Here are the latest networking-related Knowledge Base articles for the week of February 28 through March 6, 2010:
980027 A Windows Server 2008 domain controller cannot allocate new ports when Server for NIS is running
978856 Error message when you try to start the Server service in Windows Server 2008 R2: "The network path was not found"
979791 A computer that is running Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7 cannot come out of quarantine if you install the System Center Configuration Manager System health agent on the computer
980877 Certificate store types are truncated when you create a new connection security rule in some non-English versions of Windows 7
980873 A computer cannot identify the network when the computer is running Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, or Windows Server 2008 R2, and is a member of a child domain
- Mike Platts
This article originally appeared on the Networking Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/networking
I suppose we'd better need here one article per topic updated regularly (e.g.: “Networking-related KBs”) rather than a series of separate articles published regularly (e.g.: “Networking-related KBs for just another period”).
Here are a couple of examples of what I personally suppose Wiki is perfect for:
1. social.technet.microsoft.com/.../list-of-microsoft-support-knowledge-base-articles-related-to-microsoft-virtualization-technologies-for-2010.aspx
2. pronichkin.com/.../Post.aspx
(The later link will be transferred into Wiki completely as quickly as we fix some annoying technical issues described at social.technet.microsoft.com/.../89d2395f-49d6-4984-bbc0-29bfd1aebef7).
I think these work well on a blog, which you already post them on. But I'm not sure of the benefit of putting them on the wiki. The community can't really add or improve this content in any way.
Why not? I would love if I could add lines to the table in support.microsoft.com/.../968429 instead of reinventing the wheel and starting my own table in the blog (pronichkin.com/.../Post.aspx).
You know, I'm not Microsoft employee so I have no access to your internal tools. So I can be never sure whether my table is comprehensive and presents the whole picture. So if it was on Wiki, someone else could edit my table and add some missing info. I think it would be great.
My concern is how the topics are scoped. I don't know how many Windows networking KBs we published versus Hyper-V articles, but at some point, a list of either one of them is going to get unwieldy at some point. Blogging the new KBs from the previous week serves to get that content in front of more people. But lets say you have a list of a 100 networking KB articles. At some point you are just creating a monster list of KBs that few people are reasonably going to look over. I'm not sure where that line is. So I guess the question is - what purpose does a list of KBs serve, and is that lost at some point when you reach X number of articles?
Well, I tend to agree that a list of 100 KB titles is something not okay—if you just want to keep track of them. And it would be not easy to watch for updates of this long list. So a blog is a better place to publish “incremental” lists of KBs.
But think of another two cases.
1. I'm looking for a resolution for a specific complex problem. But I can't trace its root cause and neither can I formulate it more or less specifically. So I can't find the particular relevant KB by using just a search engine. I'd be happy if there were an up-to-date list of KBs related to a specific technology—so that I could read through it no matter how long it is. Current KB site lacks the ability to filter for a list of KBs by related technology, so I believe it's a huge gap. And it’s better to fill this need manually then not fill at all.
2. The list is not so large. Let's say we're interested in not any KBs, but only those which contain hotfixes. And only those related to a very specific technology (like DFS-R). KB site also lacks the ability to filter for these types of KBs, so that's another important gap. Look at my blog post — there's just a dozen of DFSR-related hotfixes issued for the current milestone (i.e. service pack level). So why not have a list of those? If you tried to post “incremental” updates to this list it would be very infrequent so nobody would watch it specifically.