June is coming quickly, and there’s one thing that has always been associated with June for me — the annual trip to be with the techies at Tech-Ed. This year Microsoft has split the conference in two, maybe to free up space or allow more people to attend, but in either case I’ll be at the IT pro sessions the second week of June.

I’m excited to go this year to my fifth Tech-Ed conference, not only because there are great products, learning experiences, and weather in Orlando but this year I’ll have an even larger surrounding of friends and colleagues there than ever before.

Speaking on that issue, keeping track of everything that I’m up to can be quite a task with a number of web services out there. I’ve found that the best way to follow what I’m up to, reading, analyzing, or toying around with is to track my FriendFeed. This service aggregates all of my content from this blog, my Twitter account, and many other sources of publishing on the web that I do. It is a great gathering place for ideas and conversation as well. Sign up your content sources and share with the world.

With that, I can tell you that there’s a good post coming up shortly on doing a domain integration exercise when the acquired company is using Small Business Server. Not to be missed!

Now available and in the "must download" list of software.

Microsoft® Remote Server Administration Tools enables IT administrators to remotely manage roles and features in Windows Server® 2008 from a computer running Windows Vista® with Service Pack 1 (SP1).

Download Link (x86) | Download Link (x64)

While you are out, pick up the HyperV admin console for Vista SP1 as well.

Here’s one that had us searching around the Internet the other day. We were adding drivers to a Windows PE 2.0 (Vista/2008) image with the PEIMG command. Unfortunately, as with most environments, we have a room full of servers with all different makes and models. In order to make the PE image as flexible as possible, we needed to include a large section of our driver library.

How to do it fast? Well, you could write a nifty script, or you could use the good ‘ol FOR command.

for /R .\ %i in (*.inf) do peimg /inf=”%i” e:\winpe_x86\mount\Windows

Simple. I love it. Tip of the hat goes to J. Greg for the idea. (one of those "hey, that’s so simple why didn’t we think of that!" moments).

If you are running into environments and working on aspects of them such as Exchange, OCS, PKI, or other Active Directory integrated applications, you will encounter situations where you may need to update the AD schema. Of course, the first question is, what version am I at today?

Here’s a handy way to find out:

Query for the objectVersion attribute of the CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=yourdomainhere of your Active Directory domain and compare the value to the table below.

I’ve provided links to the schema update information (where available), if you are curious as to what is updated in each.

** The Windows Server 2003 upgrade from 2000 also adds the CN=Windows2003Update,CN=ForestUpdates,CN=Configuration,DC=yourdomainhere and sets its revision attribute to 9. This hasn’t been used again, yet.

Exchange Server saves the current version of its schema updates in an attribute of two locations.

For /forestprep operations, query the rangeUpper attribute of the CN=ms-Exch-Schema-Version-Pt,CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=yourdomainhere object.

For /domainprep operations, query the Microsoft Exchange System Objects object in each domain for its objectVersion value.

The table below provides the number to version translation.

The weather is improving here in the northwest and my sweetie and I had the chance to run out into the sunshine on Saturday and take a trip from our home airport down to Independence, Oregon (7S5). This is a great little airport, about 50 miles south of Portland that has a thriving flying community and the Starduster Cafe.

On the way back, with the skies clearing (it was a bit overcast in Portland in the morning), we snapped this picture of Mount Hood.

The cafe is open 7a-3p every day and serves a large menu of grill favorites for breakfast and lunch, including the $100 hamburger. Get there now, while the weather is good.