Devin on Earth

Since yesterday, the Net has been abuzz because of Google’s blog posting about their discovery they were being hacked by China. Almost every response I’ve seen has focused on the attempted hacking of the mailboxes of Chinese human rights activists.

That’s exactly where Google wants you to focus.

Let’s take a closer look at their blog post.

Paragraph 1:

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.

Paragraph 2:

As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted.

Whoa. That’s some heavy-league stuff right there. Coordinated, targeted commercial espionage across a variety of vertical industries. Google first accuses China of stealing its intellectual property, then says that they weren’t the only ones. Mind you, industry experts – including the United States government– have been saying the same thing for years. Cries of ‘China hacked us!” happen relatively frequently in the IT security industry, enough so that it blends into the background noise after awhile.

My question is why, exactly, Google thought this wouldn’t happen to them? They’re a big fat juicy target on many levels. Gmail with thousands upon thousands of juicy mailboxes? Check! Search engine code and data that allows sophisticated monitoring and manipulation of Internet queries? Check! Cloud-based office documents that just might contain some competitive value? Check!

My second question is, why, exactly, is Google trying to shift the focus of the story from the IP theft (which by their own press report was successful) and cloak their actions in the “oh, noes, China tried to grab dissidents’ email” moral veil they’re using?

Paragraph 3:

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Two accounts, people, and the attempt wasn’t even fully successful. And the moral outrage shimmering from the screen in Paragraph 4, when Google says that “dozens” of accounts were accessed by third parties not through any sort of security flaw in Google, but rather through what is probably malware, is enough to knock you over.

Really, Google? You’re just now tumbling to the fact that people’s GMail accounts are getting hacked through malware?

I don’t buy the moral outrage. I think the meat of the matter is back in paragraph 1. I believe that the rest of the outrage is a smokescreen to repaint Google into the moral high ground for their actions, when from the sidelines here it certainly looks like Google chose knowingly to play with fire and is now suddenly outraged that they, too, got burned.

Google, you have enough people willing to play along with your attempt to be the victim. I’m not one of them. You compromised human rights principles in 2006 and knowingly put your users into harm’s way. “Do no evil,” my ass.

Over the next couple of months, I’d like to slowly sketch out some of the thoughts and impressions that I’ve been gathering about Exchange 2010 storage over the last year or so and combine them with the specific insights that I’m gaining at my new job. In this inaugural post, I want to tackle what I have come to view as the fundamental question that will drive the heart of your Exchange 2010 storage strategy: will you use a RAID configuration or will you use a JBOD configuration?

In the interests of full disclosure, the company I work for now is a strong NetApp reseller, so of course my work environment is conducive to designing Exchange in ways that make it easy to sell the strengths of NetApp kit. However, part of the reason I picked this job is precisely because I agree with how they address Exchange storage and how I think the Exchange storage paradigm is going to shake out in the next 3-5 years as more people start deploying Exchange 2010.

In Exchange 2010, Microsoft re-designed the Exchange storage system to target what we can now consider to be the lowest common denominator of server storage: a directly attached storage (DAS) array of 7200 RPM SATA disks in a Just a Box of Disks (JBOD) configuration. This DAS/JBOD/SATA (what I will now call DJS) configuration has been an unworkable configuration for Exchange for almost its entire lifetime:

• The DAS piece certainly worked for the initial versions of Exchange; that’s what almost all storage was back then. Big centralized SANs weren’t part of the commodity IT server world, reserved instead for the mainframe world. Server administrators managed server storage. The question was what kind of bus you used to attach the array to the server. However, as Exchange moved to clustering, it required some sort of shared storage. While a shared SCSI bus was possible, it not only felt like a hack, but also didn’t scale well beyond two nodes.
• SATA, of course, wasn’t around back in 1996; you had either IDE or SCSI. SCSI was the serious server administrator’s choice, providing better I/O performance for server applications, as well as faster bus speeds. SATA, and its big brother SAS, both are derived from the lessons that years of SCSI deployments have provided. Even for Exchange 2007, though, SATA’s poor random I/O performance made it unsuitable for Exchange storage. You had to use either SAS or FC drives.
• RAID has been a requirement for Exchange deployments, historically, for two reasons: to combine enough drive spindles together for acceptable I/O performance (back when disks were smaller than mailbox databases), and to ensure basic data redundancy. Redundancy was especially important once Exchange began supporting shared storage clustering and required both aggregate I/O performance only achievable with expensive disks and interfaces as well as the reduced chance of a storage failure being a single point of failure.

If you look at the marketing material for Exchange 2010, you would certainly be forgiven for thinking that DJS is the only smart way to deploy Exchange 2010, with SAN, RAID, and non-SATA systems supported only for those companies caught in the mire of legacy deployments. However, this isn’t at all true. There are a growing number of Exchange experts (and not just those of us who either work for storage vendors or resell their products) who think that while DJS is certainly an interesting option, it’s not one that’s a good match for every customer.

In order to understand why DJS is truly possible in Exchange 2010, and more importantly begin to understand where DJS configurations are a good fit and what underlying conditions and assumptions you need to meet in order to get the most value from DJS, we need to separate these three dimensions and discuss them separately.

While I will go into more detail on all three dimensions at later date, I want to focus on the JBOD vs.. RAID question now. If you need some summaries, then check out fellow Exchange MVP (and NetApp consultant) John Fullbright’s post on the economics of DAS vs. SAN as well as Microsoft’s Matt Gossage and his TechEd 2009 session on Exchange 2010 storage. Although there are good arguments for diving into drive technology or storage connection debates, I’ve come to believe that the central philosophy question you must answer in your Exchange 2010 design is at what level you will keep your data redundant. Until Exchange 2007, you had only one option: keeping your data redundant at the disk controller level. Using RAID technologies, you had two copies of your data[1]. Because you had a second copy of the data, shared storage clustering solutions could be used to provide availability for the mailbox service.

With Exchange 2007’s continuous replication features, you could add in data redundancy at the application level and avoid the dependency of shared storage; CCR creates two copies, and SCR can be used to create one or more additional copies off-site. However, given the realities of Exchange storage, for all but the smallest deployments, you had to use RAID to provide the required number of disk spindles for performance. With CCR, this really meant you were creating four copies; with SCR, you were creating an additional two copies for each target replica you created.

This is where Exchange 2010 throws a wrench into the works. By virtue of a re-architected storage engine, it’s possible under specific circumstances to design a mailbox database that will fit on a single drive while still providing acceptable performance. The reworked continuous replication options, now simplified into the DAG functionality, create additional copies on the application level. If you hit that sweet spot of the 1:1 database to disk ratio, then you only have a single copy of the data per replica and can get an n-1 level of redundancy, where n is the number of replicas you have. This is clearly far more efficient for disk usage…or is it? The full answer is complex, the simple answer is, “In some cases.”

In order to get the 1:1 database to disk ratio, you have to follow several guidelines:

1. Have at least three replicas of the database in the DAG, regardless of which sites they are in. Doing so allows you to place both the EDB and transaction log files on the same physical drive, rather than separating them as you did in previous versions of Exchange.
2. Ensure that you have at least two replicas per site. The reason for this is that unlike Exchange 2007, you can reseed a failed replica from another passive copy. This allows you to avoid reseeding over your WAN, which is something you do not want to do.
3. Size your mailbox databases to include no more users than will fit in the drive’s performance envelope. Although Exchange 2010 converts many of the random I/O patterns to sequential, giving better performance, not all has been converted, so you still have to plan against the random I/O specs.
4. Ensure that write transactions can get written successfully to disk. Use a battery-backed caching controller for your storage array to ensure the best possible performance from the disks. Use write caching for the physical disks, which means ensuring each server hosting a replica has a UPS.

At this point, you probably have disk capacity to spare, which is why Exchange 2010 allows the creation of archive mailboxes in the same mailbox database. All of the user’s data is kept at the same level of redundancy, and the archived data – which is less frequently accessed than the mainline data – is stored without additional significant disk or I/O penalty. This all seems to indicate that JBOD is the way to go, yes? Two copies in the main site, two off-site DR copies, and I’m using cheaper storage with larger mailboxes and only four copies of my data instead of the minimum of six I’d have with CCR+SCR (or the equivalent DAG setup) on RAID configurations.

Not so fast. Microsoft’s claims around DJS configurations usually talk about the up-front capital expenditures. There’s more to a solid design than just the up-front storage price tag, and even if the DJS solution does provide savings in your situation, that is only the start. You also need to think about the lifetime of your storage and all the operational costs. For instance, what happens when one of those 1:1 drives fails?

Well, if you bought a really cheap DAS array, your first indication will be when Exchange starts throwing errors and the active copy moves to one of the other replicas. (You are monitoring your Exchange servers, right?) More expensive DAS arrays usually directly let you know that a disk failed. Either way, you have to replace the disk. Again, with a cheap white-box array, you’re on your own to buy replacement disks, while a good DAS vendor will provide replacements within the warranty/maintenance period. Once the disk is replaced, you have to re-establish the database replica. This brings us to the wonderful manual process known as database reseeding, which is not only a manual task, but can take quite a significant amount of time – especially if you made use of archival mailboxes and stuffed that DJS configuration full of data. If we can reseed 20GB of data per hour[2] (from a local passive copy to avoid the I/O hit to the active copy), that’s 10 hours for a 200GB database or 50 hours – over two days! – for a 1 TB database. All during that time, you have one less replica of that database to protect you. If your business processes and requirements don’t give you that amount of leeway, you either have to design smaller databases (and waste the disk capacity, which brings us right back to the good old bad days of Exchange 2000/2003 storage design) or use RAID.

