Absoblogginlutely

Exchange 2007 Migration is almost done.

The migration from NT4 and Exchange 5.5 to Exchange2007 and Windows 2003 is almost done. This weekend was the installation of Exchange 2007 and the move of mailboxes. Unfortunately it did not go to plan. Upromote worked great on the first server that needed the software and after two or three reboots it was acting as a member server. The second server however did not go well. Instead the server bluescreened in the middle of the process and I was left with a server that was neither in a domain or in a workgroup.  The logon box did not include the domain option but the local SAM was corrupted and wouldn't let me login. As the machine was out of the domain I couldn't connect to it remotely apart from ping activity. After struggling for a long time with a multitude of recovery tools we ended up with a parallel installation of NT4 on the machine so that we could access the data on the drives. This was not without hassles - the RAID controller drivers would not recognise the disk in NT4 - you would have thought that downloading the drivers for the raid controller that appears in the BIOS boot would work but nope - we had to use different drivers!  I tried to access the machine using Microsoft's Dart Tool - the rebranded ERD commander, but this tool doesn't support NT - in the end I had to go back to ERD Commander 2002 to get a version that worked with NT4 (although it didn't actually help). The parallel installation of NT also needed SQL 7 reinstalling but this needed ie4 installed (and where do you get *that* from?)  Fortunately it would also accept IE6 too.

Installing the Exchange2007 sp1 was not a fun experience either - the process stopped half way through with an error saying that a file was in use and that I needed to reboot the server to continue. When I did so, the installation would not continue as all of the Exchange services and several other essential windows services had been set to disabled by the previous installation and the upgrade needs the Information Store to be running. As the other services were stopped the machine acted like it was behind a firewall - you were not able to ping out or into it. Setting all the services to automatic and then starting them got through this problem - I had to boot up my Virtual Exchange 2007 server to see which disabled services should normally be running though. I actually had to try the upgrade about 3 times before I got through with no errors but the whole experience made SQL2005 look stable.

Now I am having major trouble getting the remote outlook clients to connect through to the exchange 2007 server using RPC over HTTPS - it worked great with the Exchange 2003 server but just will not work with Exchange 2007 - if you have any bright ideas then let me know - tomorrow I'll be logging a call with Microsoft for some assistance.

At the end of the weekend I felt like I had installed every piece of Microsoft software just to get Exchange migrated onto new servers. I have got some great ideas for future migrations and I know that I don't want to repeat the process sometime soon!

Then to top it all off, the advert shown in this blog post arrived stuck to the front cover of my Technet magazine today - talk about bad timing.  Having said that, I have received the white paper and I don't think we'd use their services as it sounds expensive. The advice was pretty basic but did include the steps of removing old mailboxes and cleaning up the database. One REALLY annoying thing to see when you are moving mailboxes on a weekend without pay is a lot of "moving 1 of 3654 spam messages" and "moving 3 of 12876 deleted items".  I had told the users to delete these items before the upgrade but this hadn't been done.  I think next time I will include a step of telling the users to delete their spam, junk and deleted items BEFORE the upgrade as it will be done as part of the upgrade "automatically" (and if anyone has a tool that will walk through a message store deleting items in the spam, junk and deleted items then let me know)

Exchange server upgrade - pt 2

This weekend was meant to be the second stage in a NT4 and Exchange 5.5 migration to Windows 2003, Exchange 2007. This process has been a big nightmare so far - this weekend wasn't helped by the cd being unreadable by any of the machines (although you could see *some* files the setup program wouldn't completely launch.)
Trying to think of an alternative solution I wondered if the trial version of Exchange that is downloadable from Microsoft would work. However, although Microsoft say you can actually use a purchased key on the trial version, the only trial version available is 32bit and the only supported version of exchange is 64bit. The other problem is that the 64bit version is a 5.5GB DVD so not something you can easily download on a T1 connection :-)
Eventually we managed to get a copy of the DVD from another branch of the company and I started the install process. Unfortunately it was then that I discovered that you can only install Exchange 2007 into a Native mode AD. Initially I thought it just had to be higher than 2000. Unfortunately as I'm doing an upgrade from Windows NT domain to Active Directory I still had NT4 domain controllers from the original installation and these are not machines that the client is willing to remove. So I'm now stuck with a half finished migration.
Currently my two solutions are to split the nt4 domain controllers into their own separate LAN and then remove the records for the W2k3 servers and delete the NT4 servers from the AD LAn - this should work as the 2 domain controllers are just serving as standalone machines now so don't really need clients to connect to them but their services are needed.
The other solution (which might be more graceful) is to use upromote to demote the nt4 servers to member servers only. At $99 per server this will be more cost efficient and graceful than splitting the network into 2 lans.

I must say that this whole 5.5 to Exchange 2007 is not an easy migration by any stretch of the imagination and I would certainly not recommend that you try and do it over two consecutive windows - especially if your original NT servers provide extra services to your existing network.

Dell Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA) alert setup

As mentioned in a previous post, we have several Dell servers that have Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA) setup and one of the features of this software is the ability to setup alerts whenever an issue is detected by the built in monitoring system.  In the new version, 5.3, even more alerts have been enabled - mainly in the area of storage management.  To edit this setup you typically go to the website hosting the Server Administrator, log in and then set up all the alerts. Each alert is setup individually and takes several mouse clicks. One to open up the alert, one to select the alert process's, another to click apply and then another to click the Go Back to Alert Settings.  This is really inefficient and obviously takes a very long time to set this up on multiple servers. The process described in the extended entry below describes how you can set this up, quickly and efficiently by importing the same settings to your servers each time they are set up. Little customization needs to be done on each server but full instructions are provided.

First, ensure that you are running the latest version of OMSA. At time of writing this is version 5.3. I recommend you download it as part of the Dell Systems Management: Dell DVD ISO as this DVD can also be used to install the latest firmware patches.

Secondly, it is highly recommended that a batch file (or exe file) is used to do the alerts. By passing parameters from the OMSA application this stub batch file can do all the alerting for you. In this document I recommend you create a batch file called dellalert.bat, stored in c:\jobs on the server that includes the following lines. Blat must be downloaded and installed as per the instructions in the file. You need to specify your smtp mail server and the email address that you wish your alerts to come from. This batch file creates a log file and sends alerts to an email address (the mail parameter) and optionally to a pager/sms/on call email address if the first parameter passed to the batch file is the letter p (in lower case).

