I totally agree with the article written by Bryce Cogswell Published: March 16, 2007 in the Microsoft TechNet. When you have a bunch of machines all configured similarly for either testing, or just a rack of similar machines doing different things. The desktops all start to look the same, especially if you're buring the midnight oil on deadline. It's just all to easy to make a modification to the wrong machine.

Our of self defense I started editing the wall paper with the machine names in my lab, but Microsoft has released a really cool tool that does such things automatically. As an added bonus, if you put it into the scheduler, it will refresh the image periodically with current information on critical items like the amount of free space left. The amount and type of information is configurable during setup.

Neal Allen of Fluke Networks brought this to my attention (thank you Neal) at Interop HotStage. His luggable had it running, and he's setup it up on the desktops of the virtual machines he's got running on the lunchbox luggable the Fluke folk use for testing. Wow, so simple, but yet oh so very useful.

Kudos to the Microsoft folks for a wall paper that totally makes sense.

*NOTE: much thanks to Microsoft for NOT locking down their images on the technet site.

/brian chee

Posted by Brian Chee on April 21, 2007 10:43 AM