Now, with a RAID solution, we don’t have that same problem. We still have a RAID volume rebuild penalty, but that’s happening inside the disk shelf at the controller, not across our network between Exchange servers. And with a well-designed RAID solution such as generic RAID 10 (1+0) or NetApp’s RAID DP, you can actually survive the loss of more disks at the same time. Plus, a RAID solution gives me the flexibility to populate my databases with smaller or larger mailboxes as I need, and aggregate out the capacity and performance across my disks and databases. Sure, I don’t get that nice 1:1 disk to database ratio, but I have a lot more administrative flexibility and can survive disk loss without automatically having to begin the reseed dance.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m wildly enthusiastic that I as an Exchange architect have the option of designing to JBOD configurations. I like having choices, because that helps me make the right decisions to meet my customers’ needs. And that, in the end, is the point of a well-designed Exchange deployment – to meet your needs. Not the needs of Microsoft, and not the needs of your storage or server vendors. While I’m fairly confident that starting with a default NetApp storage solution is the right choice for many of the environments I’ll be facing, I also know how to ask the questions that lead me to consider DJS instead. There’s still a place for RAID at the Exchange storage table.

In further installments over the next few months, I’ll begin to address the SATA vs. SAS/VC and DAS vs. SAN arguments as well. I’ll then try to wrap it up with a practical and realistic set of design examples that pull all the pieces together.

[1] RAID-1 (mirroring) and RAID-10 (striping and mirroring) both create two physical copies of the data. RAID-5 does not, but it allows the loss of a single drive failure — effectively giving you a virtual second copy of the data.

[2] I don’t yet have solid data on how fast reseeds are in real-world conditions, so this number is an educated guess. I do believe, however, it’s a higher rate than what you’d see in most circumstances.

This is a rare kind of blog post for me, because I’m basically copying a discussion that rose from one of my Twitter/Facebook status updates earlier today:

I wish I could change the RAM, CPU configuration on running VMs in #VMWare and have the changes apply on next reboot.

This prompted one of my nieces, a lovely and intelligent young lady in high school, to ask me to say that in English.

I pondered just hand waving it, but I was loathe to do so. Like I said, she’s intelligent. I firmly believe that kids live up to your expectations; if you talk down to them and treat them like they’re dumb because that’s what you expect, they’re happy to be that way. On the other hand, if you expect them to be able to understand concepts with the proper explanations, even if they may not immediately grasp the fine points, I’ve found that kids are actually quite able to do so – better than many adults, truth be told.

So, this is my answer:

The physical machinery of computers is called hardware. The programs that run on them (Windows, games, etc.) is software.
VMware is software that allows you to create virtual machines. That is, instead of buying (for example) 10 computers to do different tasks and have most of them have unused memory and processor power, you buy one or two really beefy computers and run VMWare. That allows you to create a virtual machine in software, so those two computers become 10. I don’t have to buy quite as much hardware because each virtual machine only uses the resources it needs, leaving the rest for the other virtual machines.

However, one of the problems with VMWare currently is that if you find you’ve given a virtual machine too much memory or processor (or not enough), you have to shut it down, make the change, then start it back up. I want the software to be smart enough to take the change *now* and automatically apply it when it can, such as when the virtual machine is rebooting. For a physical computer, it makes sense — I have to power it down, crack the case open, put memory in, etc. — but for a virtual computer, it should be able to be done in software.

Think of it this way: hardware is like a closet. You can build a big closet or a small closet or a medium closet, but each closet holds a finite amount of stuff. Software is the stuff you put in the closet — clothes, shoes, linens, etc. You can dump a bunch of stuff into a big closet, but doing so makes it cluttered and hard to use. So if you use multiple smaller closets, you’re wasting space because you probably won’t fill every one exactly.

In this metaphor, virtualization is like a closet organizer system. You can add a clothing rod here to hang dresses and blouses on, and underneath that add a shelf or two for shoes, while to the side you have more shelves for pants and towels and other stuff. You waste a little bit of your closet space for the organizer, but you keep everything organized and clutter-free, which means you’re better off and take less time to keep everything up.

Of course, this metaphor fails on my original point, because it totally makes sense you have to take all the stuff off shelves before moving those shelves around. In the world of software, though, it doesn’t necessarily make sense — it’s just the right people didn’t think of it at the right time.

Clear?

I came close to busting out Visio and starting to diagram some of this. I decided not to.

Edit: I don’t have to diagram it! Thank you, Ikea, and your lovely KOMPLEMENT wardrobe organizer line!

It’s amazing what kind of disruption leaving your job, looking for a new job, and starting to get settled in to a new job can have on your routines. Like blogging. Who knew?

At any rate, I’m back with some cool Exchange blogging. I’ve been getting a chance to dive into a “All-Devin, All-Exchange, All The Time” groove and it’s been a lot of fun, some of the details of which I hope to be able to share with you in upcoming months. In the process, I’ve been building a brand new Exchange 2010 lab environment and ran smack into a myth that seems to be making the rounds among people who are deploying Exchange 2010. This myth gives bum advice for those of you who are deploying an Exchange 2010 DAG and not using an Exchange 2010 Hub Transport as your File Share Witness (FSW). I call it the Exchange Trusted Subsystem Myth, and the first hint of it I see seems to be on this blog post. However, that same advice seems to have gotten around the net, as evidenced by this almost word-for-word copy or this posting that links to the first one. Like many myths, this one is pernicious not because it’s completely wrong, but because it works even though it’s wrong.

If you follow the Exchange product group’s deployment assumptions, you’ll never run into the circumstance this myth addresses; the FSW is placed on an Exchange 2010 HT role in the organization. Although you can specify the FSW location (server and directory) or let Exchange pick a server and directory or you, the FSW share isn’t created during the configuration of the DAG (as documented by fellow Exchange MVP Elan Shudnow and the “Witness Server Requirements” section of the Planning for High Availability and Site Resilience TechNet topic). Since it’s being created on an Exchange server as the second member of the DAG is joined, Exchange has all the permissions it needs on the system to create the share. If you elect to put the share on a non-Exchange server, then Exchange doesn’t have permissions to do it. Hence the myth:

1. Add the FSW server’s machine account to the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group.
2. Add the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group to the FSW server’s local Administrators group.

The sad part is, only the second action is necessary. True, doing the above will make the FSW work, but it will also open a much wider hole in your security than you need or want. Let me show you from my shiny new lab! In this configuration, I have three Exchange systems: EX10MB01, EX10MB02, and EX10MB03. All three systems have the Mailbox, Client Access, and Hub Transport roles. Because of this, I want to put the FSW on a separate machine. I could have used a generic member server, but I specifically wanted to debunk the myth, so I picked my DC EX10DC01 with malice aforethought.

• In Figure 1, I show adding the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group to the Builtin/Administrators group on EX10DC01. If this weren’t a domain controller, I could add it to the local Administrators group instead, but DCs require tinkering. [1]

Figure 1: Membership of the Builtin/Administrators group on EX10DC01

• In Figure 2, I show the membership of the Builtin/Administrators group on EX10DC01. No funny business up my sleeve!

Figure 2: Membership of the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group

• I now create the DAG object, specifying EX10DC01 as my FSW server and the C:\EX10DAG01 directory so we can see if it ever gets created (and when).
• In Figure 3, I show the root of the C:\ drive on EX10DC01 after adding the second Exchange 2010 server to the DAG. Now, the directory and share are created, without requiring the server’s machine account to be added to the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group.

Figure 3: The FSW created on EX10DC01

I suspect that this bad advice came about through a combination of circumstances, including an improper understanding of Exchange caching of Active Directory information and when the FSW is actually created. However it came about, though, it needs to be stopped, because any administrator that configures their Exchange organization is opening a big fat hole in the Exchange security model.

So, why is adding the machine account to the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group a security hole? The answer lies in Exchange 2010’s shift to Role Based Access Control (RBAC). In previous versions of Exchange, you delegated permissions directly to Active Directory and Exchange objects, allowing users to perform actions directly from their security context. If they had the appropriate permissions, their actions succeeded.

In Exchange 2010 RBAC, this model goes away; you now delegate permissions by telling RBAC what options given groups, policies, or users can perform, then assigning group memberships or policies as needed. When the EMS cmdlets run, they do so as the local machine account; since the local machine is an Exchange 2010 server, this account has been added to the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group. This group has been delegated the appropriate access entries in Active Directory and Exchange databases objects, as described in the Understanding Split Permissions TechNet topic. For a comprehensive overview of RBAC and how all the pieces fit together, read the Understanding Role Based Access Control TechNet topic.

By improperly adding a non-Exchange server to this group, you’re now giving that server account the ability to read and change any Exchange-related object or property in Active Directory or Exchange databases. Obviously, this is a hole, especially given the relative ease with which one local administrator can get a command line prompt running as one of the local system accounts.