The companyname is specified in the script file so that the email alert message contains the company name in the subject of the email - useful for distinguishing servers if you monitor several companies each with a server called server01!

@echo off
::Dell alert program
::Set variables below as appropriate
::needs blat downloaded (http://tinyurl.com/2qdxea) and setup to mail to the local server. Put blat.exe in the system path
::use "blat -install smtpservername fromalertemailaddress@company.com" to set this up
@echo on
setlocal
set log=c:\jobs\dell.txt
set pager=destinationpageraddress@company.com
set mail=destinationemailaddress@company.com
set company=Companyname
set server=%hostname%
date /t >%log%
time /t >>%log%
echo %* >>%log%
if {%1}=={p} blat %log% -to %pager% -subject "%company% %server% alert - %*"
if not {%1}=={} blat %log% -to %mail% -subject "%company% %server% alert - %*"
endlocal

The program works by creating a log file with the current date and time. The details passed in the OMSA screen are then fed into the log file. The log file is then sent via blat to the pager if the first parameter of the batch file is a lower case p. The log file is then also sent via email as long as there is a parameter passed. This is a failsafe trick to prevent an error if the batch file is double clicked by accident.

Thirdly OMSA needs to be configured to send alerts as required. You could use the web page, but we are trying to automate this. Check that OMSA is installed on the server and functioning correctly by typing "omconfig" at a dos prompt. As long as this returns a syntax statement, the next set of lines can be entered.

Note that these lines are suitable for *my* environment. You may wish to miss some of these lines out or edit them as you wish. The segment below includes all of the alertactions that are currently available in OMSA 5.3. I also do not use the Broadcast event or the message on the console as I do not want to panic the users and there is nobody at the console 99.9% of the time. However these options could be added by extra lines added to the group. The broadcast line would be similar to "omconfig system alertaction event=powersupply broadcast=true" - see the omconfig online manual for more details.

From a dos prompt, enter the following lines, edited as you see fit. If you do customize these lines I strongly recommend you save the settings to a batch file that can be run on all server setups - this will enforce consistency across your servers.

omconfig system alertaction event=batterywarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p battery probe warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= batteryfail execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p battery probe failure"
omconfig system alertaction event= fanwarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert fan probe warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= fanfail  execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p fan probe failure"
omconfig system alertaction event= hardwarelogwarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert hardware log warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= hardwarelogfull  execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p hardware log failure"
omconfig system alertaction event= intrusion  execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert chassis intrusion detected"
omconfig system alertaction event= memprefail execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p memory prefailure"
omconfig system alertaction event= memfail execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p memory failure"
omconfig system alertaction event= systempowerwarn   execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p  system power warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= systempowerfail   execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p   system power warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= powersupply execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p psu critical"
omconfig system alertaction event= powersupplywarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert  p psu warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= processorwarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p processor warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= processorfail execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p processor failure"
omconfig system alertaction event= redundegrad execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p redundancy degraded"
omconfig system alertaction event= redunlost execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p redundancy lost"
omconfig system alertaction event= tempwarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p temp probe warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= tempfail execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p temp probe failure"
omconfig system alertaction event= voltwarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert voltage probe warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= voltfail execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p voltage probe failure"
omconfig system alertaction event= watchdogasr execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert Watchdog ASR"
omconfig system alertaction event= storagesyswarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p storage system warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= storagesysfail execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p storage system failure"
omconfig system alertaction event= storagectrlwarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p storage controller warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= storagectrlfail execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p storage controller failure"
omconfig system alertaction event= pdiskwarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p physical disk warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= pdiskfail execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p physical disk failure"
omconfig system alertaction event= vdiskwarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p virtual disk warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= vdiskfail execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p virtual disk failure"
omconfig system alertaction event= enclosurewarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p enclosure warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= enclosurefail execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p enclosure failure"
omconfig system alertaction event= storagectrlbatterywarn execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p storage ctrl battery warning"
omconfig system alertaction event= storagectrlbatteryfail  execappath="c:\jobs\dellalert p storage ctrl battery failure"

Once this is complete, double check the OMSA Console. The Alert Management interface should show all the alerts with a tick in the Execute Application column as below.

Click on one of the names, such as Watchdog ASR to check that the batch command is correct as in the screenshot below

Hopefully this tutorial has made life easier and enables you to setup your Dell server in a consistent manner and quickly.  Note that I am not responsible for any loss or damage that may result from you using this tutorial. I do not have time to support the setup of OMSA, if you have issues then contact Dell support however I will try to help on this blog post if at all possible.

Dell Firmware and software update DVD

If you have several Dell servers (or even just one server) then I would highly recommend downloading the Systems Management Dell DVD. Inserting this DVD in the server drive will then show you a list of all the firmware, drivers and software that needs to be updated on the server. This is a great tool for ensuring that your Dell server is up to date and you don't need to download all the patches each time on the server or even worry about where they are located on the Dell website. I find it really difficult to work out which files are needed and this DVD is really helpful. Included on the DVD is the OpenManage 5.3 suite of software that came out fairly recently. Note that if you install it then you will want to go back to the alerts page as there maybe new alert categories.

I know IBM do a similar service as I used to use it when installing Netfinity servers and I assume HP does too.

Incidentally I found out about this by subscribing to the Dell Technical Update Subscriptions

70-290 passed.

My passing score was 928 (pass was 700) so I passed comfortably - which is a very nice feeling and something I've maintained in all the exams I've taken with Microsoft so far. I now have 1 more to go and then I get my MCSA exam. This exam was quite different to the ones I've done before - there were 45 questions and about 10 (or more) were simulation exams. Personally I like these questions as it's a lot easier to recognise the process needed to go through as opposed to the previous "drag and drop to put in order" box questions where you have to remember the exact wording on the dialog boxes that in real life you pay little attention to as you use them every day.
After 20 questions the screen froze, for ever, and ever and ever. Eventually I went out to see the receptionist but when I came back the machine was waiting for the next question - it takes a long time to load some of the simulation questions. I was really nervous at this point as the first 20 questions were easy and I was confident I had about 19 of them correct. I really didn't want to start again.
After this scare the questions seemed to get harder but a lot of them were similar to the questions in the official MS press books and there were some questions I had seen that were identical to various test prep software solutions although I didn't use the MeasureUp software for this exam which I have used in the past. Now it's onto 70-291....

