So the Root CA was installed but I could not request certificates using web enrollment.

I went ahead and installed IIS and enabled ASP after the fact but web enrollment still wasn’t going to work as the virtual directories for web enrollment were missing as expected. Only if I had read RTFM.

What can I do now? How big of an issue this is going to be for me? luckily not any bigger than issuing a command “certutil –vroot”. As long as IIS was installed correctly, the command creates necessary, checks if ASP is enabled and warns you if not. That’s it for fixing the problem I created for myself. Thanks fabulous programmers at Microsoft to make products work for those who don’t read the fabulous manuals without real headache of reinstall.

Off to my next task…

Microsoft Store guys have Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool which makes creating USB media for installation easy.

The first step is to download and install the tool.

Once you do that, launch the tool and select source ISO file. Click next:

Next, select “USB Device” in media type:

In Step 3, select appropriate USB device from the list and click “Begin Copying”. Make sure your USB drive is empty or you have back up of data contained on the USB device:

Confirm erase operation. When you click “Erase USB Device”, it will format the device before copying the files to it. You should see the progress window while it copies the files to USB device for you:

Once the process completes, remove the USB, insert it on the computer where you need to install Windows 7 and start the computer. Make sure your BIOS can boot from USB devices and you select appropriate USB device that contains installation files when it boots.

You can find more details about this tool at Microsoft Store web site.

This process should work for Windows Server 2008 R2 as well.

Enjoy!

Cesar has documented the process here.

I would like to add to the process documented above. In my experience, I did not have to do Step 1 mentioned above. I decided to skip it and see how it worked. I had a working USB key so I just removed all contents and performed Steps 2, 3 and 4.

I have been using this process since release of Windows 7 Beta so I had to do step 2 only once. Every time I got new build, I just removed all files and replaced from new DVD ISO.

Also, since I don’t have DVD drive, you may be wondering how did I copy files from DVD to USB. Well, I just mounted the ISO using Slysoft Virtual CloneDrive. There are many tools available to mount ISO files. Feel free to use one that best suits your needs. I settled on Virtual CloneDrive as it was the only one that worked on Windows 7 x64.

If you have installed Windows 7 Beta or RC, it’s time to upgrade to RTM. If not, what are you waiting for?

Also, if you missed, the article does mention you have to make sure you rebuild counters from other programs such as Exchange Server and SQL server among others. It’s not part of rebuild process outlined in the KB.

So, I went digging for gold and found Exctrlst.exe. If you run the exe, it will bring up the UI and displays all registry-based performance counters installed on the system. There is a neat option in the UI. The check box “Performance Counter Enabled” allows you to see if you have any performance counters that are not loaded. The UI is not very helpful in making user aware that you can just click the checkbox if the counters are not loaded and it will load it for you. There are no “OK” or “Apply” buttons and change is instant.

There may be services that does not immediately reflect this and you may have to unload/reload counters but I will let you figure out how to do that. Most of the counters should load immediately and you should be able to report on them using Performance Monitor.

For those who need to see the gold I dug up, follow me.

P.S.: I have read some posts which confirms this will also work with Windows Server 2008. Don’t take it as my word, but you have one more reason to experiment.

Get-WmiObject : Invalid Class

This could happen for 2 reasons:

1: You have a typo in Perf Counter object.

2: The performance counter is missing on the host you are checking.

When this happened to me, I checked and verified this by loading performance monitor on affected server and trying to load Memory counters which the code was checking for. To no surprise, I found that the server did not have Memory object.

There are many reasons why the performance object could go missing from the OS. The KB article “How to manually rebuild Performance Counter Library values” explains how you can resolve this problem and bring the missing performance counter objects back.

This is when I started thinking what information is being collected from my computer and how is it used. A quick search resulted in a pleasant surprise.

The surprise was how much information is published about each feature of Vista, what information it collects, processes and transmits. How the information is used by Microsoft and what choices users have.

If you are an Enterprise administrator and ask, forget Vista, tell me how do I control communications from my Windows Server 2008 machines. What features of Windows Server 2008 communicate to Internet and how the information flows? What ports do they use? What if I want to prevent Windows Server 2008 from communicating over Internet to satisfy my organization’s security requirements?

Well, I am glad to inform Microsoft has provided detailed documentation on this as well. you can access it here.

I like it the way the documentation is clearly defining each component and how it communicates back to company servers, information collected and choices users are provided with. I have yet to find such details from other vendors.

I don’t believe anyone reading this post would not care about privacy policy. For those who don’t, I would let you read the quote below.

Quote of the day:
An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out. – Will Rogers