So please, do us all a favor: if you ever hear or see someone passing around this myth, please, link them here.

Busted!

[1] Yes, it is also granting much broader permissions than necessary to make a DC the FSW node. Now the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group is a member of the Domain Admins group. This is probably not what you want to do, so really, don’t do this outside of a demo lab.

This weekend, I finally finished getting our desktop computers replaced. They’re older system that have been running Windows XP for a long time. I’d gotten newer hardware and had started building new systems, intending to put Vista Ultimate SP1 on them (so we could take advantage of domain memberships and Windows Media Center goodness with our Xboxes), but one thing led to another and they’ve been sitting forlornly on a shelf.

I must confess – I’m not a Vista fan. I grudgingly used it as the main OS on my work MacBook Pro for a while, but I never really warmed up to it. SP1, in my opinion, made it barely useable. There were some features about it I grew to like, but those were offset by a continued annoyance at how many clicks useful features had gotten buried behind.

So when I finally got busy getting these systems ready – thanks to Steph’s system suddenly forgetting how to talk to USB devices – I decided to use Windows 7 RC instead. What I’d seen of Windows 7 already made me believe that we’d have a much happier time with it. So far, I’d have to say that’s correct. Steph’s new machine was slightly tricky to install – the built-in network interface on the motherboard wasn’t recognized so I had to bootstrap with XP drivers – but otherwise, the whole experience has been flawless.

Want to try Windows 7 for yourself? Get it here.

One of my favorite experiences was migrating our files and settings from the old machines. Windows 7, like Vista and Server 2008 before it, includes the Easy Transfer Wizard. This wizard is the offspring of XP’s Files and Settings Transfer Wizard but has a lot more smarts built in. As a result, I was able to quickly and easily get all our files and settings moved over without a hitch. With the exception of a laptop, we’re now XP free in my house.

Today, I ran across this blog post detailing Seven Windows 7 Tips. There were a couple of them I had already figured out (2, 4, and partial 3), but I’ll be trying out the rest this evening!

Okay, okay…so updating my blog server took longer than I’d anticipated. Getting the old material out of Community Server into BlogML format turned out to be a lot easier than I’d thought and finding the time to get it all imported into WordPress wasn’t much harder. What tripped me up was getting all of the redirection for the old, legacy URLs working.

Community Server and WordPress store their content in very different ways, and so they generate the URLs for blog posts using different algorithms. I know there are a fairish number of links out there in blog land to various posts I’ve done, and for vanity sake, I’d rather not orphan those links to the dreaded 404 not found error. The solution was to find the time to buy the lastest edition of O’Reilly’s Apache Cookbook and bone up on the Apache web server directives.

So, I think all the relevant old URLs should now automatically redirect to their proper new places — there’s not much point in keeping all the old posts if you don’t do this. The nice thing, for those of you who are web geeks, is that I’m issuing permanent redirections so Google and other search engines will update their links as they re-trawl my web site, thus pointing to the new URLs. For those of you who are humans, you might want to take a minute to check your bookmarks and make sure they’re updated to the new links.

One note: some commenter data didn’t make the import successfully. I could probably dig into it and find out why, but frankly, at this point, it’s more important to get the site (and Steph’s blog) back up and running. So, sorry — if you were one of those commenters, I apologize. Future comments should be preserved properly, and I really don’t see moving away from WordPress anytime soon.

If you’re reading this, then the necessary DNS updates have finished rolling out and we’re back live to the world. Thanks for your patience!

Life is full of synchronicity; most of the time, this is through the workings of chance, but every now and then we get to help it along. Two ships may pass in the night, but how often does the helmsman take a hand?

You’re the owner of a no-longer-working original PowerPC Mac mini. This awesome little piece of technology once rocked your world, but slowly, you moved on to bigger and better things. Maybe you upgraded; maybe it stopped working. This Mac mini, though, still hangs around, complete with a working SuperDrive. You may feel a bit of guilt over not passing it on or getting it refurbished.

I’m the owner of a proud original PowerPC Mac mini that is having problems with its SuperDrive. My mini wants to be a member of the OS X 10.4 generation but can’t boot from the internal drive, nor can it seem to find an external USB drive as a boot device.

If you’ve got a spare original Mac mini (or drive that fits) and you’re willing to part it with inexpensively, please drop me a line. No pina coladas or getting caught in the rain required.

Warning: the following post may not make much sense. If it does, it may sound bitter and arrogant. I apologize in advance; that’s not my goal here.

I finally got a critical mass of people dragging me into Facebook, so I’ve ben doing it over the last couple of months. I entered into it with a simple rule: as long as I knew someone or could figure out what context we shared, I’d accept friend requests. I only send friend requests to people I want to be in contact with, but if someone wants to keep up with me, I’ll happily approve the request. (Remember, Asperger’s Syndrome; I may be able to fake looking like I’m socially adjusted, but underneath, I’m not.)

This resolve has been sorely tested by a number of requests I’ve gotten from people from my high school days. I am not one of those people who thinks that high school was the best time of my life. Far from it, actually. Now that I understand about Asperger’s, I have been able to go back and identify what I was doing to contribute to my misery during those years — and boy was I — but I also know that there were a bunch of people who were happy to help. I was happy to leave that town, happy to never go back, and happy — for the most part — to not try to get back into some mythical BFF state with these people that I never shared in the first place. There are some exceptions; you should know who you are. If you aren’t sure and want to know, send me a private message and ask. Don’t ask, though, unless you’re ready to be told that you’re not.

Does this mean I want people to stop requesting? No. We’re adults. (At least, we should be.) Life moves on. I’m not that same person, and I’m willing to bet you’re not either. Let’s try to get to know one another as we are now, without presuming some deeper level of friendship than really exists. It’ll be a lot easier for everyone that way, and probably a lot more fun.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been on vacation.

Much of that vacation has consisted of quality Xbox 360 time, both by myself (Call of Duty: World at War for Christmas) and with Steph and Chris. (Alaric had a friend over today and we had a nice six-way Halo 3 match; the adults totally dominated the kids in team deathmatch, I might add.) However, I’d also slated doing some much-needed rebuilds on my network infrastructure here at home: migrating off of Exchange to a hosted email solution (still Exchange, just not a server *I* have to maintain), decommissioning old servers, renumbering my network, building a new firewall that can gracefully handle multiple Xbox 360s, building some new servers, and sorting through the tons of computer crap I have. All of this activity was aimed at reducing my footprint in the back room so we can unbury my desk and move Alaric’s turtle into the back room where she should have a quieter and warmer existence.

Yeah, well. Best laid plans. I’ve gotten a surprising amount of stuff done, even if I have taken over the dining room table for the week. (Gotta have room to sort out all that computer gear, y’know. Who knew I had that much cool stuff?) My progress, however, has slowed quite a bit the last couple of days as I ran into some unexpected network issues I had to work my butt off to resolve.

Except that now I think I just figured out the two causes. Combined, they made my “new” network totally unusable and masked each other in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. It was rather reminiscent, actually, of the MCM hands-on lab. I guess I’ve been practicing for my retest.

Ah, well. I still have one day of freedom left before I head back to work. I might actually be ready to go.

This holiday weekend, I finally accomplished a task I’ve been meaning to do for a while: I got rid of my email.

More precisely, I’m no longer hosting my email domains on my own server here in the house like I have been for the past eight years. I’ve finally made the switch to hosted email. With all of the free email domains out there, this may have been an easy choice, but Steph and I are not your run-of-the-mill email consumers. We’ve gotten used to having the calendar and scheduling features of Exchange and Outlook here at the house, so it was pretty clear I needed a hosted Exchange solution.

Last night, I flipped the switch — I double-checked that all of our domains and email addresses were configured and then changed our MX records to point at the new service. (An MX record (Mail eXchanger) is an entry in DNS that tells the rest of the Internet who to send your email to. Almost all email systems use at least one of these records.). As a result, some time early this morning all mail to us started going to our mailboxes on the new provider. Over the next couple of days, we’ll be transferring our existing messages up to the new mailboxes and shutting down my trusty Exchange 2007 server here at the house.

Actually, I’ll be recycling the hardware — it’s one of my beefier servers, and I can use it to do some other tasks around here and upgrade some of my low-end machines. This helps me consolidate servers, shut down more boxes, get rid of more clutter, and lower my bills. It also means that we no longer need to have our current DSL line and static IP address; we can explore newer, faster options that will better fit a household with multiple Xbox consoles. It also helps de-clutter my time; running a healthy email server takes time that I wasn’t putting into it here. (I shamefully confess that I went to run backups on my email a couple of weeks ago and discovered, rather to my horror, that it had been over a year since I’d last done so!) Now I don’t have to worry about those tasks. I also don’t have to worry about spam; the hosted service includes a really decent anti-spam service (the same one we use at work).

Still, after a decade of being responsible for managing my own email services (eight years running thecabal.org here at home, plus another couple of years being a sysadmin at an ISP), it feels rather strange to no longer be able to put my hands on the physical box hosting my email.