0xe00084af failure in symantec backup exec caused by wsus 3 installation

Fixed! One of my servers has been failing to backup with the error "0xe00084af The directory or file was not found, or could not be accessed. Final error category: Job Errors. For additional information refer to link V-79-57344-33967" I spent ages troubleshooting the errors and trying to work out what was going on and found that it would fail to backup any file on the local hard disk of the machine.
I posted a note in the symantec forums and didn't hear anything back, but did find a post that upgrading to 10d might fix it (not a current solution as this would mean purchasing an upgrade of the software for the exchange agent and the exchange agent is currently working)
The other solution was to stop SQL servers on the box. This server was the WSUS box and I had also recently upgraded it to version 3 of WSUS. This created (at least) two new services - SQL Server VSS Writer and Windows Internal Database (Microsoft ##SSEE). Through trial and error I discovered that stopping the SQL Server VSS Writer service meant the backup would work, which is weird as why this should affect me backing up something like c:\jobs\fred.bat which has nothing to do with SQLI don't know.
I'm hoping that my forum posting about the problem will get a better solution but for now I'm just pleased to be able to backup my file server.

Sema4 drop down lists slow?

We had a customer who had a new installation of Sema4 (accounting and timesheets package) installed on a new pc and the performance of the software was abysmal in some cases. It was reported to me that if they opened the package and selected timesheets and then selected the employee drop down list, there would be a long wait for the dropdown box to appear and the program would appear to hang. I timed it and it took 7 minutes (for about 50 users) for the dropdown box to appear after it was clicked when the timesheet screen was first loaded.
The very strange solution is posted in the extended entry....

Several calls to technical support to try and troubleshoot the issue and we were not getting very far. However I noticed this afternoon that if I went into timesheets, clicked the dropdown menu and then went into another window, then went back into timesheets the dropdown box was populated immediately.
I then discovered that it didn't matter what the first window was that popped up, the drop down boxes would "hang" until another window was opened and then the first window reacted correctly.
I called the support line, gave them my account number and the tech seemed to have an understanding about my problem and told me to change my windows theme to classic instead of Windows XP as this was likely the culprit AND to click in the empty space in the Sema4 window - when I did so, everything worked as normal. I was pretty confused as to why the theme was the culprit so after I was off the phone with support I set the theme back and reloaded Sema4. Loading the initial window and then clicking in the empty space of the mdi application and then clicking on the dropdown box, everything worked as expected.
This is the weirdest bug I've ever seen - just in case anyone else is having the same problem I've included a dummy screenshot outlining the areas of the application.

MDI mockup. Hosted on Zooomr

Symantec Tech Support phone number

United States Technical Support - Phone: 800 342 0652 or 407 357 7600. Be prepared for a long wait

Blackberry at work

We got Blackberry 8703e leashes at work on Friday afternoon so I've spent quite a bit of time over the weekend playing around with the functionality and working out how to do things. It's a shame that their legal department spends more time writing a HUGE software licence and warranty booklet - 133 pages in all the different languages yet the getting started manual is only 51 pages, 10 of those are the terms and conditions. Strangely enough there is no mention of how long to keep the blackberry charged before using it or any instructions as to the various lights on the device, normally there are warnings of dire consequences and doom if batteries are not charged for 18 hours OR MORE!

Although I like the device, I've yet to work out some very strange things it does. I spent a while playing around with the alarm yesterday and couldn't get it to play a tune. At church this morning I put it on silent mode, and the alarm went off, with tune *just* before the service started even though it was in silent mode. I think this is due to the fact the alarm settings only get read at a certain time and not every minute. Setting an alarm for 3.02 when it is 3.01 doesn't work but setting an alarm for 3.03 does work (a useful thing to know but every other device i've ever used will set an alarm for the following minute.)
The device doesn't have a voice recorder in it OR voice activated dialing, something which is critical for my use - I often need to dial a number stored in memory and the voice activated dialing on the Motorola was great - didn't even need to train it to understand my strange accent. I use the voice recorder on the phone to make notes of when I leave my clients to aid in filling out my time sheet at the end of the day, so this is another feature I'm going to miss.
I do like the ability to use it as a modem with the laptop as this will mean we have net access almost anywhere. The speeds not great but it is certainly useful.
The google applications, maps, email and talk work well - very impressed with those so far - although we don't have the gps tracking built in, google maps would help you get to a destination if you had someone who could push the next button every time you got to a certain stage in the route and could read the directions. But I have a proper GPS for that so it's not that important. Apparently the gps tracking function would cost $10 per phone per month.
I'm waiting to get mail on the device as we will be getting an enterprise server to cope with our Lotus Notes server (I'm still struggling as to why RIM decided it needed something like this when Windows Mobile devices can talk directly to exchange servers) but it did sync the calendar, tasks and other stuff up ok which was good.

Lotus Notes Productivity

I've been doing a lot of research,reading and studying in improving my productivity and time management recently. This morning I came across the Getting Things Done with Lotus Notes document which really strikes me as an oxymoron. Notes seems to be the most counterproductive piece of software out there and it is not helping me in my productivity. So maybe I'll get this document to see how it should be done.
One of the things that I picked up from one of the books was to use 1 calendar for everything which is ok if you are single and don't have a spouse that also needs to see your calendar but they don't work for your company and have access. As we both have google accounts, I thought that syncing the Notes calendar to google calendar would work as then my wife can see the google calendar and we could both use the calendars to ensure we didn't doublebook events. I did find the Companion Link for Google Calendar software but it doesn't work very well.
The synchronization takes forever (when it does work) and I've ended up with duplicate entries in google but with different times - 1 hour apart I could understand due to some funky dst issues, but these are a couple of hours apart. Recurring appointments are not supported (although recurring appointments that have been canceled appeared in gmail but active recurring appointments didn't)
Still, at least I now have a base copy in Google calendar which I will hopefully be able to keep up to date.

