Category Archives: Windows

Full Sound Through RDP From a Hyper-V Windows 7 VM

Hyper-V, Powershell, Server 2008 R2, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 7, , , , ,

Windows 7 is a nice operating system and it has some pretty cool features. One of which, and one of my favorites, is that it comes with the newest version of Remote Desktop (RDP). This version is capable of letting you watch HD video through it (assuming your network connection is fast enough…). RDPing from one physical computer to another physical computer is easy and sound between the two works just fine. This is because both machines (most likely) have physical sound cards.

Sometime during my travels, I loaded Windows 7 onto a Virtual Machine (VM) running on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Virtual Machines in Hyper-V don’t have physical or even virtual sound cards like VPC. When RDPing to a Windows 7 VM the sound card is listed as Remote Audio. This is fine and will actually push through a decent amount of sound. While testing, it seemed to work fine for WMV files and a few other formats. For some reason, I was unable to get it to work with AVI files, and flash websites like youtube.com. I wanted full sound capabilities. So here is what I was able to get working.

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Creating and Executing Powershell Scripts

Powershell, Windows,

Writing your first PowerShell script can be pretty easy. Just open notepad and paste in:

Write-Host "Hello World!"

Save that as a .ps1 file and you’re are all set. That line will just print out Hello World! to the console.

Now, how do you run that script?

First, you open up Windows PowerShell. Browse to the location where you script is, and type the name of the script.

If this is your first time running a PowerShell script, chances are you will see an error message like this:

PS C:\Users\user\Desktop> .\HelloWorld.ps1
File C:\Users\user\Desktop\HelloWorld.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Please see “get-help about_signing” for more details.
At line:1 char:17
+ .\HelloWorld.ps1 <<<<
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], PSSecurityException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : RuntimeException

This is because PowerShell is pretty locked down to prevent unauthorized scripts from running.

Chances are you will be fine with:

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Change Public Folder Permissions in Exchange 2007

Windows,

Our HR administrator was unable to delete or change events in a public folder calendar using Outlook 2007. To my surprise I was not able to either, all though I could change and delete appointments that I created myself. The Outlook error message revealed why:

You don't have appropriate permission to perform this operation.

Clicking on the properties for the public folder calendar in Outlook revealed that I only had Author rights to the calendar. I needed the Owner privilege to delete other people’s meetings.

Public Folder administration is not hard in Exchange 2007, but you must use the management shell for most tasks. Exchange 2007 SP2 includes a Public Folder management tool/gui, unfortunately it is essentially useless for most administration tasks.

I used the following Exchange management shell command to give myself the “Owner” permission. Note: you need administrative privileges on the exchange server to make this change.

Add-PublicFolderClientPermission -Identity "\public folder name" -AccessRights Owner -User eli

You can assign permissions like Author, Editor, Reviewer, etc.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 and IE8 Compatibility

Browsers, IIS, Internet Explorer 8, Virtual Server, Virtualization, Web Servers, Windows, , ,

Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Internet Explorer 8 don’t play nice by default. As you can see from the picture, it looks a little funny, but what’s worse is you can’t turn Virtual Machines (VMs) on. Clicking Turn On doesn’t do anything.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 IE8
Virtual Server 2005 R2 IE8

Well, the reason is the some of the features of IE8 aren’t compatible with Virtual Server 2005 R2. But there are at least 2 easy ways to fix this. The first is super simple and it will fix your browser in no time. In the address bar of IE, next to the refresh button, there is a page with a zig-zag through it. Just click that button to enable compatibility mode which should make the browser behave the same way as IE7.

The second method, which I prefer, will make it so any computer with IE8 that connects to your Virtual Server 2005 R2 server will default to compatibility mode. In order to do this, open you IIS administration window. I’m running IIS 7.5 on windows 7, so your’s might look a little different, but the idea is the same.

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