I don’t remember which day it was two weeks ago that I discovered that my web server was no longer accepting queries, but I do remember the distinct annoyance I felt when I got home from work, made my way through the back room to the computer rack, logged on to the management console, and saw that the server was powered off.

That’s nothing to the irritation I felt ten seconds later when it wouldn’t power back up.

This server is an oddity in my collection; it’s not the standard desktop/server size for motherboards and power supplies. As it turned out through some testing a couple of days later (when I found some free moments), the power supply had given up the ghost. Unfortunately, I didn’t have another power supply that would fit into that particular case, nor could I locate one in the local area.

So, today I got to do a motherboard-ectomy. For the uninitiated, that’s where you take the contents of one computer (in this case, the motherboard and the disk drive) and transplant them into a new case. It’s a relatively straightforward process, just long and (usually) cramped in a couple of places. This process was actually simpler than normal — the web server motherboard is so much smaller than a regular one that the usual cramped space problems didn’t happen — but was complicated in other ways by the need to jury-rig a couple of things in place (very minor tweaks; the delay was more from finding the right pieces to do things as close to The Right Way as possible).

However, it all went well — and as you can now see, the web server is now back up and running. With some of the changes coming in my network in the next month, this is a temporary measure, but at least Steph and I can blog again.

Steph alerted me to the existence of a very cool product — a dock for Macbook Pro laptops that stands them vertically. This has two advantages: saves desktop space and promotes better cooling. Macbook Pro machines are industrious heat generators and you have to be really careful about what kind of surface you leave them on. I’ve found that mine will shut down or have BSODs (when running Windows) if I have it flat on a plastic or formica surface; wood seems to be okay. The best bet, though, is to put it on a little stand that elevates the rear of the laptop and allows air to cool the underside. So, yes, I was really keen to check this out.

What I found, however, was this dreck. I have to admit that it’s a very sweet piece of machined aluminum; very pretty, matches the look of the Macbook Pro. However, this is not a dock; it’s a stand with delusions of $305 grandeur. This is a dock; note the integrated plugs. That handy little lever at the top moves all of the plugs into matching position on the sides of the Macbook, allowing you to quickly and easily put the laptop in place and make connections (and here’s the important bit) without having to manually plug and unplug all of the various cables you’re using every time you put the laptop in or take it out. It’s not as sexy, and it takes up more desk room (quite a bit more, which is one of the reasons I don’t have mine actually in use yet), but it’s functional.

That other block of aluminum? That’s designer silliness. Sadly, I bet far too many Mac folks will fall for it.

Edit: okay, looking closely at the Balmuda page shows that they never call it a dock, simply a stand. Kudos for them — however, it makes the price tag even more mind-boggling. Razzes to Apartment Therapy Unplugged for the mis-identification.

Stupid website, but it gives me a chance to taunt my co-worker Kevin. This morning I got a puzzled e-mail from him, asking me why this picture of me in Sydney from February (yes, that’s Sydney, Australia; we were there for training for work) was the most-viewed picture in his online galleries (warning, probably not a worksafe gallery). I have no clue, but I think it’s damned funny.

Kevin’s a hard-core picture nerd; he’s got a wireless card for his digital cameras that will automatically use any nearby open WiFi connection to upload pictures to his Web gallery. This means that on a trip he’s usually got pictures uploaded before he gets back to his hotel, let alone before he gets home. That’s pretty cool, even if (like me) you aren’t inclined to take gigabytes of pictures everywhere you go.

Email clients need to be more intelligent. For example, I can appreciate the Request Read Receipt feature that Outlook/Exchange and other email systems offer; it makes sense in a corporate environment, or when sending correspondence with business partners. However, all bets are off once you starting emailing the Internet in general. Why, oh why, do Outlook and Exchange continue to be so clueless about these wonderful things we call mailing lists?

It wouldn’t be very hard at all for Outlook to notice when a message I’ve received comes from a real mailing list; they have all sorts of wonderful headers (at least, they do if they’re compliant with RFCs) that easily distinguish them. It should then automatically change its behavior in several key ways:

1. Stop sending read receipt requests to that address. It’s really bloody annoying to be reading along a mailing list and suddenly get the read receipt request dialog in my face, and all it does is make me think that the sender is an idiot.
2. Stop sending OOF (out of office/out of facility) messages to that address. That looks even dumber.
3. Offer to automatically create a new folder and rule to manage future messages from this list.

Oh, and email users who set “request read receipt” as their default? Should. Be. Shot. 

Dear iPod,

Over the years that I’ve had you (as your second owner), we’ve had our rocky times. You’ve worked well with both my Windows and Mac workstations — that’s a plus. Your battery life is damn near useless (and I understand that’s not really your fault), but with the appropriate adapter therapy we’ve been able to work around that. I hardly ever use you with headphones, but that iTrip is a righteous score that allows you to rock the car, the house, and any other FM radio within distance. True, you’re only a 3G classic model, but you’ve got 40GB and I’ve never even come close to running you out of space. All in all, we’ve been good for each other. Today, however, was something entirely different.

I now, of course, realize that you picking Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life when I was driving home through Woodinville was really a message. But I didn’t get that message until after we got on to 522 through the funeral procession and slowly drove by the column of funeral-goers. Just as we drew even with the hearse, you switched to Chumbawumba’s Tubthumping. Specifically, you blared the following line out the open windows:

I get knocked down, but I get up again
You’re never going to keep me down.

That, dear iPod? Total awesome.

I was thinking about getting a newer model, but now? Now we’ll see what we can do to replace that no-good battery of yours. You’ve still got years of life left in you with just a little TLC from me. You, iPod, rock.

Love,

Devin. 

WOrking on my latest book, Mastering System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, was a long process. However, Monday I got to experience my favorite part of the writing process — getting the box from the publisher with the author’s copies. There’s just something cool about seeing the final physical product; I don’t think I’ll get tired of that feeling after my 20th, 40th, or even 100th book.

It’s a good thing I have this memory to buoy my spirits; today has been a day jam-packed of small annoyances:

• I was out yesterday with a migraine (neck was jammed in tons of different places), making me super pissy. Today seems to be a ramp back down from Pissy Devin, rather than a huge improvement.


• Updating the sidebar of my blog (if you’re reading this via RSS or LiveJournal feed, you won’t see that sidebar) with the Amazon link was WAY harder than it really needed to be, involving having to reboot the damn blog server to get one little graphic to show up (iisreset didn’t do the trick).


• Getting my new wireless headset (which I won in Sydney at the training conference) working was, again, more of a chore than it really needed to be.

Here’s hoping the day gets better.

The speaker just said, and I quote, “regular expressions, which are fairly straightforward.”

That’s, um, well, interesting. And wrong.

I’ve been using Mac OS X for a couple of years now and I just today learned about Quicksilver, thanks to an offhand comment in a friend’s blog.

Holy crap — Quicksilver is so incredibly scrumptious and I’m not even running it yet! Haven’t even downloaded it — I’ve only got 10.3 on my Mac mini and the Macbook Pro is on 10.4. Apparently, I can’t run the latest version of Quicksilver on 10.3, and I hate hate hate having to maintain two separate versions of software across multiple machines. (As an aside, this is one of my biggest pet peeves with the Mac world. It seems like every cool and useful application just drops support for previous versions of the OS, a year or two after the next release comes out.)

 

Okay, I have a question for you Mac users out there.

Say you’ve got a Macbook Pro with an 80GB hard drive. Due to the accumulation of data, including a 30GB Boot Camp partition, you’d really like to upgrade the hard drive. Let’s also say you can (or have) acquired a compatible hard drive 160GB or larger.

What software would you need to move your existing Mac OS X and (preferably) Boot Camp partitions over to the new machine and allow them to be expanded? That is, you should be able to boot up and have at least 80GB on your Mac OS X partition and the rest for your Boot Camp image. Can you do this with the utilities built in to Mac OS X, or do you need extra utilities? Do you need any hardware (like an external Firewire or USB 2.0 case for a hard drive)?

Bonus points if you can point me to a link on how to do the process. Note that while moving the Boot Camp partition is a “would be nice”, not being able to do it isn’t a deal-breaker.
 

Dear IT Marketing people;

You are required to immediately cease and desist from using the phrase “perfect storm” (example: “the current regulatory environment creates a perfect storm for compliance vendors”) in any subsequent communications or materials. You may be under the delusion that it shows that you are hip and trendy, but all it really does is let us know that you have nothing substantive to say and merely rely on stealing the latest buzzwords to try to tell us about your boring, unoriginal product.

Here’s a suggestion: stop your frantic efforts to stay on top of the latest chic IT lingo. Instead, devote a mere 10% of that time (yes, that’s one-tenth, for the four of you who understand fractions) to actually coming up with something original to say about your product or service.

You will get extra bonus points (and probably higher sales) if you can do so in simple language: “If you buy our product and use it correctly, your CEO has a smaller chance of going to jail” is much more clear and persuasive than just about anything else you can say, except for possibly, “If you buy our product and fifteen years’ worth of consulting services to go with it, you will be 500% more attractive to members of the appropriate gender and orientation.”

You can really increase sales by being honest about your product, but that’s an advanced topic for another time.

Thanks in advance for your kind attention. Please close your mouth and wipe the drool from your chin; it’s unbecoming.