Verizon Wireless software

Verizon software can be dowloaded from vzam.net for the pcmcia card - useful to know as it doesn't seem to be easily found on the main Verizon website

Friends In Tech Puzzler

I've posed a puzzler at Friends In Tech about an issue I had when upgrading a NT4 domain to Small Business Server 2003. It will be interesting to see if anyone comes up with the correct answer but also to get some responses from other techs and hopefully it will encourage conversations on the website and forums.

Timeslips configuration/installation issue.

If you get the message "Another program is accessing your timeslips database in a way that prevents you from accessing it" then (in my case) the solution is as follows.

On the machine that is not having the problem, click on start/all programs/time slips/Station Administrator. Click on Help/About and make a note of the *install folder*. In my opinion this should really be named the config folder!
On the pc that is having the problem, do the same thing and you will find that the install folder is different (possibly c:\program files\timeslips).
Click on Options menu and then Change Database location - browse to the folder that was on the working pc and select the timeslips.cfg file.
Click ok (or done) and restart timeslips. You may be prompted to upgrade/update the timeslips data and then your timeslips data will be accessible again.

The menu names above are taken from memory but should be sufficient to get you working again. PS Sage's phone support is 800 555 2542 but you will need a support contract.

Belated Happy Christmas!

Sorry this is late but I hope everyone had a great Christmas and have a wonderful new year....
I came down with a cold on the Wednesday before Christmas after working 12 hours in a cold airconditioned room and catching it from Kristen on the Monday previous. The annoying thing was that my throat was sore for 2 days and I knew the cold was on it's way but it took ages before it started to hit in earnest. I was off sick on Thursday and Friday (but still got calls from work) and Saturday and Sunday I was still coughing and sneezing a little (and still got calls from work). Sunday I felt much better and we had 2 christmas services which were nice although the evening service was not very well attended - I think most people had either settled in for the evening or had gone to visit family and friends. (We had to drive back from some friends after spending a wonderful afternoon laughing at "my little ghetto pony" - a pony made from a plastic toy box upended with a pompom tail, cucumber neck and a lambs head - a very funny frankenstein contraption but the child loved it).
Monday was Christmas day, of course, and we opened presents at our house (well some of them- the order I placed with Shutterfly for Kristen's present didn't turn up until Boxing Day despite ordering it before the cutoff and paying for priority handling) and then headed over to her parents for Lunch - fondue and tea - Egg Rolls and English Apple Pie - hardly the traditional Christmas Meal. I enjoyed the meal but it did feel weird not having Roast Turkey and all the trimmings, Christmas Cake and Baked Alaska (the latter we had for Thanksgiving instead). Thankfully there were no calls from work.
Tuesday (yesterday) was meant to be a day off from work as the office was closed but started with pages from work as the monitoring system detected a customers box down - turns out that isp hosting their dns had both dns servers unavailable and there was no 24 hour support or phone number easily visible on the website and there was still an hour to go for the company to start work. Eventually one of the dns servers came back online so they were ok (although the customer was actually ok as their outgoing access was fine - just incoming mail and web hosting was unreachable by name). At the same time I had calls about the phone system from another company (this phone system has been in for 13 months and I am still debugging, supporting and fixing it on a daily basis) and several helpdesk tickets that needed answering to as they weren't taken care of whilst I was off sick.
Eventually I was able to unplug the laptop and go out to Microcenter to get a new computer, monitor and peripherals for us - more on that later.......
So today is Wednesday, I woke up early and I have no idea what is in store for me at the office today - should be interesting.....
Friday we are off to a wedding so a very short work week! (Thats the good great news)

Published in a book

Ages ago I wrote a feature on how to backup a cpanel account. Just recently one of my clients purchased a dedicated server that uses cpanel as the website hosting manager. I purchased cpanelAric's cpanel userguide and tutorial book to assist with learning some of the more obscure features and functions and as I was reading through the book I got to page 93 - and my site is quoted as a way to backup the system - how cool is that!
Naturally I now have to go back and make sure that the script still works and make any changes necessary.

1 year anniversary

Monday was my one year anniversary of working in the United States. A lot of things have happened since then and I now have the fun task of filling out a review. This blog should help me remember what I've been up to in the past year, after all there are 40 posts in the work category but only 17 in the past year. There are a lot more things that I'd have liked to have blogged about but due to confidentiality reasons (or that I just want to keep my job!) I've not been able to blog about them.

Slimtimer

Slimtimer may be a great tool for those of you who need (or like) to keep a track of things that you are doing during the day. A web page app that keeps track of what you are doing automatically (as long as you click to stop or start a task) and gives you nice reports at the end of various time periods. I'm going to try using this for work for the next couple of days to see how it goes and see if it will help keep my time sheet uptodate. Currently I use a paper based system, but it only gives me details when I fill it in (not always by the computer) and this means I can run it from any computer that I have access to. Of course it doesn't solve the problem of tracking things that happen offline like lunch/travel/ etc but it should hopefully be a start. Thanks to Joe for the information on this one

Sysinternals licences

Sysinternals have finally got back to me with details on their consulting licence for their tools - a while back Sysinternals changed their licencing terms for their software which meant that use by a consultant would require payment for a commercial licence. I heard back from them today that $200 per technician per year gives you the right to use the software on any computer - but you do need to remove it when you have finished with it. I don't think that price is unreasonable considering the power of the software, but it remains to be seen whether work will pay for it - or whether we'll have to use alternatives....

Debugging BSOD Dumps

I've only had to do this once, but debugging memory dumps would have been a helpful guide.

Microsoft USB disk doesn't turn up :-(

I got an email on Friday from Microsoft with the following - "Thank you for your interest in the Mystery Solved Windows® licensing promotion. We've received your request for more information to help clarify Microsoft® Windows Desktop Licensing pre-loaded on the USB drive. Unfortunately, this Mystery Solved promotion was available in the U.S. only and while supplies last. Supply is depleted at this time, so we encourage you to please utilize the online alternative today.
Simply download* the Windows Desktop Licensing reference files directly at:www.microsoft.com/mysterysolved/corp. Oh well :-(

Rewards!

