Category: Vista Service Pack 1

After installing SP1 I can no longer access my network shares which contain my Documents. After contacting Microsoft they have concluded that there actually is a change in the way Windows Vista SP1 handle Kerberos communication. The changes affect only when you use Active Directory to store accounts which is then mapped using altSecurityIdentity to use the password from an external Kerberos server. In my case we are using a Heimdal Kerberos server but the problem might affect users of MIT Kerberos as well. Logging in to the Windows system itself is not a problem, the only problem seems to be when accessing file shares (using CIFS).

Until the Heimdal Kerberos is patched to solve this problem there is a work around for the problem. On the client computer you have to add a registry key with your domain name and then add a REG_SZ value named “SpnMappings” with the value “.your.domain.com” in the registry key below:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\ 
Kerberos\HostToRealm\YOUR.DOMAIN.COM

After restarting the computer you can access the network share as expected.

A few nights ago I spent a lot of time on doing some performance tests about Windows Vista Service Pack 1 for publishing in a magazine. I compared several areas such as copying files from hard drive to another hard drive as well as over both wired and wireless networks. I also ran benchmarking tests with 3DMark06 and PCMark05 as well as the FPS-test in Half-Life 2 Lost Coast and finally I compared extracting files from a zip file. I can just say that Vista with SP1 out-performed Vista RTM in all tests, in some tests by far! This is very promising for the final release but on the other hand it is also a sign of the fact that maybe Vista wasn’t so ready to be released in November last year after all?

Anyway, in the test of copying files over the wired network the time it took with Vista RTM was 4 minutes and 4 seconds and with Vista SP1 it was 3 minutes and 9 seconds, quite an improvement. Extracting the files with Vista RTM took 2 minutes and 12 seconds while it just took 1 minute and 25 seconds with Vista SP1. Maybe I ought to run the same tests on my XP installation on the same machine, but do we dare to see that result?

Service Pack 1 beats all previous records of the number of restarts a Service Pack requires. Normally the number of restarts to install a Service Pack is limited to just one (1) restart but with Vista this number is up to almost ten (10) restarts. First, you have to install a number of hot fixes one at a time just to be able to install SP1 as it requires certain fixes to make sure that nothing breaks during SP1. Installing SP1 itself also requires some five restarts or something like that before the installation is finished. As the SP1 is still in beta one could always hope that this number of required restarts would decrease as we reach the final version of SP1 but Microsoft has declined this. But prior to releasing SP1 Microsoft will start shipping the pre-requisite updates via Automatic Updates so that they are installed well in time before SP1 start shipping.