Sincerely not living in 2000,

Devin

I’m getting really bloody tired of LJ’s RSS feed reader deciding to re-read old posts from my blog.

Apologies to the 20 or so people who still read this blog’s LJ feed. I’m starting to think I need to just ask LJ to remove the devinonearth feed entirely.

We had a nice even grey cloud cover with light rain this morning, providing a relief from the big nasty bright glowing ball of superheated plasma. I love this weather; it’s why I live in Seattle.

I’ve been having recurring headaches and back trouble, traceable to my chair at work. I picked up a new one last night; it is quite tasty. My back is happy!

Bonus: the battery on my Macbook Pro died and I had to deal with Apple Support. During the discussion, in which I never called the rep a single name or in fact said anything offensive, I managed to make my rep cry. This was after I explained to him why Apple’s intended little procedural run-around (“We can’t do the replacement procedure directly with you unless you pay $50 for a support incident or $250 for the extended protection plan even though your laptop is still in the hardware warranty period; you’ll have to go to your local Apple store and have them do all the troubleshooting steps from our website you already did. Oh, and they can’t just hand you a replacement battery; they’ll give you a code so you can call us back to have us do the replacement procedure with you.”) was not acceptable. The phrases “the worst of both worlds” and “a gratuitous insult to the intelligence of your customers” were both featured prominently.

I didn’t mean to make the guy cry, but Apple’s policies were crap and he was just a touch too cheerful about staying within their lines. From my time of doing tech support, I know that most policies are of the “try to steer the customer in this direction when possible” variety. I can even understand why Apple wants to offload initial support triage to their store staff when possible; that makes sense. However, if they’re going to send me to a store (located in the heart of Bellevue Square, which is a really crappy place to get to during the business day) for what is a common problem that is resolved with a simple component replacement, they’d better make sure that my problem can be resolved by that store visit. Let the store staff determine if it’s really a battery issue; if so, hand me a new one. They can then take care of sending the dead ones back to Apple to rotate their on-hand stock. That’s a bad policy, and when the phone rep doesn’t recognize from the caller’s response that it’s causing problems for the customer, he should at least see what what kind of latitude the policies have. If he’s not willing to show some initiative to help the customer exercise his warranty rights and solve the problem, he deserves to get reduced to tears by a rant directed at the piss-poor policy he’s offering.

Apple sells gift cards that can be redeemed online or in their physical stores. So far, so good.

Apple sells gift certificates for iTunes — both phsycial and email versions. So far, so good.

A friend got me a $50 Apple Gift Card for Christmas. So far, awesome.

Apple won’t allow my to use my Gift Card to buy songs off iTunes. Annoying. 

Apple won’t allow me to use my Gift Card to buy the email iTunes Gift Certificate (which I would receive immediately, and be able to use to buy the $50 worth of songs I’ve got saved in my iTunes cart, that I was planning on being able to listen to on the plane tomorrow).

Bastards.

Thinking about it, the reason behind it is probably either a) fraud prevention or b) the result of some legal settlement/contract along the way…but either way, it’s incredibly crappy that I have credit with Apple, want to make a purchase, and can’t through no fault of my own.

Apple, you suck. Fix this, because it makes iTunes and the Apple Music Store far less convenient. I don’t really care what the underlying problem is; you’re a smart company. Fix it and get out of the way of me spending money at your store.

 

I refer you all now to the truth about switching, a nice little blog post that is refreshingly clear of hype and hyperbole. Now that we’re all on the same page, on to my additional commentary.

1.  Too true. It’s a lot more friendly, though, than it used to be. I credit the steady barrage of laptops with the ubiquitous Apple logo on TV and silver screen for the last few years. If Sydney Bristow and James Bond are cool enough to use Macs — and I can hack into alien motherships and save the whole Earth with one — then maybe they’re good enough for us “normal” people to use.


2. Oddly enough, I get this the most when I’m in the parking lot. Apple products come with a couple of discreet all-white Apple stickers, and I put one on my car. It never fails to get a conversation going, especially in combination with the Utilikilts sticker and the “Practice safe government; use kingdoms” sticker.


3. I haven’t seen this nearly as much, or rather, most computer users tend to be helpful. It’s just that many Windows users’ idea of helpful is “Install Norton” and “WebShots rules!”, whereas Mac users actually have a lot of the useful stuff built in, so the help they give enables you to make more use of what you’ve already got. And when they do tell you to buy a program, it’s usually pretty darn worth it.


4. I don’t see this one, but then again, I am pretty careful in my online hygiene habits.


5. Again, I don’t tend to see viruses even on my Windows machines. However, my Mac-using friends certainly don’t get as frothed about the latest virus/worm threat. Even my UNIX/Linux friends tend to spend a little bit more time worrying, just because those systems pack in so MUCH software that it sometimes seems like there’s always a new vulnerability in core libraries — and the patches cause their own share of problems, usually in forcing some library to get upgraded and breaking a host of other applications that they hadn’t wanted to upgrade yet.


6. Here, I disagree. I wouldn’t even claim 99%. There are definite issues even in some of the basic functionality between Windows and Mac versions of the Office suite. However, I tend to use each system for different types of things, so I minimize the pain that way.


7. I still see a lot of sites that don’t work well with Safari. Part of this is the HTML out there; part of it is Safari. I see it a LOT more on my 10.3 Mac mini than I do on my 10.4 MacBook Pro. And Firefox for the Mac just seems to be a bit slower and a bit less stable than it is on Windows.


8. Yes, yes, oh God yes. I get compliments on the MacBook Pro, and I love just how comfortable the laptop and keyboard are to type on. The touchpad won me over. The trayless media drive is just sexy. The magnetic power cable is invaluable in a house with four klutzes. Sometimes, I just want to roll naked in bed with this laptop, it’s that genius.


9. Figuring out how to deal with expired shared credentials for Windows file shares about drove me nuts, until I discovered how to manage keychains. I still don’t like the split between “Applications” and “Utilities,” especially for system programs — it seems to be very arbitrary.


10. I shared my “ah-ha!” moment already (see the last link about the touchpad), but there are other things. The whole way I can mount disk images easily and quickly, grab files out of them, then unmount them. Boom. I wish Windows did that — it’s just so nice.


11. This is probably my biggest gripe, but it’s been less of one since I’ve been spending more time on the MacBook Pro and have an actual Apple keyboard. I’ve adjusted fairly well to switching between Ctrl and Command keys.


12. No buyer’s remorse for me. I’m a lot less likely to spend money up-front these days, so I don’t suffer buyer’s remorse. (That, and I didn’t buy my Macs — but in both cases, I’d been wanting to.)


13. Another huge agreement from me. I spend a lot of time getting my profile adjusted to my preferred working style on each Windows box I spend more than 10 minutes on. I have a lot less fiddling to do on the Mac. I just go do the fun/hard/cool stuff.


14. Not only do I have to plan my reboots, I plan when I shut down apps. Firefox has been nagging me about an update for three days now. I don’t shut down my apps all that often even on Windows, but I’ll usually clear stuff out at the end of the day when I shut the laptop down. On my MacBook Pro, I just shut the lid and let it all sleep.


15. I’m not really into buying aftermarket add-ons and such; I’m saving my pennies for bigger purchases, like A/V converters. That and Parallels, for when I need to run Office without compatibility issues. (And then I can run Solaris 10 in a VM. Yum!)


16. Sadly true. I really need to dish out the money for a Tiger upgrade for my mini, but I’ve got sticker shock still (and I’m still grumpy about Apple’s “two weeks” policy for reduced-price upgrades, because I missed it on the mini by only a few days). I know what Windows retails for, but you can usually find a reseller who is letting go for a nice discount, and you don’t have to buy an upgrade every year. Windows Service Packs usually add enough new functionality to give you the “new OS” experience.


17. I hope so. Then again, I’ve got plenty of life left in the mini.


18. I’ve had this happen a couple of times — usually at Microsoft-themed conventions. The last couple of months have been fun — the big bad Microsoft Exchange MVP, busily working away on a MacBook Pro. It’ll be better when I have Parallels installed.


19. I don’t know if I am more productive, but I certainly FEEL more productive. I’m less inclined to download timewaster software to my MacBook. It’s so sleek and sexy! I don’t want to crap it up.


20. I haven’t run into this yet, but I’m not looking forward to it when I do.


21. Market share, shmarket share. Apple’s producing decent laptops (that can run Windows if they have to) at a good price point. They look nice, they work as well as other mid-to-high-end Wintel machines, and everyone is starting to get used to seeing the Apple brand around thanks to the iPod.


22. Yup, especially on 10.4. Connect, get what I need, disconnect. Share stuff out, stop sharing. It just works.

I guess you could sum all these points down thusly: Switching isn’t nearly the big deal that both Apple and the Wintel world want you to believe. Macs are great computers, but they’re just computers. At the end of the day, they’re tools; they won’t get you laid more quickly, help you write that Great American Novel with more flair, or save you money on your tax returns. Pick the tools you like and use them well.

 

I wrote up a posting yesterday for my work blog about the recently proposed SAFETY Act, a lovely bit of proposed legislation from some Republican Representatives who basically are handing the Attorney General’s office an open license on the Internet. Rather than duplicate it here, I’ll just link you. And lest you think this is a sad, transparent attempt to drive more traffic to my work blog, I’ll point out that if there’s any traffic driving to be done it would be the other way around; my work blog gets far more daily readers.