Two weeks ago I got the honour of being the employee of the quarter from work which I am pretty chuffed about ;-) Thankfully I didn't have to give an acceptance speech as there would have been too many people to thank. As a prize I was firstly awarded a Batbelt - complete with (nonworking GPS). This was because of the gps but mainly because of the fact that I always have a software tool to solve a computer problem and it's become the joke to ask if I have a tool on my batbelt for a particular problem. Needless to say, everyone thought it was funny so I proudly hooked it up to the top of my cubicle to be on display - this also means the little dart gun is close at hand in case I need to ward off a particular nasty case of job sloping.

I also received an avaya t-shirt - again a gag gift - as I have done so much work on the avaya phone system that support should really be doing, that everyone thinks I am an avaya employee now! (incidentally I got a compliment from the tech I was working with last night (on our third firmware upgrade to solve persistent phone problems) when he said it was nice to work with a customer who actually knew their way around a computer and could help in the diagnostic problems)

The third gift was two tickets for the North Market 10th annual Apron Gala which we went to on Saturday night. The event was really good fun with loads of posh food to try out. We didn't stay right to the end but did enjoy being there at the beginning when there wasn't too many people around. One of the most popular stalls was Bob the fish guy who had two huge containers of shrimp which were really nice - lots of people made several trips to that stall! The picture framing stall had a caricaturist doing pictures so Kristen and I got ours done as you can see on the left - click for a bigger picture. We also purchased two aprons as our donation towards the event - the pockets in the apron were great for keeping napkings, forks and a cup handy whilst walking around.

Kristen also got me a congratulations cookie biscuit (thanks Rob!) which we are now half way through - thanks luv!

More online publishing.

My tip on passwords was published in redmond magazine the other week and is available online. Shouldn't be too hard to work out which tip I posted. Note to current employers - doesn't mean that I'm using this function now - especially as Symantec Antivirus is crazy enough to think that certain tools are virus's and deletes them!

New car!

The new company car arrived at the office today - they've got one of the horrible looking boxes with wheels on - aka scion. Admittedly, with the smart wheels and rear bumper that it has, it doesn't look that bad - and the advantage of the boxiness is that it has plenty of room for signage on the car. When I looked through the window I was a bit worried as it only had a cd player - no use for my mp3 player, but was then told it would play mp3 cd's - which was good news. Even better is that it has a 3.5mm jack to plug the mp3 player into AND a cradle to hold it in place - sweet! The car doesn't have cruise control which was a suprise as nearly every car has cruisecontrol over here but driving around columbus it's pretty rare that you get to use cruisecontrol anyway. The boot was suprisingly small for a boxy car, but I think thats because there is a fair amount of room for the rear passengers - but the seats can be folded down for storage and carrying servers, printers and the other tech stuff we lug around. I've yet to drive it - that'll be later this week or early next week so I can't comment on the driving but apparently it is pretty good. It's white (at the moment) and thats all the important things on a car covered - I have no idea on the engine size, rpm, bhp or any of that other stuff.

6 months.

In a meeting today I got asked if I knew what Sunday was - I had no idea until it was pointed out to me that it was my 6 month anniversary of working for the company. There is still some discussion over whether this is a bi-annual event or not (as noone can agree on whether biweekly means twice a week or every other week - personally I solve the problem by saying a fortnight but people have no idea what that means). Anyway, I've been there for 6 months so now have my review coming up. I must say it's been a very fast 6 months - I've learnt a lot, gained several qualifications, had a couple of late night pages, had some good laughs and been very productive. I wonder whats going to happen in the next 6 months........

Group policy problems with printing.

I'm having a problem where ctrl-p doesn't work in a kiosk mode machine with group policy restrictions and wonder if anyone has a clue? I've posted this to google groups.

I have a group policy enabled for a particular user for a locked down, kiosk user interface in a public area. Currently in *some* web pages the ctrl-P shortcut key will work, but on other web pages nothing happens when ctrl-p is pressed. Other shortcut keys such as ctrl-h, ctrl-r, ctrl-w activate properly (in the case of ctrl-w this option complains that the user does not have access to close the window).
We are running internet explorer as the shell in kiosk mode, but removing the kiosk mode doesn't make any difference. Likewise, we have disabled the toolbar, but adding the toolbar back and enabling the print button also does not make any difference - the print dialog box never appears on certain web sites.

www.msn.com, http://travel.msn.com/default.aspx both work but http://travel.msn.com/New_York_City_New_York_State_list_entitylist_attractions_23164_2.aspx or http://www.helsby.net or http://absoblogginlutely.net doesn't. There are a lot more sites that do/don't work but these are just a couple of examples.

Anyone come across this problem before?
I've uploaded the resultant set of policies wizard output to http://absoblogginlutely.net/test/lock.htm - the only thing I've done is change the domain name for security reasons.

New phone

I got a new phone at work the other day - a Samsung SGH D357. I'm not that impressed with it so far. I do love the fact that when the headset is connected you hear an incoming call ring before it answers. On the previous motorola phone I had it would just autoanswer with no ringing - not a good idea when singing along to the radio in the car.

The bad side of the headset is that it is not compatible with any of the standard 2.5mm jack headsets you normally have on a phone. I have a feeling that they have reversed the polarity of the jack in an attempt to make you buy their accessories. We got a bluetooth headset instead which I'm not crazy about as my plantronics wired headset was really comfortable but the bluetooth headsets are not comfortable and they flop around on your ear - after you've spent about 10 minutes putting it on your ear in the first place.
The ringtones are pretty gaudy, as usual, and its criminal to not have an ascending ring tone (like my uk nokia did) - which gives you the chance to answer the phone before annoying everyone else in the room with an obnoxious ringtone. I'm sure that the naff ringtones are put on the phone on purpose so that you can pay more money to download your own choice.
The phone also comes with a Push To Talk feature but it's only any good if you have someone else on the network with this feature. There are now 2 of us at work with it, so we are trying it out, but for the past two days that I have tried it, we've not managed to make a successful connection and have resorted to going back to the standard cellular call (which again is a lot less obnoxious to those people in the room with you). The PTT feature could either be rubbish or really good but not intuitive on how to use it (as neither of us have read the manual yet). - Oh and did I mention that in order to use the PTT you have to.....pay more money ($10 per month per phone) to use it.
The phone doesn't have a camera, the games are all demo's (pointless but a money spinner) and the menu navigator is too small to use - I keep pressing the centre key rather than the navigation keys and as I haven't paid for the web/wap access (sensing a theme?) it doesn't work.

