Setting up to Print from Mac OS X Snow Leopard to a Windows 8 Shared Printer

Whoever says that Mac computers are easy to use are not entirely right! When it comes to troubleshooting a Mac, it is the most painful experience ever. So I needed to configure to print from my MacBook to a Shared Printer that is connected to my newly formatted Windows 8 machine. I am using a HP LaserJet 3015 Printer connected to my Windows 8 machine via USB.

After searching the Internet for awhile, which basically tells you that finding resources for Mac troubleshooting is NOT EASY.. cause there aren't many out there.

I was able to stumble upon a blog post that did what I wanted but for the Windows 7. I figured I would try it and see if it will work since the kernel is somewhat similar.

Tried and worked. Here is the steps I did that followed exactly the blog post here

Windows 8 PC. The place that your shared printer is connected to.

1. From the Windows 8 Desktop, move your mouse to the bottom right corner, which will bring up the hidden panel.
2. Click on Settings, then Click on Control Panel
3. Launch the "Devices and Printers" app
4. Right Click your shared printer and select "Printer Properties"
5. Select the Sharing tab and share your printer with a share name WITHOUT ANY SPACES
6. Click on the Back button to go back to the Control Panel Home screen
7. Select "Programs and Features"
8. Click "Turn Windows Features on or off" {its on the left side of the windows}
9. Expand "Print and Document Services", then select and enable the "LPD Print Service"
10. Click OK and it should start adding the feature in.

Mac OS X. The place you want to print from.

1. Open "System Preferences" then select "Print & Fax"
2. Click "+" to add a printer
3. Right click anywhere on the tool bar and select "Customize Toolbar" then drag the "Advanced" button to the toolbar
4. Select "Advanced"
5. In the "Type:" field select "LPD/LPR Host or Printer"
6. In the "URL:" field enter lpd://Windows8IPAddress/PrinterShareName; (e.g., lpd://192.168.1.99/HPF4280) Make sure there are no spaces in your printer's share name. Using lpd://Windows8PCName/PrinterShareName does not work, the IP address must replace Windows7ServerName The IP address is the address of your PC, the one assigned by your router. If you need to find out your IP address, go back to your Windows 8 machine, launch Command Prompt, and type in 'ipconfig' in the command prompt window. Hit Enter and it should display your ip address for you.
7. "Print Using" drop-down list: I was able to select my printer's software from the driver list and it worked (HP Laserjet3015). 
8. Click the "Add" button
9. Do a Test Print and it should print ok.

Hope this helps someone. Thanks again Justin for his blogpost

Best of MMS Malaysia

For the first time in Malaysia, Microsoft is bringing Best of MMS to these shores. Best of MMS is an event that is run after the main show, which is the Microsoft Management Summit (Las Vegas). The goal of these events is to bring some key sessions to areas, countries and people that were not able to attend MMS.

Best of MMS Malaysia will be held on:

Date: June 5th

Venue: Microsoft Auditorium, Petronas Tower 2, KLCC, L29, Kuala Lumpur

Registration Link: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032511973&Culture=en-MY

The following are the session that will be presented at this event:

• Welcome, Best of MMS 2012 Keynote by Eric Liew, Server Lead, Microsoft Malaysia + Q&A
• Cloud Contest (2x Virtualization Stations)
• An Overview of Client Management and System Center 2012
• Datacenter Management with System Center 2012
• Application Management Capabilities with SCCM 2012
• Service Delivery and Automation
• Incident, Problem, Change and Asset Management with SCSM 2012
• Virtualization Management on Steroids
• Desktop and Mobile Management from the Cloud
• The New Generation of Microsoft Virtualization with Windows Server 2012
• Compliance and Patch Management with SCCM2012
• MS Cloud Certs & MVA (MS Virtual Academy)

Do register yourself for this event and join us for some good sessions delivered by industry professionals, MVPs, Microsoft technical specialists and get some gifts while you are there!

Supported Network Devices Monitored by SCOM2012

As we are approaching the launch of SCOM 2012, it will come with the ability to monitor network devices. Question is.. what is the supported devices? In a nutshell, SCOM 2012 can monitor network devices that support SNMP, and can provide port monitoring for devices that implement interface MIB (RFC 2863) and MIB-II (RFC 1213) standards

The list of supported network devices can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26831 

This list may change upon the General Availability of SCOM 2012.

Next Question is how about devices which do not meet the RFC MIB requirements? well it simply means that by default SCOM will not auto monitor the port monitoring for those devices. This can be overcome by creating custom monitors via the SCOM console

Windows Troubleshooter solved my Adobe Reader printing crash problem

I must say i was pretty impressed…

I was trying to print a PDF file from Adobe Reader 10.1.2 and it kept crashing the minute i hit Print.

Pops up the Windows Troubleshooter so i decided to click on the ‘Check for Solutions Online’

In less than a minute, it gave me this in the Action Center:

I proceeded to click on the link for the KB Article, which directed me to this site: http://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/pdf-wont-print-reader-10.html

… and there listed that there was a patch that i could download and run!.. so I did

Once done, I opened up the PDF again and clicked PRINT and it worked!!…

Hooray for Windows Troubleshooter

Windows Intune Experience: Uploading and Deploying Software

The following guide is the experience in uploading and deploying a software via Windows Intune. It is important to note that Windows Intune will execute and run the application based on its current form. If you need to perform the installation in Quiet mode, or running in the background without the user knowing, remember to enter the appropriate command line parameters to perform the quiet mode installation.

