As part of the basement build out we included a home theater area (not dedicated in a separate room but perfect for late night movies) as well as zoned audio in some of the other rooms of the house.  For the theater I selected the Marantz SR5003 as the A/V receiver which among all the other great features supports separate zones (up to three I believe depending on configuration).  So far I have been extremely happy with the SR5003 but I did have a bit of trouble getting the zones to work the way I had expected.  For my setup I was looking to utilize only zone A.  The Zone A output channels can use the internal amplifier if 7.1 is not being used or supply line-out if the primary zone is configured as 7.1.  One thing to note here is even if you are using the pre-outs into an external amplifier you will still not get the powered channels for the secondary zone if all 7 pre-out channels are used (this was confirmed by Marantz support). In my case my theater is configured as 7.1 but the zoned system I am using expects line-out only so no issue here however I was still having trouble sending any audio signals from the receiver to any of my zones.  After much searching I came across the answer to my problem.  The Marantz supports both analog (zone A) as well as digital (zone B) signals to the secondary zones. I was using the analog outputs for zone A but all of my inputs were digital and it turns out only analog inputs are supported for the analog output in zone A.  I did not see anything related to this in the documentation and maybe if I sit down and think for a bit it would make perfect sense but thanks to a great Multi-zone flowchart which made mention of this fact I was able to get the zoned audio working the way I had expected.  I still want to try a few other configurations when I get a chance but progress is good!

Yesterday I was working on polishing up some demos I will be using in my upcoming session at the Regional SharePoint Users Conference 2009 at the end of June and all of a sudden I was unable to authenticate to any of the SharePoint sites running in my VM except for Central Admin; I would get prompted for credentials (this was automatically propagating not too long ago) but would end up in an endless cycle getting nowhere fast. Looking at the difference between Central Admin and the other sites provides a clue to what was happening, I access the Central Admin site using the name of the server (DEMOSERVER in this case) but I access the other sites using FQDNs registered in a local DNS (such as staging.demo.local).  I recalled an email a colleague, Bob German, had recently sent out with the same issue which I had apparently deleted but luckily Ed Hild had a copy and indeed Bob’s fix worked for me.  So it seems an update was pushed down to my VM when I was converting over to run in Hyper-V (I enabled the extern NIC to get the latest SDK downloaded) and this update tightened security for loopback requests to FQDNs.  The fix for this is described in the KB article linked below.  If you are having some strange authentication issues for requests within the context of the same machine (I have seen others experience this issue with the search crawler and Forms Services) this may be the ticket.

You receive error 401.1 when you browse a Web site that uses Integrated Authentication and is hosted on IIS 5.1 or IIS 6

Basically there are two options, disable the loopback check or store each FQDN on the machine.  I experimented with adding each FQDN to the registry vs. simply disabling the loopback check but it appears wildcards are not supported (*.demo.local) and since I add new sites and FQDNs fairly regularly during demos this approach didn’t work for me.  Also, you will notice the KB does not reference Server 2008 or IIS 7 but the issue occurred and the fix worked for me in a Server 2008 environment

I have had good intention to start blogging for some time if for nothing else to help me build a reference of projects and interests I can refer back to over time.  I have gotten started a few times over the years but something else always seems to come up and I am ultimately sidetracked to more important matters and the discipline of posting in a timely fashion is quickly lost.  Case in point, I setup this blog over a year ago and after spending a good bit of time putting together a theme and tracking down add-ins never actually got around to posting anything.  A bit later I updated to the latest version of BlogEngine.NET but still nothing.  Well, I am going to give it another go.  I recently finished up two big projects, my MS in Software Engineering and conversion of our basement from a concrete cave into great hang-out pad, so I now have a bit more time on my hands.  The basement has been a big project and we still have a few items to finish up (we may never actually be completely done).  I plan some detailed postings for a few of the more interesting aspects of what we have done but I thought adding a few pictures here would be a good start. 

Hopefully this will not be the last post and I will be able to provide something of use to someone or at least a good reference library for myself.

Cheers!