Overall I wouldn't purchase this phone - I'd rather have my Motorola phone back although the bluetooth feature is nice (once you've paid the $50 for a bluetooth headset as the wired ones don't work).

PrintConductor for printing

PrintConductor looks like a useful tool for printing multiple docs automatically - like all the manuals for Live Communication Server which incidentally I went live with some real users this afternoon. It's taken this long to get the software, user documentation written and the time to install it myself. Work has been incredibly busy with a couple of clients and this week seems to be no better even though we had a new guy start today.

This morning started off badly with all the remote sites complaining that they were getting a message saying that Windows Updates had finished installing and the computer needed restarting but the restart now, reboot later buttons were greyed out. I should have realised they were talking about the screen appearing in their terminal server window and they don't have permission to reboot the server! Instead I spent a while poking around in their event viewer trying to find out what the problem was. I'm not sure if the problem is me not being clear enough when I ask if they are using terminal services or whether its just too complicated a question.... Maybe I'll rename the TS icon on their main desktop to "IF YOU CLICK THIS YOU ARE USING TERMINAL SERVICES" and put a default background saying the same thing.

MORE windows patches

Microsoft released 2 more patches yesterday - the day after I manage to schedule a lot of reboots for my customers for the wmf patch. Thankfully it looks like the machines may not need rebooting judging on my xp desktop experience. Hopefully the same will hold true for the server.
I had one customer box not reboot overnight because the boot.ini had been mysteriously changed to boot to a (non-existent) windows 2000 installation. Fortunately the customer mentioned (when I rang them early this morning) that the problem of not finding ntkernel.exe is solved by selecting the other option in the boot sequence....I'm glad they told me this but it would have been better if they had mentioned the problem before so I wouldn't have had to get up early this morning in case I needed to make an emergency stop at their site.....so instead I'm catching up on some blogging.

I must be the only person in the world who wasn't pleased that Microsoft released the wmf patch early on Thursday last week. Everyone else seems to be so grateful that this happened but it was a nightmare for me. Thursday night I was doing a software audit on a lan and I left it scanning the machines overnight. I came in the next morning expecting to sit down and start analyzing only to find that the machine had downloaded the new patch and automatically rebooted - loosing all the scanning results so I had to start again - not so happy. Before you tell me that you can set automatic updates to not do the reboot - I know - this was on a machine outside of my control AND Microsoft had also previously announced that the patch would not be ready until Tuesday.

A long day in the office.

It was a long day in the office today with an upgrade of a windows 2000 server running exchange2000 to a windows2003 running exchange2003. We also upgraded a w2k server running sqlserver to w2k3 too. The sql server was the easiest upgrade with no hitches whatsoever - shame we couldn't say the same thing about the exchange server.

It all went wrong when the dell firmware cd hung on upgrading the firmware and after it had kindly disabled the nic's so I had no network access to the machine. In the end we had to power off the machine to get it back and working. We then upgraded the firmware by hand (as opposed to using the openmanage software which upgrades everything at the same time (or is meant to)). After that exchange2k3 went on the machine with no problems.
However, when we went to upgrade to w2k3 the cd wanted drivers for the scsi disks AND the network card so I had to waste 2 cd's to download the drivers for each (I burnt one cd for the disks and then it asked for the network after the cd had been finalised).
After providing the new drivers the machine came up and there were a couple of registry entries that had been wiped out as part of the upgrade which were there earlier (to do with virtual memory handling)
Anyway, to cut a long story short we got the servers upgraded and turned on imf version2. This will be great to convince the boss that we really DO need to configure postini to drop email that is sent to nonexistant email address's. At the moment we are getting about 1000 spam emails every 15 minutes due to a fundemental flaw in the way postini is setup. Email to valid users is scanned and blocked if it is spam (thats about 150 users) but email to nonexistant users is passed through (to catch any email address's that we might have forgotten to add to postini). Naturally this clogs up the incoming pipe and then exchange sends out ndr's (even though it's not supposed to). I'm not too bothered about the bandwidth as they are on a fast line but I am concerned about how hard it is to track mail using the mail tracker during a time period. If you try to use the message tracking system to find any email that was sent within the last hour, it is not possible as exchange refuses to show you more than 1000 emails in the tracker - which narrows down the time frame to about 15 minutes! As it is all spam the imf is now picking up (and archiving) all this email so I hope we still have some disk space left on the machine on Monday morning. We should do as a quick calculation showed 750MB per month and we have about 30gb available at the moment.
Having said all that, this will be great proof to the boss to show how much email they are getting (as I don't think they believe the quantity)

Exchange version numbers

Build numbers and release dates for Exchange Server came in handy today although why they can't put the service pack details on the tab when you right click on a server and do properties I don't know.

Work updates.

The laptop keyboard has now been replaced so I can now type away again uninterrupted. It's amazing how often the k key is pressed in one day. (three times in this post already!) I also had a chat with the certification bod and they want me to get my MCSE next year and the first exam will be an elective and they have chosen the Small Business Server exam. My exposure to this software is fairly minimal as I've only used it in live environments so I'm looking forward to spending some decent time on the software to see how it really works. I've requested a copy of virtual pc and the software to put on the laptop so I can play without causing any damage to live servers. I'll probably need a bit more ram for the laptop to run it though. I've also got to come up with a way of generating an smtp feed of email so i can populate the exchange database - I'll probably just run some batch files to use blat to send emails to it or something.....
It is hard work getting up early in the morning though - I went to bed at 9.30 last night and I'm about ready to go to bed now!

My first football soccer game

The office had a tailgate party at the Columbus Crew game on Thursday night and it was a good idea to go and meet with the people I'm working with and their families. I had a great time with everyone and spent a lot of time reminiscing with one of the wives who had lived in England when she was a girl. The only down side to that was that I started missing some of the things we were talking about (mainly food items!). The funny thing was that she remembered half pennies and pound notes which have long been scrapped by the Bank of England.
Crew were winning until extra time when New England scored an equaliser but in that half the Crew goal was at the far end of the field, noone cheered and we didn't even realise a goal had been scored.
The ironic thing about the whole night was that the first time in my life I go to see a football (sorry but there is no way I'm going to start referring to it as soccer) game it is in America and not in England where I've lived for 33 years AND it is at the Crew Stadium when I used to work at Crewe.