Big conference, lots of geeks. With two laptops and a Windows Mobile cellphone, I’m not at all unusual here. The conference organizers have wisely established free Wi-Fi for us all.

Well, guys, that’s a great start, but how about you give us some bandwidth? I’ve had faster connections over my old 300 baud modem.
 

I buy and read more than a few technical books. Big shock, I know, but what can you do? I have a local bookstore I like to visit, but I’ll often use Amazon as well when I’m not in a tearing hurry to get a particular book in my hands.

One of Amazon’s value-added features is that they’ll send you recommendations on books you might like to buy, based on the books you’ve bought or told them you own, combined with the buying patterns of other people who’ve bought the books you bought. Recently, they sent me a suggestion so on-target, so brilliant, I had to laugh:

Thanks, Amazon! I’ll check that out right away! It’s right over there on my bookshelf, about 10 feet away from me. And who knows…maybe I can get the authors to sign it for me!

…in my last post when I said this was the year of the outage. About the time Steph and I tried to get the domain controller back online, we had a completely unrelated bit of breakage take down the blog server for another several weeks. Finally tracked it down and fixed it this weekend, and in the process fixed more of the cruft on the servers.

But more about me later; it’s time to do the Advent wreath with the family.

It’s been an awfully long time since I last posted, hasn’t it?

As you may have guessed by now, it is because of, yet again, another computer outage at home. In this case, my Windows domain controller hard drive died. Dead. Kaput. Spins No More. Dances With Boat Anchors. It’s an old IBM Deskstar hard drive, which I’d somehow overlooked when installing it into that machine years ago, because the Deskstar line has earned the nickname “Deathstar” for how frequently they would fail. Modern Hitachi Deskstar drives may be perfectly reliable, but it wouldn’t matter because the association <em>Deskstar = lost data</em> has become far too embedded in my brain.

Those of you who aren’t networking geeks may not know what a domain controller (DC) is, and you probably don’t care, so I won’t go into details. I’ll just say that it’s the brain of the network.  If your network is set up to use a DC and you don’t have one available, nobody can log on to their workstations. They probably can’t resolve DNS lookups to the outside world (which means no browsing websites or sending email). Exchange certainly won’t even start up without a DC around, and I’m lucky that I’d configured my web server in such a way that it’s been able to stand not having a DC around.

This failure happened, of course, the Friday night before Steph and I were leaving for Las Vegas on the following Tuesday, and we already had far too much to try to get done that weekend for me to even pretend to take the time to fix the DC. And by “fix” I mean “rebuild from scratch,” which in turn means having to reinstall Exchange and have a lot of fun recovering our mailbox data. I instead tossed up a quick band-aid of a mail service so we’d continue to get email on our main addresses and called it good. We then went to Vegas for the conference I was speaking at and had a lot of fun, and since we’ve been back I’ve slowly been assembling the tools and components I need to begin the rebuilding process.

Steph, bless her heart, has been making noises about getting more involved in the computer administration (hey, it never hurts a kept woman to have a few legal salable skills in the event that her sugar daddy is killed in a freak accident involving a ton of failing Deathstars), so over the past couple of days I’ve been walking her through rebuilding the domain controller (and by extension, the rest of the domain). Tonight’s task: re-install the DNS zone files inside our network, so that the computers in our house can once again see the websites that I host on my web server. (It’s hard to blog regularly when you can’t get to your own blog site, and lately I’ve been too busy at work to take the time to do it from there.)

So, there you have it. I hereby declare 2006 as the Year of the Outage. 

 

While I’m waiting for the last test to finish up (late night at work, but sometimes that’s what you do), I upgraded to Community Server 2.1 Service Pack 1. SP1 was just released Monday. So far, so good.

My Mac is sure being awfully slow, though. 

If you’re the owner of an HTC Wizard mobile device (Qtek 9100, I-mate K-Jam, T-Mobile MDA Vario, Cingular 8125, Orange SPV M3000a, and more), then you may have discovered one of the few design flaws of the device: the fact that the stylus, after a few months, stops staying in the body of the phone. It’s a bit disconcerting to go to pull your stylus out and find that it’s not there anymore.

I’ve seen lots of people posting on the Net about it, and there have been a variety of fixes and work-arounds posted. Some people wrap the stylus with Scotch tape, thus making it a bit thicker. Other brave souls have opened their devices up and fixed the liner that causes the problem. I found a third solution that seems to be working for me, and since I haven’t seen it anywhere else, I figured I’d share it. And for the faint of heart, it requires no alternations or additions.

My tip is very simple: extend the stylus to its full length before putting it back in the slot. Yup, that’s it. The stylus on these devices telescopes slightly. For whatever reason, it fails to grip fully if I collapse the stylus first; by fully extending the stylus, I can get it to make a solid contact inside the case and not fall out.

As a note, not all the cases are alike. My wife’s Cingular 8125, for example, has a nifty ridged lip design that helps hold the stylus in place from the top. I don’t think she’ll be suffering from this problem.

Apologies to those of you reading this on RSS who may have seen two copies of the previous post. I swear, one of these days I’ll figure out how not to duplicate posts when trying to edit them.

I just discovered an amusing typo in a technical document. Instead of a section on prerequisites, it has a section on perquisites.

Okay, so it’s not earth-shaking, but I got a much-needed chuckle.

Now off to brew a pot of peppermint herbal tea to share with my office mate. 

Oy vey. We’ve been Slashdotted.

Let’s see if our T-1 and web server can hold up. 

Today, my company released a report comparing several anti-phishing technologies, including a beta version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7. I note this because I was one of the researchers and authors of the report. Needless to say, we’re already catching a lot of flack in the press because we scored IE7 the highest of the various products.

Many of you have heard my opinion of IE6 (I switched to Firefox back in the 0.4 timeframe). I just want to say that through my exposure to IE7 as gained through the testing for this project, I ended up switching back to IE7. I’m now using IE7 RC1 as my main web browser, and slowly converting my mass of Firefox bookmarks back over to IE7 RSS feeds and favorites (as appropriate).

So, make of that what you will.
 

Boy howdy, that was quite an excessively long break.That’ll teach me to patch my servers!

You see, back in late August, I was being a good server admin and making sure all of my servers had the latest patches on them. The last server I updated was my blog server (hosting the web server plus the database that holds my Community Server install as well as a couple of other dynamic websites I host). Unlike all the other server, my old blog server (MARA) failed to reboot.

It turned out that the boot hard drive decided this was a lovely time to express to the world that it had some rather strong doubts about my parentage, whether I wipe my feet adequately when coming indoors, and a bunch of other insulting and sensitive topics.

Like the seasoned expert I am, I took a few minutes to think about how I was going to restore the data. Obviously, this would be a good opportunity to separate the web server and the database server like I’d been planning on doing for, oh, months now. Which would in turn require me to first finish the mail server migration I was in the middle of. Oh, hey, don’t forget that it’s going to be really tricky to recover certain very necessary data from the failed hard drive; if I was lucky I’d get one shot at it[1], so I’d better make sure it worked the first time. I wanted to make sure I was very clear on what needed to be done before I jumped in, spanners akimbo.

I thought a bit too hard. The whole “one shot to get my database data off a known bad drive” started assuming Olympian proportions. So I did what any sensible admin would do.

Like Jonah, I fled screaming to Ninevah as fast as my legs could take me.

Finally, I convinced my friend Nick (who is a genius with hardware) to come down from his mountain and give me a hand. We pretty quickly got all the relevant data recovered, leaving me to finish up the mail server migration so I could free up the new web server, while building the new database server…

…anyway, it all finally got done, and everything is back up an running. Thanks for your patience[2].

[1] Let’s not discuss the backups. Really, why is it that backups fail so damn often? What good are they?

[2] I note that Google has pretty much removed any reference to this blog from searches about me. What’s up with that, Google? You said you loved me forever last month! 

Whoa! I just now saw that folks on the LJ feed (possibly on the RSS feed) got to see the Firefly review I did all over again. Sorry about that; it wasn’t intentional! (I was just fixing a couple of transcription errors that kept the hyperlink to Nick’s blog from working…)

There are a couple of glitches on the site relating to the upgrade. One of them is extremely annoying and I’m trying to track it down, the others are just minor pains in the butt:

1. In the ugprade from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0, your old cookies may not carry over. You’ll have to delete any cookies you have from blogs.thecabal.org and re-login to the site.


2. In Firefox, I’m seeing at least a couple of instances of folks just flat-out not being able to login. I’m working on trying to figure this one out. This may very well hasten my migration back to Internet Explorer (albeit version 7, with proper tab browsing).


3. In IE7 beta 3, the pop-up windows show up in a separate tab.

Okay, not me. For once, I’m the one giving the peer pressure.

A few posts back, I noted in passing that Nick’s blog was displaying a error message. Nothing too hideous, but it was the web equivalent of a pimple on the face. I am happy to report that he’s now fixed it. ePimple gone.

You’re still Snakes on a Plane cool, Nick.

