six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2013-03-12

TSM BA Client 6.4 on Debian

Although IBM doesn't officially support its TSM client on Linux distributions other than SLES and RHEL the client works quite nicely on Debian. With version 6.4 you need at least the following 4 packages on AMD64 systems:

  • TIVsm-BA
  • TIVsm-API64
  • gskcrypt64
  • gskssl64

See more ...

Posted 00:46 [permalink]

2013-03-09

Features on Demand in Server 2012

Back in the days of Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 it was common practice to copy the i386 folder from the CD to the server and change the SourcePath registry value, so you wouldn't have to shuffle installation media around for adding/removing Windows features. With the advent of Windows Vista and Server 2008 Microsoft introduced the component store. Now all Windows features were put on disk by default and simply had to be activated/deactivated. That increased the size of a Windows installation by factor 3-4, but on the other hand disk space had become rather inexpensive, so it wasn't that big a deal. And although the component store can be a little fragile at times it usually works quite well.

So far, so good. But what happened now with the release of Windows 8 and Server 2012? Someone at Microsoft decided that the component store took up too much space, so they introduced a new concept called "Features on Demand", which simply means that administrators can free disk space by removing components from the store. The .Net Framework 3.5 for instance was removed by default.

This is not a bad thing per se. However, the removed framework still shows up as an installable feature (e.g. in Server Manager), only now you're prompted for an alternate source path when you choose to install the framework. So what we have now is that the component store still eats up disk space (I didn't notice any significant reduction in used disk space) and we're back to either shuffling installation media around or copying sources to the local harddisk (eating up even more disk space).

Srsly, Microsoft?

Posted 15:06 [permalink]