First day at work.

It was a tough job getting up early yesterday morning for the first day at work. What was also weird was that I was out of the house just as everyone else was getting up - apparently I looked like a school kid on the first day of school as I left the house with a backpack on my back (You'll be glad to know that I wasn't wearing grey shorts though).
The funny thing when you start a new job is that the first thing you do is fill in the forms so you can have your wage packet reduced due to all the various types of taxes that will get deducted, so a nice encouraging start there!
After a run through of the company manual it was time to go see some clients. We only got to see two clients and I spent most of the time there filling out the server checklists which is a good way of getting used to all the customer sites.
Although it wasn't a stressful or difficult day I was really tired at the end of it and enjoyed the meal that Kristen and I had at the Old Bag of Nails pub. This is famous for its fish and chips so I was looking forward to a traditional english meal. The menu is full of jokes and funny sayings and worth reading in full before you order and we both ordered the fish and chips. It would have been nice to have had photos of the meal in the menu as we'd have realised to only order one portion between us as it came with loads of chips and two fish portions the size of a normal english portion! Although the fish and chips were nice, we did feel that the fish was rather dry inside the batter and although it was a good meal I don't think it lived up to its hyped reputation (although it was MUCH better than the harry ramsden's fish and chips I had from a mall in Wales one time)
Today we're off to about 3 more customer sites. No techie hints and tips (sorry Danny :-) yet but I do have a couple of puzzlers that I need to research. Out of Office setups on two sites are causing problems - one client has an individual who's ooo just doesn't work and another site where the mailbox cleanup agent removes all the ooo data when it runs. According to Microsoft this shouldn't happen but it does!

New Job!

Well you heard it here first - as of Monday morning I will be employed again as I was offered a job yesterday after attending a lunch interview. It certainly is a great feeling and also comes on the same day that I accepted an offer on the house back in England so hopefully we can start to settle down for good.
I will be working for a consulting company in Dublin, Ohio covering the Columbus area and I am *really* looking forward to it. This should also mean that I get back to my usual technical blogging which some readers will enjoy and others won't.

misquoted?

I think I was misquoted in this article about server patching although we might have just gone through a load of security patches the previous week!

Watch out Ohio - here I come.

I've just handed in my resignation to work via email (what a chicken) this evening. Actually the reason it was done via email is that I've been out on a customer job today and just got back in and the last thing I want to do on a Friday night is talk work over the phone. Wonder how long it will take for the grapevine to work.....

Quick roundup

Its a shame that services such as job vacancies are not available in rss feeds (although i wouldn't be using the new version of Intravnews reader on the laptop for 2 obvious reasons. However, I will be looking at and subscribing to public folders as rss feeds as we get a couple of mailing lists at work that this would work really well for. Speaking of Microsoft software, there is a Microsoft portal of bloggers which will make interesting reading - some day. It's starting to take me too long to read all my rss feeds, especially when I'm away for four days on the trot and have loads of emails, (20) caching entries and rss feeds to catch up on.
There's also been a whole load of microsoft updates published today - check out Fred Langa's article on the latest update client

IBM updates

After having several calls that were resolved/improved by upgrading firmware on the IBM servers, I've discovered that they have an IBM IBM Message Center that sends you critical information on fixes, alerts, hints, tips and upgrades etc. The software only works on w2k or xp and sits in your taskbar. Now this seems to be an ideal application for an RSS feed and then you could read it from any computer.

New company.

The company that I worked for completed a buyout to another company so as of Saturday night I now work for Azur Group.

xlr file?

Got a call from the library asking me what an XLR file was. The UK Technical Support page for file extensions beginning with X gave me the answer - a Microsoft Works file (which can be opened in Excel).

Debt collection

Found a good site with some tips on freelance working and ensuring that you get paid on time. This page, although primarily aimed at journalists has some good links on ensuring you get paid with a very handy interest and penalty calculator to determine how much you are currently owed. So far my bad debt that I am chasing owes £18 in interest, plus a £40 debt collection charge!

Driving

Got home late last night after leaving London at 4.30pm. Amazingly the M25 was clear and I made fairly good time. 30 minutes after arriving home it started snowing. Previous to that the drive had been fairly clear of traffic, no rain or snow in sight and for once no idiots tanking at 99.99999 mph on the motorway. Woke up this morning to probably 0.9999mm of snow - wonder just how much chaos that is going to cause?

Hard disk failure on server

One of the servers in a remote site failed to send its usual backup email messages over the christmas holiday. When the user rang me up they explained what was on the screen (a BSOD) and I told them to reboot it. Unfortunately on the reboot the hard disk was not detected by the server. At this point I decided to jump in the car and drive to their office. An hour later I got to their site and it sounded like a cuckoo clock (sans cuckoo) was ticking in the office. The tick was the sound of the heads in the hard disk making a racket. Needless to say an order for a new hard disk was swiftly placed. When it arrives I'll have my first live experience of doing an NT install and full restore using ntbackup. Will be interesting to see how well it goes.

Laptop returned

As mentioned in the previous post, I had to return my Toshiba laptop for repair yesterday. The mouse has been going haywire and after being told to install the mouse drivers from the Recovery CD (of all the weird places to put drivers - personally I would have put them on the Utility and Drivers CD) and not finding it on either of the supplied cd's I rang back up and was told they would come and collect it. Didn't bother telling me how long it would be before I'd get it back though (and I didn't want to depress myself by asking). Their website says that its a hardware fault so fortunately there was no arguing needed to persuade them to fix it. Shame there was no on-site warrenty purchased though.
Incidentally the nipple mouse is more politically referred to as an Accupoint mouse.

Microsoft interviews

Matt Goyer had an interview with Microsoft and Amazon and has blogged about his experiences. Very interesting reading and quite daunting - especially if you are not a programmer!