As you may have figured out by now (if you read this site in your browser instead of via RSS or LJ), there’s been another small change around here. I just got done upgrading to Community Server 2.1, the latest and greatest version of the blog software I used. It includes some very nice new themes; Alaric and I made use of them until we figure out how to further tweak and customize them. Treanna won’t budge from her current pink theme until I figure out how to get one of the new ones a bit more in her preferred portion of the spectrum.

One of the biggest new updates is that the old categories feature has been transformed into tags — they’re both ways to classify blogs posts, but tags are more compatible with the way other blogging sites and software are doing these types of things. It just helps our blogs fit more closely into the blogosphere.

Another personal change, for me, is that I’m finally using the built-in WYSIWYG editor instead of writing the HTML for my posts by hand. This makes things go a little faster, so I appreciate it — and I also appreciate the fact that CS is generating the kind of HTML now that I’ve always preferred. For example, it uses paragraph tags instead of break tags, and it allows me to specify whether my links open to new pages or overwrite the existing page (I prefer the former and have been taking the time to force this by hand in the past couple of months). I can also do all of my formatting the same way I’d do it in Word: CTRL-B for bold, CTRL-I for italics, CTRL-K to turn a highlighted piece of text into a hyperlink. Sweet!

Another nice change — I can choose my tags from the same window that I’m writing text in, instead of flipping over to a different tab (which I’d forget to do half of the time, meaning I’d have to jump into management mode to come back and edit the post. What a pain!). This is very streamlined, and I think I can even whip up new tags on the fly!

The final change is strictly under-the-hood; My CS installation is now running on ASP.NET 2.0, using the standard ASP.NET membership providers. This is a Way Cool Thing in geekville and really doesn’t change your reading experience in any way. It does make things much easier for me from the back-end view, so please spare a moment of happiness  on my behalf if you can’t figure out why you should personally care.

“My computer can beat up your computer.” What a load of horse hockey.

I’ve long been tired of the whole PC vs. Mac vs. Intel vs. AMD vs. RISC vs. Windows vs. UNIX vs. Linux rat race, and was finally motivated to sum my precise feelings yesterday when commenting on a friend’s computer plans:

Computers are tools, not religious icons or penis extensions. Pragmatism should be the first, best factor in picking the right hardware and software for your needs.

The reality of the matter is a dirty secret that, deep down inside, all computer geeks know and few want to admit: all hardware sucks and all software sucks.

How can they not? They are produced by human effort and design processes, which involve the fine art of — say it with me now — compromise. No design team has an unlimited budget, infinite time, mastery of all physical processes, or the ability to make up their own requirements. The history of computing is replete with the corpses of elegantly engineered designs that proved to be too costly to mass-produce or that failed to meet the real-world needs of the customers expected to buy them.

We live in a physical universe ruled by the Satrap of Entropy and his lieutenant Murphy. Instead of wasting a lot of time heating the atmosphere and murdering electrons with endless flamewars, people need to chill out and find the flavor of suckage they can live with.

So take a stand against computer zealots everywhere. The next time you see a wrinkled lip or furrowed brow being unshipped for the opening salvos of a rant, take pre-emptive action. The only answer to “My computer can beat up your computer” is, in the end, “My sledge hammer doesn’t give a shit.”

WHAM!

The current project I’m on at work? I’ve decided it needs a new name. I’m henceforth calling it Operation Zeno’s Paradox.

You know you’re in trouble when you’ve finally found a solution to a
roadblock that is keeping you from finishing a major portion of your
project, serendipity has dropped a convenient piece of hardware in your
lap with which to effect this solution, and then in order to ensure
that your day of brilliance is turned into wasted effort — not to
mention stalling your continued hopes of forward progress — that
hardware blows up. And spectacularly, I might add. I’ve seen power supplies blow up before, but never as enthusiastically as this. Huge clouds of white smoke pouring from the machine.

My first thought was literally, “Wow. I knew somebody didn’t want me to finish this project, but this
is a little much.” Then I sighed, calmed Treanna down (she was standing
two feet away from the machine at the time), and hauled the now-carcass
of a computer back to 3Sharp to rebuild.

Let’s hope the redeployment goes more smoothly, yes?

I’ve never been a big fan of the whole zombie genre. However, I’ve finally found a bit of zombie-themed entertainment that makes me giggle. A very talented musician by the name of Jonathan Coulton has taken the basic zombie concept, mixed it in with office meetings and lingo, and set the whole tasty thing to music: Re Your Brains.

You can listen to it only or download it for a dollar. While you’re at it, check out the rest of his songs. His white boy easy listening version of “Baby Got Back” is funnier than sin.

Also entertaining, yesterday I got what was quite possibly the funniest spam I’ve ever seen. Somebody out there is aggressively targetting geeks. It was your basic Viagra ad — a picture of a woman and a man obviously about to get intimate — but the tagline read, “Take the blue pill…and I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Marketing male fertility by using Matrix references — genius! If only they weren’t spammers…

I’ve reached another milestone on my personal plan for world domination: my first tech magazine article has been published. I talk more about it over on my work blog.

I should have known, from first thing yesterday morning, what kind of day it was going to be. Starting with sleeping through the alarm I’d set so I could get up and get a headstart to a long day, right through trying to change the roll of toilet paper and ending up by dropping the fresh roll into the toilet bowl, I had signs it was going to be a difficult day.

We did finally manage to make it to all of our errands in Redmond, including my eye exam and subsequent purchase of not one but two new pairs of glasses (luckily, we were able to turn a $410 purchase into a mere $155, through clever use of an eye plan discount we get through our bank and by recycling my existing set of frames, which were in remarkably good shape after three years of living with me). Yes, I now have driving glasses and reading glasses. I’m having to get used to the reading glasses — anything beyond about 10 feet gets blurry. This is more than fine for my daily computer work and reading books, but I’ll have to figure out the best way to keep both pairs on my person (or at least near me) at all times so I can switch, because if I’m not looking at something up close, the reading glasses will get me sick in a hurry.

It is nice to be able to read my monitors again without having to crank up the font size or get a headache, though.

We also managed to swing by the office so I could get the lowdown on some stuff I’ve been asked to do. We also picked up a new ATX power supply for Steph’s computer, dual-1GHz motherboard with processors, 512MB of RAM, and even a 40GB hard drive thrown in — all for very cheap, courtesy of the Seattle Craigslist. These will go into the Exchange server, giving it a much needed upgrade, freeing up other components so Steph can have my old system and we can get her back up and running on her own machine.

All in all, it ended up being a productive day; everything just took longer than we’d expected. I ended up working on day job stuff well into the evening. Thank goodness today is Friday.

On the calendar for the weekend: some good clean RoboRally fun with new friends, a Saturday evening visit to Church of the Apostles, some computer upgrades, and hammering out Chapter 5 of my ebook.

When I did my last round of server and desktop deployments here at
the house[1], I tried to set up each of my servers (Windows Server
2003) with at least 256MB of RAM and each of the desktops (Windows XP
Pro) with 512MB. That may sound backwards, but I was working with what
I could scrounge and frankly, the desktops in this house do a lot more
work than the servers.

Ever since Steph’s computer died,
she’s been using the kids’ computers. Now, I’ve known for a while that
it is noticeably slower than our machines, but it does have the slower
processor, the motherboard has a slower front-side bus[2], the hard
drive is smaller and older (which means slower), and it had the least
powerful video card, so I didn’t think it terribly strange. Steph has
been complaining about it, and since she’s been using it regularly
while we wait for the parts to rebuild her machine, I finally decided
to take a look and see what I could do to speed it up — maybe defrag
the hard drive, run a spyware scan, that sort of thing.

Turns out the damn thing only had 128MB of RAM.[3] Obviously, I
didn’t get 512MB in that system. I can only speculate that I thought I
was putting a single 256MB stick of RAM in there after a late night of
troubleshooting, and promptly forgot to a) check the machine while it
was booting up and b) scrounge the rest of the RAM.

It’s amazing how much faster it runs now.

[1] Dear Lord. I don’t set up computers for my wife and kids, I deploy desktops. I’ve been doing this too long.

[2] The front-side bus (FSB)
is a techy term for how fast the CPU can access other portions of the
computer; in this day and age, a FSB is usually somewhere around an
order of magnitude (10x) lower than the CPU’s rated speed. A 1GHz CPU
might be running in a system with a 100MHz FSB, which means the system
is configured with a 10x clock multiplier. The same CPU on a system
with a 133MHz FSB would be running on a x7.5 multiplier. Clear?

[3] Although this is not the
absolute minimum amount of RAM you need to get Windows XP to boot, it
is considered the bare minimum in order to do anything useful[4].

[4] As long as you define “useful” as “Able to open Notepad by itself, within 30 seconds.”

Today, I did something I’d never done before. It was risky and a bit scary, and I don’t recommend it as a general procedure for everyone.

Yes, I upgrade my new Window Mobile Pocket PC. What made it risky was that I upgraded it to the ROM images that didn’t come from my manufacturer, but rather from that of a similar device. In fact, there are several devices sold by various vendors that are all basically the same hardware under the hood; they vary in the specific software their vendors bundle on them.

If you’re interested in why I did this, and how I did it, you can read all about it either online or via Word doc.

