to come form the OEMs, I imagine it’ll be a little while before we can get our hands on it.

The Attendee Party was fun, although it started to rain shortly after we arrived. I managed to ride Dueling Dragons twice before they shutdown the outdoor rides due to a lightning strike in the area. the second run on Dueling Dragons was in the rain, and it stung as we whipped around the track. Between my glasses and the rain, I kept my eyes closed for most of the ride so sitting in the first row really didn’t do much for me. Rode Spider-man and then grabbed some food while waiting for rides to restart. While walking back towards Jurassic Park, I noticed that the Dudley Do-Right Ripsaw Falls ride was running again, so hopped in line. I usually don’t mind getting wet, but this time I pout my free poncho back on since I was through getting soaked between the storms last night and the rain this evening. Pretty good water ride, and the poncho was a good idea as you get pretty wet at the end. Hit the Jurassic Park water ride which was pretty short, but well done. The T. Rex at the end was especially convincing. They even had performers at the end of the ride portraying John Hammond and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum’s character). Very convincing! A little more food, then the Cat in the Hat ride, and that was enough to call it a night.

So now I’m packing and doing a little laundry. Need to grab my clothes out of the dryer and get to bed. Two sessions tomorrow morning, then off to Walt Disney World!

Oh, almost forgot the day’s swag tally. Not much so no picture.

• Source Fource figure: Master Office (my set is complete!)
• Foam yellow school bus (from Neuron, whoever that is) which I found next to one of the CommNet computers

Dean Andrews posted over on the TechNet Webcast Weblog about the Bluecast feature at TechEd and some of the issues they’ve had. The idea is you set your Bluetooth-enabled phones and other devices to be discoverable, and content will be made available that you can download and use. Some of the stations offered an opportunity to get a free e-book or a video that you can show to get a free t-shirt.

I tried and tried and had absolutely no luck. All I managed to do was help run my battery down more than normal. According to Dean, I wasn’t alone. Apparently we overwhelmed their systems, so they regrouped and reduced the number of Bluecast locations and beefed up their infrastructure. I didn’t have any more luck yesterday but didn’t try today. I’ll give it one more try tomorrow, and if I still don’t get anything, then I give up. My PPC-6700 must be one of the devices they mentioned that have beenbdisabled by the manufacturers from receiving Bluetooth published content.