Mobiles while driving

With the upcoming change in law of using mobile phones whilst driving, the register has summed up the details fairly well in their document. Interesting to me is that companies that require or encourage people to use the phone whilst driving are breaking the law....wonder how that will go down with the boss! The interesting thing is that the use of two way radio's or cb's are not affected by this (as long as they also can't be used as a phone). I'm not quite sure on the logic of why this is the case unless the powers that be are frightened of offending hgv drivers, or for some weird reason they reckon hgv drivers are better drivers than the rest of us.

Working too hard?

I totally sympathise with this report that mentions that 12 million european workers have asked for a cut in salary or work shorter hours due to the amount of stress they are suffering and the lack of a quality of life in their (permanently shrinking) personal life. Now I wouldn't have thought people would have been asking for a drop in salary OR shorter hours - I would have thought it would be both. At one point a couple of months back I was seriously considering reducing my hours by 10% by requesting to take every other friday off. That would mean a drop in pay and it would be really hard if I ever needed to go back to working 5 days a week again.

phone calls from users

Sometimes I wish I had the guts to answer the phone like they do in this BOFH piece

CV Spams

I submitted my cv online this morning to a company that sounded like they had an interesting job and I wanted more information on it. By the end of the day I had 7 emails to the same address (with the email I used this morning) with the same subject "Personal details update link" from 7 different companys with 6 different email names (and 7 domains). All of them welcoming me to their company and asking me to update my details with a unique userid (all different) and telling me how my data is stored under the data protection act. I don't remember accepting to have my details passed on and I certainly didn't want that much spam! Say away from jobboard.com

Laptop Cooler?

I'm fed up with having my lap heat up every time I use it at home so I'm on the lookout for a decent laptop cooler. The ByteCC looks good and has had favourable reviews but it doesn't look like it would be any good on the lap, but good for a desktop holder. The Acrylic cooler looks a better choice and similar to the CyberCooler. The Laptop desk does not need any power as it doesn't actually use fans so I'm not sure how effective it would be. I really need to see/try one before I purchase it. I wonder if Argos do one? (no they don't)

Naff job search results

ComputerWeekly.com have been touting their new career moves website although at a quick glance the service is pretty useless. They have a salary checker so you can tell if you are getting paid too much or not enough....I'd love to tell you but can't because "there is no information available" for that query. The only job that appears if I enter Crewe is actually one in Scotland - and that only appears because the address for sending the cv is Crewe Road! They do have a section called "Why am I finding it hard to get a job"....probably contains one page saying "because sites like ours are rubbish".

IBM's tape drive compatibility

Tried to persuade IBM to come out to look at a faulty tape drive but they closed the call as we were not using recommended tape types (and the support person had never heard of imation tapes, despite them being listed on the list of approved tapes, albeit it for a different tape drive!). The list of approved tapes is online. I'm not sure just how legal it is to refuse to come out to a faulty tape drive (which spits out DDS3 tapes as soon as you insert them into the drive (as they replaced an original faulty dds3 drive with a dds2 one)) just because they are using non recommended tapes. After all recommendations are just that - its not compulsory. After all if Ford insisted that everyone filled up at a Shell Garage I think there would be a lot of drivers telling Ford (and Shell) to get stuffed. (Incidentally I picked those companies purely at random and I am not suggesting/implying or stating these companies do that!)

Sp4 installed (2nd time around)

First time I tried to install Service Pack4 it complained it hadn't been able to do it and to either rollback or continue, rebooting into safe mode and recovering from the emergency repair disk.

At this point I had a horrible feeling it was going to be a long lunchbreak! A quick search on google came up with someone else who had a similar problem. Looking in svcpack.log I found the error messages
"An error in updating your system has occurred.
Select 'OK' to undo the changes that have been made, or select 'Cancel' to quit. If you select 'Cancel', your system will be left in a partially updated state and may not work correctly.
***
Message displayed to the user: An error in updating your system has occurred.
Select 'OK' to undo the changes that have been made, or select 'Cancel' to quit. If you select 'Cancel', your system will be left in a partially updated state and may not work correctly
***
User Input: CANCEL
***
Service Pack 4 installation did not complete.
Windows 2000 has been partially updated and may not work properly. It is recommended that you use your Emergency Repair disk to repair your system. To do this, insert the Windows 2000 Setup Boot Disk into the floppy drive, restart your computer, and then select the Emergency Repair option.
***
Message displayed to the user: Service Pack 4 installation did not complete.
Windows 2000 has been partially updated and may not work properly. It is recommended that you use your Emergency Repair disk to repair your system. To do this, insert the Windows 2000 Setup Boot Disk into the floppy drive, restart your computer, and then select the Emergency Repair option.
***
User Input: OK

In the end I took a gamble, stopped all the extra services, exchange, norton anti-virus etc, cleared out the temp dirs and reapplied, this time saving the uninstall files onto a drive with more disk space (just in case - although i had 600MB free which should have been ok). This time it worked. One reboot and I'm running sp4...now to see if it's fixed the slow tape drive problem.

Ronseal AIX

Does exactly what it says on the tin.....For those of you not in the UK, ronseal make annoying adverts for quick drying paint and wood varnishes with the catch phrase "Does exactly what it says on the tin".
Anyway, I made this
when I got asked 'what does "System has Shutdown" mean'?

I'm staying at Jamie Oliver's

I'm staying at Jamie Oliver's parents pub this weekend. When I found that out I knew the food was going to be delicious. The first night I had swordfish steak - and that was massive! Really tasty too. Last night I decided to try ostrich as i've heard a lot about it, but never had a chance to eat it. It doesn't taste like chicken though! It is a very dark meat, hard to describe. The taste is very powerful though. Although I enjoyed the steak I don't think i'd have it again though. Tonight is the Sunday roast - mmmmmmm!

I went into Cambridge yesterday and did a bit of walking around the city. One of the colleges was graduating, so there were loads of people in gowns, and some in tophats! I just wish I had brought the camera with me, but I was expecting to be working the whole weekend so hadn't bothered :-( The college buildings are really impressive and looked really good, although I don't think I'd want to study there - too posh for me. The daft thing is that the Park and Ride that I took into the city centre stops at 6pm so I wasn't able to go to the cinema as the bus would have stopped before I got out the cinema :-(