Windows Vista SP2

Today I accidentally found out that Windows Vista SP2 has been released! I was going through my WSUS server and noticed that my machine had a lot of updates outstanding. I then say an entry that said: "Windows Vista Serivce Pack 2 Standalone (KB948465)- English, French, German, Japanse, Spanish"

Well it looks like SP2 was released about 2 weeks ago according to this KB Article.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948465

Anyway I am waiting for my WSUS server to download it so I can install!

Conquest Dicom Server on Windows Vista 64bit

OK after a huge battle, we finally have our 2.8TB disk installed and running. Just to let you know all the various options that we tried check this list out:
System Configuration:

• 4 x 1TB Hard Disk Drives in RAID5 Array (2.8TB) for DICOM data
  
• 1 x 180GB Hard Drive for operating system an applications
  

The things we tried:

• Windows XP - XP Can't see a partition bigger than 1.8 TB
• Windows Vista 32bit - Vista 32bit automatically partitions the drive into 2 partions. There is no option to make a single large partition greater than about 2TB.
• Ubuntu Linux - I could not get the tools on Ubuntu to recognise the RAID array correctly. It could only get it to see about 700GB. If the disk was working I was going to use samba to share the disk and mount it as a network drive on the existing server.
  
• Windows Vista 64bit - Works like a dream.

Conquest Dicom Server installed fine on the 64bit version of Windows Vista. I actually used the same process as describe in my previous post on how to install Conquest Dicom Server on Windows Vista with MySQL Community Edition.

Conquest Server and 2.8TB RAID - The Battle!

Its been some time and we have had many hiccups with our new Conquest Dicom server.
First of all we battled to get 4 x 1TB drives as they seemed to be rare in our part of the world.
We then had some issues as one of the disks failed due to the case being too cramped and hot, so we got a bigger more spacious and cooler case to house the hard drives.
Then we had a problem with Windows Vista not picking up the entire RAID array. It seems as though Windows Vista Business Edition 32bit can only install itself on a partition that is more than 3TB. So then we installed a smaller 160GB disk to run the operating system.
The next problem is that Windows Vista can now recognise the whole RAID array, but it automatically partitions it into a 2TB partition and a 700GB partition. You cannot make the whole disk one partition!
So my current plan now is to retain my old conquest server that is running out of space, install Ubuntu Linux on the 2.8TB drive machine and share the disk. Then mount the disk as a network drive on the original conquest Dicom server and see if that allows us to have the full 2.8TB drive space available for Dicom images.

Some of the other things I thought of doing where the following:

• Setting up multiple smaller conquest servers for each modality.
• Setting up multiple instances of conquest server on a single machine and depending on the AE Title sending the data to different partitions on the disk.
• Using Windows Vista Business Edition 64bit
  

These options although viable did not seem practical for our usage.

The major benefit of this setup is that we are utilising an Open Source OS and therefore we can save some money instead of forking out for Windows. I also think that by using a network share as the primary storage for the Conquest Dicom server we will be able to more easily swap out storage servers in the future by merely adding a new mapping to another server, etc.

Lets hope that Ubuntu does the trick! I am installing it as we speak. (Hold thumbs that the RAID configuration works!)
PS: Raid Calculatator: http://www.ibeast.com/content/tools/RaidCalc/RaidCalc.asp
4 x 931GB HDD in RAID 5 Array = 2.793TB

UltraVNC on Windows Vista

There seem to be a couple of issues with UltraVNC and Windows Vista.
I am currently setting up a Conquest Dicom Server on Windows Vista Business Edition.
I want to use UltraVNC to remotely manage the server.
The problem is that with MySQL I need to disable UAC (User Account Control) which then causes UltaVNC to stop functioning.
Also you can not send the Ctrl. + Alt. + Del. command to Windows Vista with UltraVNC.

I found this article which seems to have the solution.

http://www.uvnc.com/vista/

Getting Conquest Dicom Server to run on Windows Vista with MySQL

This is a brief tutorial on setting up Conquest Dicom Server on Windows Vista Business Edition (32bit) using MySQL Community edition.

Why use Conquest on Vista?
Windows XP has a limitation that only allows the operating system to recognize partions up to around 2 Terabytes. With Windows Vista you can have much larger partitions allowing your Conquest server to store way more data. I am currently testing with a machine that has 4 x 1 TB disks in a RAID 5 array which will result in a partition size of 3 TB.

Installing MySQL 5.1 Community Edition on Windows Vista Business Edition
I could not get the current stable release of MySQL 5.0 to install correctly on Windows Vista.
I kept getting an error when running the configuration utility that said something about "side-by-side" configuration being incorrect. Even with the user account management turned off.

I have found that the Release candidate version of MySQL (5.1.22-RC) installs fine on Windows Vista. You just need to turn off the User Account

Start -> Control Panel -> User Accounts -> User Accounts -> Turn User Account Control on or off.
Uncheck the box and restart Windows
.
Now you can install MySQL on your computer by following the wizard.

You can download MySQL 5.1.22 RC 2 from this link.
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html

I would also suggest that you download the MySQL GUI tools for easy administration of your MySQL database server.
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html

Installing Conquest Dicom Server on Windows Vista Business Edition
Once you have installed MySQL Server 5.1.22 RC you can start the Conquest Dicom server installation.
The standard conquest installation procedure will get you through the rest of the installation.


And just so that you know I also managed to get K-PACS 1.5 running very nicely on Vista without any hassels.