Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Vista SP1 and RSAT now available.

Vista Service Pack 1 has been out for about a week now and the minor tweaks have been pretty good especially in the file copy category. Mark Russinovich from Microsoft has a very in depth blog on the way previous versions of Windows copied files and what was changed in SP1 for Vista to improve performance. There has also been quite a few changes in the security(little on this later), hibernation and driver/hardware compatibility areas as well.

I didnt have time to download the full SP1 so I just did a windows update to get the remaining patches (about 65-100MB) download. The real waiting came while doing the update. The whole install process was about 45 minutes on my Dell D820 Centrino 2.16 2GB Ram. Kinda long if you ask me. But the process came out as a success and no crashing resulted. 8)

I also didnt realize that while trying to do some group policy changes SP1 removed the Group Policy Management tools (GPMC). At first I was pretty mad but reading why Microsoft did this I understood and accepted it. The reason was because of possible security risks that arise because of these tools being installed by default on Vista PCs. A user could use these tools to open any group policy and view/backup the GPO and give that information to a more knowledgeable person for malicious intent. Until the RSAT(Remote Server Administration Toolkit) for Vista SP1 was released Microsoft instructed those who installed SP1 to use RDP and manage Group Policies on the server.

Now that RSAT is released as MS promised it would. You can managed Group Policies once again with your Vista SP1. For those of you who don't know or haven't heard of RSAT (Remote Server Administration Toolkit) it is the replacement of the AdminPak for 2008 Server. You can find RSAT downloads for x86 and x64 platforms below.

Note: You must have Vista SP1 installed first.

Remote Server Admin Tools (x86)
Remote Server Admin Tools (x64)

The following are a list of the tools you will find in RSAT:

Role Administration Tools:

  • Active Directory Certificate Services Tools
  • Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) Tools
  • Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) Tools
  • DHCP Server Tools
  • DNS Server Tools
  • File Services Tools
  • Network Policy and Access Services Tools
  • Terminal Services Tools
  • Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Services Tools

Feature Administration Tools:

  • BitLocker Drive Encryption Tools
  • Failover Clustering Tools
  • Group Policy Management Tools
  • Network Load Balancing Tools
  • SMTP Server Tools
  • Storage Manager for SANs Tools
  • Windows System Resource Manager Tools

And these tools also fully supported managing Windows Server 2003 servers:

  • Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) Tools
  • Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) Tools
  • Active Directory Certification Authority Tools
  • DHCP Server Tools
  • DNS Server Tools
  • Terminal Services Tools
  • Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Services Tools
  • Group Policy Management Tools
  • Network Load Balancing Tools

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