Step 1: Launch your Intune console via http://manage.microsoft.com and click on the Software section

Step 2: From the Software administration section, click on the Upload Software link

Step 3: The Software Publisher mini app should begin downloading if it was not already downloaded before

Step 4: Sign in with your Intune admin account

Step 5: The Software Publisher wizard will start, then proceed to choose the application to be uploaded for deployment. At current, as far as I know, exe, msi and bat files are supported. Any file you can execute via command line basically…

Step 6: Proceed to enter a description

Step 7: Specify if the application needs to meet any architecture requirements of 32/64 bit and OS version

Step 8: Specify any pre-installation Detection Rules, such as if File exists, dont install, etc

Step 9: IMPORTANT! This step is where you enter the command line arguments of how you would like to execute the software. for MSI, you can use the MSI /? to assist you

Step 10: In order to receive reports on the success of the installation, specify your preference of return codes

Step 11: DO a final review and click Upload

Your software will be begin to upload to the Intune Storage. The trial of Intune will give you a storage space of 2GB. Upon purchase, you will be auto upgraded to 20GB of Storage. Additional Storage can be purchased at 1GB blocks.

Step 12: To Deploy the software, go to the Managed Software section, and click on Deploy

Step 13: Select the Install selection from the drop down menu for the specific group of your choice

Users should receive the software at the next communication cycle

The following is the user experience of receiving the software:

Step 1: User receives a notification via the Taskbar Icon

Step 2: When you click on the icon, the Install Software pop up will launch, click on Review and Install if you want to look at the choices of installing the software

Step 3: Review the software being installed and click on Install when you are ready

 

The important admin experience to note if you are evaluating Windows Intune to perform software distribution is that the users will have to take the initiative to launch the Install

Feel free to comment on this experience

New Task Manager in Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Browsing to find out what differences Windows 8 Consumer Preview has, i noticed a cool new Task Manager:

Nice pictorial view of machine resources and also some network stats.

The processes tab has also been beefed up with a more detailed breakdown:

sweet!

Grabbing a file from inside a VHD

Following the post earlier of me configuring a VHD Boot of Windows 8 CP, I had gone in and created some screenshots. Because Windows 7 was still my primary work OS, I had rebooted my machine and went back into my Windows 7. I started to want to post a blogpost then realized the screenshots were in my Windows 8 VHD. How do i get them out?

Step 1: Launch Computer Management

Step 2: Navigate to Disk Management, Right-Click Disk Management, then select Attach VHD

Step 4: Browse to the VHD of choice, in my case was the Win8Beta VHD

Step 5: You should now see it as a listed disk. If you had not already done so, now assign a drive letter to it.

Step 6: You can now browse the files inside it through the drive letter.

Step 7: Go look for the files that you need, in my case, it was in the My Pictures folder in my user profile.

Setting up Windows 8 Consumer Preview to Boot from VHD

Being in a careful situation, not wanting to mess my Windows 7 and configurations I have done seeing as I would probably need to work.. … I opt to configure Windows 8 to boot from VHD. For some reason, when i tried this in the Developer Preview, I couldn’t get it working. I have Windows 7 running natively, and dual booting with Windows Server 2008 R2 booting from VHD.

I had referred to a couple of blogs for guidance, and one in particular gave me a good reference point on Hyper-V.nu

Here is how i did mine:

Step 1: Download the Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO

Step 2: Have installed UltraISO or PowerISO. We need this to mount the ISO to copy out the install.wim image

Step 3: Create a directory where you would like to place the VHD file. In my case, I created Z:\VHD\Win8Beta

Step 4: Mount the Windows 8 ISO

Step 5: from the mounted drive, copy the \sources\install.wim to the created directory [e.g. Z:\VHD\Win8Beta]

Step 6: Download the Install-WindowsImage PowerShell script and copy it into the same directory as above

Step 7: Create the VHD using the following steps in Windows 7

Step 7a: Launch the Computer Management app

Step 7b: Right-click Disk Management and select Create VHD

Step 7c: Create the VHD in the directory created earlier with the size of your choice. I wanted to do some performance testing, so I selected Dynamically Expanding for my disk type

Step 7d: Once done, from the Disk Management control panel, you should see the created and attached VHD. Proceed to initialize the Disk

Step 7e: Next create a Primary partition

Step 7f: Assign a drive letter so that we can perform the WIM install later. In my case i assigned [M:\]

Step 7g: Perform a Quick Format of the drive 

Step 7h: You should have an end result of a formatted VHD attached to the drive letter. Once again ensure you have the install.wim, the powershell script, and the created VHD in the directory you created

Step 8: Apply the WIM Image to the VHD using the PowerShell script

Step 8a: Launch a CommandPrompt run as Administrator

Step 8b: Change to the directory containing the VHD, WIM image and PowerShell script {cd z:\VHD\Win8Beta}

Step 8c: launch powershell {> Powershell}

Step 8d: Run the following powershell commands one by one (replace the drive in the command below with the one you created):

     PS> set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
     PS> .\Install-WindowsImage.ps1 –WIM Z:\VHD\Win8Beta\install.wim
     PS> [R]un once
     PS> .\Install-WindowsImage.ps1 –WIM [drive]:\vhd\install.wim –Apply –Index 1 –Destination W:
     PS> [R}un once

The steps above are shown in this screenshot below:

Once done, you should see the Windows 8 system populated in the mounted drive

Step 9: Configure the Boot Menu for the VHD to Native Boot

Step 9a: In the Command Prompt window, execute:

     > bcdboot m:\windows

     *in my case, m: was the drive that i used to assign the VHD to.

Step 9b: check your boot entries:

     > bcdedit /v

Below shows a screen shot of Step 9:

Step 10: Reboot and configure your sysprepped Windows 8!

You will see the new Boot Menu

Hope these steps are clear enough for you to try it out. And do post comments if you have noticed any errors or it went successfully for you.