Today I had a problem. At work we had a SCSI Raid controller that failed and we lost a logical device. Man I was pissed off! On top of this the raid was RAID 0 (striped), meaning there was no chance of getting any data back. This was the drive(s) hosting the OS which we had to reinstall :-( Anyway, this resulted in me having to spend quite some time in a freezing and noisy server room fixing the problems. While doing stuff like this (reinstalling OS, software and a pointless effort of restoring data) there is a bit of waiting time, so I figured I might as well work on our new server waiting to get TFS 2008 up and running. A brand new server (see spec below) dedicated to protect the heart of our company; the source code!

So I started digging around for the TFS 2008 DVD, knowing it should be on my desk with the MSDN subscription we get through the Microsoft Gold Partner program, but it was nowhere to be found. After a call to MSDN it turns out that the DVD's are now being shipped to our headquarters in Oslo, which was the case for TFS 2008 as well, but they couldn't find it. The guy who knew was of course away that day. You might wonder why not download? Well, you can't. TFS versions available on MSDN subscription is only Workgroup and trial editions.

My last attempt before giving the whole thing up was calling my friend John from NNUG and ask if they had a DVD I could use. He had a much better idea:

"Just use the trial and upgrade with your key at a later time".

Dooh! Why didn't I think of that. Check out Brian Harry's blog for more details: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/11/22/2008-installation-questions.aspx

Server spec:

• HP ProLiant DL380 G5 Intel® Xeon® E5440 Quad Core Processor 2.83 GHz 12MB 2GB 1P Rack Server
• HP 4 GB PC2 5300 DDR2 DIMM Memory
• 6 HP 72GB 2.5 inch 15K rpm Hot Plug DP SAS Hard Drives
• 2 HP 146GB 2.5 inch 10K rpm Hot Plug DP SAS Hard Drives

I think this should keep our source code safe for a while...