First written: 07 Mar 2006
Latest update: 07 Mar 2006

Note: You can also download this document in Word format.

I-mate recently released new ROM images containing AKU2 (aka Windows Mobile 5.0 with the Messaging and Security Feature Pack) for their K-JAM Pocket PC. Because the K-JAM is a re-branded HTC Wizard device, these ROM images can also be used on other HTC Wizard devices, such as the Qtek 9100.

I own a stock Qtek 9100 with the September 2005 ROM images and have experienced slow communications, occasional device instability, and other unpleasant symptoms. Out of the box, my device details were:

ROM version:            1.1.7.5
ROM date:               9/22/05
Radio version:          01.01.10
Protocol version:       4.0.13.16
Extended ROM version:   1.1.7.105

I’ve been considering upgrading to the updated November images I’ve seen on the various forums. Because I couldn’t confirm that those images were officially released images, I’ve been holding off and hoping that an official set of images with the MSFP would be released.

Now that the I-mate images are available, I’ve finally made the upgrade plunge. By choosing to use the I-mate images I run the risk of having future support issues in the event of failure or problems; I’m certain I’d have to revert to a standard Qtek ROM image before getting any official support from my reseller. However, the potential feature and stability benefits are worth it to me. Here’s what I did to upgrade and how the process worked for me. I won’t talk much about how it improved my device in this document; if you’re interested in that kind of information, I’ll blog about it from time to time on either of my blogs:

My professional blog (e)Mail Insecurity (courtesy of my employer 3Sharp LLC).
My personal blog Devin on Earth.

When following these steps, I ran programs on both my mobile device and the laptop that has the associated ActiveSync partnership. For clarity sake, I will use the terms device to refer to the mobile device and host to refer to the computer that is partnered to the device via ActiveSync.

I used a USB connection between my device and host. To the best of my knowledge, use of the USB connection to update is mandatory, as the radio firmware is updated as part of the process (and would therefore clobber the link and leave the device non-functional).

Note: I provide this document only for informational purposes to help other Qtek 9100 owners know what the process involves to aid them in deciding when they wish to upgrade their own devices, not to provide instruction on how to do it. If you decide to use this document as guidance for upgrading your own device, you acknowledge and certify that neither I nor my employer support this process, nor are we in any way responsible or liable for any mistakes, data loss, device damage, warranty voiding, or other consequences of you performing this action. No nasty e-mail, no flames, and no lawyers! You should never perform any upgrade without first checking with your vendor’s support representatives to get their advice and directions.

Without further legalese or ado, here’s how I spent my summer vacation:

1.      First, I made sure that I’d downloaded all the necessary tools and images:

·        I started ActiveSync 4.1 or later from Microsoft. My device came with ActiveSync 4.0 on CD, but the updated image requires the use of 4.1 after the upgrade. It turns out that I’d already upgraded to it for other (non-mobile) reasons – but if I hadn’t, I’d have downloaded and installed this update first before doing anything else.

·        Next, I got the AKU2 ROM images. This ZIP archive unpacks to a single executable installer that will completely wipe the device and use the existing ActiveSync connection to upgrade it to the latest ROM, radio, protocol, and Extended ROM.

·        Finally, I got the lokiwiz tool. The latest version at the time of writing was 0.2b; If I did this at a later date I’d want to get the latest version. This tool allows users to manipulate various locks on the device, including the all-important CID lock that prevents loading I-mate branded ROMS on a non-I-mate Wizard variant.

Note: I’ve heard that some Wizard-based devices are locked by the carrier. If I had one of those devices, I would probably have needed to track down additional ROMS and the tools to load them after performing the procedure below. That’s part of the reason I’m so happy with my Qtek – it’s not locked in to a single carrier. Sure, I have to do some manual configuration to get the GPRS services running with my carrier, but I’ll take that any day in exchange for the freedom to switch carriers when needed.

2.      Since the update process completely wipes the device, I backed up my data. I didn’t worry about any fancy utilities; I simply copied files to my host and made sure I’d done a full synchronization pass. I didn’t have to worry about contact, email, or calendar info, since I have my device configured to pull down everything from my Exchange server anyway. If I did have other data or had wanted to save some of my settings instead of restore them manually, I might have used one or more of the following options:

·        Copying files and settings to removable storage.

·        Manually copying other information to the host via ActiveSync, wireless, etc.

·        Use some other methods for backing up system settings. I’m told that some backups made by other utilities may not be recoverable under new ROMs because file formats and locations may have changed. This is a special concern when switching from one vendor’s ROM images to another like I did.

3.      I used lokiwiz to unlock the device CID:

A.     On my host, I extracted the lokiwiz ZIP archive to my desired folder. I used My Documents\HTC Updates but the actual choice of folder doesn’t matter.

B.     I copied the EnableRapi.cab to the device.

C.     On the device, I executed the EnableRapi.cab file. The device warned that it is unsigned, which I was expecting. I let it run and clicked OK when it finished. This enabled the use of the Windows Remote API (RAPI) protocol between the host and the device, which allows host-based applications to perform management updates.

D.     I ensured that the device and host had a current ActiveSync connection.

E.      On my host, I opened a command line prompt (cmd.exe) and executed the lokiwiz.bat batch file with no parameters.

F.      I selected the C. CID Unlock (SuperCID) option by typing c and pressing Enter.

G.     The batch file extracted and copied over files to my device. When it was done, the device rebooted. I waited for it to re-establish the ActiveSync connection and finish the synchronization pass.

4.      On my host, I extracted the ROM image ZIP archive to my desired folder. It created a single executable file named K-JAM_WWE_216901_2169101_020710_ship.exe.

5.      I again ensured that the device and host had a current ActiveSync connection. I then executed the K-JAM_WWE_216901_2169101_020710_ship.exe file on the host and clicked Next to start the installer.

6.      The installer unpacked files for a few seconds then disappeared from the host screen. After a few seconds, the PDA Phone ROM Update Utility launched and displayed a warning screen.

7.      I enabled the I understand… checkbox to acknowledge the warning that all of my information would be deleted from the device then clicked Next.

8.      I showed that I was able to follow the displayed instructions by:

·        Disabling standby and hibernation on the host.

·        Charging the device battery to at least 50% (fully charged is best).

·        Ensuring that the device and host had a current ActiveSync connection.

9.      I enabled the I completed the steps indicated above checkbox and clicked Next. I was careful to follow the directions to not launch any other programs while the update process was running. In the future, I’d shut down a few applications that were previously running, just to be on the safe side.

10.  The utility interrogated my device then displayed the current ROM image version. I clicked Update to tell the utility I wished to upgrade that version, Next on the following screen to verify that I did in fact really mean it, and Next one more time to actually begin the update.

11.  The connection between my host and device was broken and re-established as the ActiveSync screen disappeared from the desktop. After a few moments of a funky multi-colored boot screen on the device, I saw a progress bar on both the host and device. The upgrade took approximately 10 minutes; I did not remove the USB connection or launch any program during this time.

12.  When the update completed, my device rebooted. I clicked Finish to remove the update utility. My Qtek originally displayed an HTC splash screen during boot; after the upgrade it now shows an I-mate screen.

13.  I now needed to setup the device. My device stepped me through the familiar Windows Mobile setup routine, but also asked me to select my carrier package. Since none of the packages were for my US-based carrier, I clicked Cancel. The device then installed other software and rebooted. It will be interesting to see if there’s a pre-packaged .cab that does contain the settings for my carrier. In the meantime, I had to manually configure the device to connect to my GPRS service.

14.  I also needed to re-establish the ActiveSync partnership between the device and host, including provisioning my Exchange settings.

At the end of this process (which really didn’t take very long at all – perhaps 15 to 20 minutes if I hadn’t been typing it all up as I went), I have a sexy, fast Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC that includes support for the MSFP. Whether or not it will solve my other problems, I don’t yet know. You can bet, however, that I’ll be blogging about it in the next few weeks.

In case you were wondering, here are my device details after the upgrade:

ROM version:            2.16.9.1
ROM date:               2/6/06
Radio version:          02.07.10
Protocol version:       413.1.03
Extended ROM version:   2.16.9.101

That Protocol version “413” isn’t a typo – at least not on my part. My Qtek really does say that.

You can use the contact forms at either of my blogs to send me any questions or comments. Thank you for reading!

I don’t know whether folks reading this via RSS got it too, or whether it’s just a quirk of Livejournal’s RSS feed system, but for some reason when LJ finally picked up my new blog posts this afternoon (so why do they claim it scans new feeds every hour if it can’t detect new material?), it picked up a bunch of the old posts as well. I’m guessing that something in the upgrade updated time and dates on a bunch of posts. I had something like that happen when I went from 1.0 to 1.1.

So folks reading me on LJ and other affected RSS feeds, apologies.

Thanks to the timely comment from Scott Watermasysk, the developer of .Text (which became the blog engine for Community Server), we’ve got our technical glitches sorted out and everything should be working normally.

How often have you had a software problem and gotten the answer from the person who wrote the software, directly on your website? Doctors don’t do housecalls — it’s nice to see that developers do. Thank you, Scott — your fantastic level of service is part of what keeps me so happy with this product.