According to Microsoft, it is a supported operation to upgrade a Windows 2008 R2 Domain Controller in place to Windows 2012 Standard (GUI to GUI). But let me warn you - this will most likely fail. I have tried upgrading and after working around some small issues (such as incompatible Anti Virus and some S3 Device Cap driver issue, I finally had no warnings left for the upgrade pre-flight check. It started the upgrade, and rebooted a couple of times. However it never got past "Getting Ready" with the spinning circle. Luckily I could roll back...

In the end to get from Windows Server 2008 R2 PDC with Exchange 2010 to Windows Server 2012 with Exchange 2013 I did the below:

1. Made a good backup of the HyperV VM containing Windows 2008 R2 PDC.
2. Prepared Windows 2008 R2 by running adprep from the Windows 2012 DVD for both forest and domain levels.
3. Ensured Windows 2008 R2 domain is in good health.
4. Created a new virtual machine and installed a clean Windows Server 2012 with GUI.
5. Stopped the Exchange transport service on the 2008 R2 server (to prevent new emails from arriving).
6. Exported all mailboxes using New-MailboxExportRequest cmdlet in EMS to .pst files on the 2008 R2 server.
7. Uninstalled Exchange 2010 (a huge mission since you have to perform a lot of small manual steps).
8. Made the new VM a member server of the domain.
9. Promoted the new server to a domain controller using the server manager (basically, install the AD role and select the Promote to domain controller option at the end) and transferred all FSMO roles making it the new PDC.
10. Fiddled with the DNS settings to ensure the old server now points to the new server, and that the new server points to itself.
11. Set up DHCP on the new server by exporting the configuration from the old server using NETSH DHCP SERVER command and importing it on the new server.
12. While this was ongoing I used robocopy /mir /sec/ secfix to copy all data directories over, including profile folders and folder redirection folders.
13. Recreated all shares on the new server.
14. Renamed old server to a temporary name using netsh, renamed new server to the old server's original name. Also swopped the IP addresses so that the old server's IP address is now the new server's address. This allowed me not to need fiddling with DHCP options and group policies.
15. Installed Exchange 2013 on the new server.
16. Set up send connector, accept domains, external addresses for virtual directories, new SSL certificate, add mailboxes for users in AD.
17. Using New-MailboxImportRequest cmdlet, import the pst files exported earlier. During this time the mail server was already accepting new emails.
18. Demoted the old server from role of domain controller using dcpromo.

When you buy a new car, and you ask the sales person whether you can also get the empty, filthy McDonalds cup inside of it as well, and they bill you $20,000 + $1.50 for the car and the cup, I am pretty sure you would be pissed off.

I have just returned from my LFS (Local Fish Shop), where I purchased $300 of consumables and live stock. Needless to say, I was furious when I saw they charged me $1.95 for a small piece of Bryopsis algae, something that fell off another rock of coral, something considered by everyone in the hobby to be the ultimate pest and that, if found to be present on a rock of coral you are interested in buying, would actually prompt you to reconsider buying the rock.

They charged me $1.95 for a nuisance algae. What a rip off. I was not in the mood for fighting about $1.95 but it sure does change my perception of the store.

The idea of the Dashboard with widgets always accessible by a simple swipe of the mouse has been one of the most useful operating system enhancements on the Mac OS X platform to date for me. I use it extensively to store important notes for client work I perform.

The widget I used to use for this, K-Notes, worked well with the exception that it had no undo/redo facility. That means, if I ever accidentally delete text it is gone forever, a big no-no. So I decided to use SecureNotePadPlus, which worked OK until yesterday. See, I was busy performing hard drive wipes on some old disks laying around when one drive decided to hang the IO bus on the laptop. So I had to hard reboot the mac.

This morning when I tried to add some additional notes to the widget application, I found to my horror that I have lost the past week's information. These notes were extremely important, so I tried to perform a time machine restore of the login Keychain (this is where SecureNotePadPlus stores its notes). I cannot tell you how angry I was when I discovered SecureNotePadPlus does not perform regular flushes to disk of the content stored within it. The last entry was dated 8 January, 4 days old. That is, for 4 days that application stored my notes ONLY IN RAM. It never persisted it to disk, because the machine crash only happened on the 12th. Dashboard widgets are designed to persist state transparently. And even if this widget decided not to adhere to those standards, then there should have been a SAVE button so that I can manually commit the data to disk. It does not have one.