So much tech, so little time…
Who does a better “James Brown”?
Eddie Murphy [NSFW]?
Pros:
Or Weird Al?
Pros:
You decide…
Last week I mentioned a bizarre problem that occurred during an Exchange 2000 to 2003 migration for a client. Shortly after posting that little expository, I discovered another.
The customer called to indicate one of his user’s Inbox had been moved to his Deleted Items folder. I had never before seen this, as Outlook prevents users from making such “mistakes” with special folders. I’d heard rumors that previous versions of OWA would allow users to do this, however he insisted that it just appeared this way after the migration. What was really strange was that new email continued to be delivered to this seemingly “deleted” inbox. No attempt to move the folder back to the root of his mailbox would work, and Google turned up little helpful information this time. Deleting the Outlook profile and all of its offline cache goodies proved futile, and I was on the verge exporting his mailbox to a PST file and nuking it, when The Google finally answered.
Turns out some random bloke on a Technet message board had this problem when moving users from Exchange 2003 to 2007, and after some of the same steps I had taken, he had found the solution that worked equally well for me. Moving the user back to the old server, then back AGAIN to the new server put the Inbox back where it belonged. While I don’t understand the root cause of this problem, I’m glad to have solved it without the pains of nuking a mailbox. Just further proves that keeping an old Exchange server around for a few weeks after its migration is a Smart Move™.
After a nasty power outage a few weeks ago at Key, I realized that I had never installed APC’s wonderful Network Shutdown tool on our VMware server. The Network Shutdown tool is a service that runs on just about any OS, and communicates with APC’s network-enabled UPSes. When the UPS detects a power failure and reaches a battery life threshold, it will issue a command to each computer running the Network Shutdown tool to, obviously enough, shut down. I’ve installed this on many Linux boxes in the past, so I figured this would be no different.
A quick Google search turned up numerous hits about a VMware specific RPM available from APC for v2.21. A quick search of APC’s website turned up no such thing, and downloading the newest release for Linux didn’t get me very far. During the installation it through an error about VMware not being supported. After some further Google digging, I finally found a direct link to the RPM buried on APC’s FTP site. Installing the RPM worked like a champ, and once I opened up the requisite firewall ports in ESX I was able to access the web interface and get it configured.
To save others the same headaches I encountered, I’ve preserved the RPM file on my site until APC decides to support VMware in new releases again. The file is available below.
Windows XP: Going, going … gone? - The most thorough article I’ve seen yet regarding Windows XP’s support future. If anything, the article reafirms my decision to stick with XP at Key for as long as possible. Hopefully, I can bypass Vista altogether…
I upgraded my Verizon 8703e to Blackberry OS 4.2 about two weeks ago, one out of the desire for “new stuff”, and two because someone developed a Blackberry companion to KeePass that required 4.2 or newer. It’s a pretty nice upgrade that brings some of the look and feel of the newer Curves and 8800 series to my trusty email warrior. In particular, the newer, brighter Dimension theme, options for a Today-style screen, and a decent media player that finally lets me listen to the WAV files my unified voicemail software delivers to my inbox.
Generally, the upgrade process was smooth, but not without some hiccups, plus I had to do a fair amount of work to get the much-sought-after Today screen working. Just to help others that may experience the same pain, here are the tips and gotcha’s I encountered:
I use the Netgear WG102 access point in a few client sites, mostly small to medium business that use wifi as a secondary form of access. For about $120 you get an 802.11g access point that’s plenum rated and supports PoE, auto-channel and auto-signal strength, VLAN’s, SNMP, multiple SSID’s, and every security feature under the sun (including 802.1x RADIUS auth). What it doesn’t provide is good centralized management or any sort of serious wifi intelligence, which limits them to smaller shops.
Despite this great bounty for only $120, they do have a major weakness - they tend to lock up after about 2 weeks of normal use, which requires a hard power-cycle to resolve. After some Googling, I recently stumbled across a work-around on Netgear’s forums. It seems by setting an SNMP OID to a certain value, you can cause the access point to do a soft reboot. The trick is to schedule such an event on a weekly, or even daily, basis, so that it occurs before the AP has a chance to lock up. The command below works quite well using the Windows task scheduler and the Net-SNMP tool set.
snmpset.exe -v 1 -c private 10.10.10.10 1.3.6.1.4.1.4526.4.3.9.1 integer 1
Just change the community string (in this instance, private) to your R/W community, and of course the IP address to match your AP. I have this running at two locations each rebooting 5 of these AP’s on a weekly basis and so far no lockups.
The 10 safest states for kids - So let me get this straight, Maryland is the 9th safest state for kids because it requires carbon monoxide detectors, despite the fact that its violent crime rate is 50% above the national average? Ummm…..
So, the Fed just cut interest rates by 3/4’s of a point. Which, to quote FARK, “means they’re paying last month’s Visa bill by taking a cash advance on their Amex. Next month they’ll take a cash advance on their Mastercard to pay off Amex. Rinse, repeat, recession.”
You’re doin’ a hell of a job, Bennie!
I migrated a client from SBS/Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003 this weekend. On the server-side, everything went quite smooth, despite my fears that SBS would really screw with my ability to work with the standard Windows and Exchange tools. Not so much on the client side.
All the clients were running Outlook 2003. Some users were seeing duplicates of many of their system-level folders (Inbox, Calendar, etc). All users were unable to access any folder but their Inbox. Trying to view the calendar, contacts, or even a user-created mail folder would cause Outlook to crash. I suspected it had something to do with offline folder files, although deleting the Outlook profile and it’s associated OST files had no affect. A bit of Googling finally turned up this post at joeware, which pointed to this post in the Microsoft newsgroups, which contained the answer.
After some work, we were able to determine why Outlook 2003 crashes after moving mailboxes off of Exchange 2000 onto Exchange 2003. The fix is to add a registry value “Guid-Replid Caching” under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\SERVERNAME. Under each mailbox store we added a REG_DWORD of “Guid-Replid Caching” with a value of 0.
Taking their advice, I made the change, restarted the Exchange IS service, and damn if that didn’t solve the problem.
I started using Gmail about 9 months ago when I picked up my first Blackberry, and quickly found that IMAP and POP3 via BIS are on a 15 minute delay, but Yahoo and Gmail accounts are real time push, just like a BES. I started forwarding all of my email accounts to Gmail and, after a few days of acclimating myself to labels, archiving, and other oddities, I was off and going. Nine months later, I was continually frustrated with my inability to organize myself using Gmail’s web interface. Near instance search was great, but the whole “label” concept just didn’t work for me. I desperately wanted nested folders and more keyboard driven filing abilities, and a task-list built right into the interface would be nice too.
Not willing to give up Gmail’s obvious benefits (access-anywhere ability, instant Blackberry, search search search) I decided to give Gmail’s recently added IMAP feature a whirl with Mozilla’s Thunderbird , which I consider to be the least-bad IMAP mail client out there. Using this article from Lifehacker as my guide, I began to tweak, test, and finally settle on a good configuration and a gaggle of extensions that make my life in Thunderbird SO MUCH NICER than it ever was in GMail’s (also least-bad) web interface. Here’s what I discovered.