I installed a trial version of Office 2003 that runs out Feb 29th 2004. Will be interesting to see if I’m totally hooked on Outlook2k3 by then. First impressions are that it looks good. However I’ve vpn’ed into the office and connecting to outlook remotely 2 mins after activating the software online. The annoying thing is that I get a systray popup message saying that its trying to get email from my mailserver. I’m sure (i hope) that I can turn this off after all when you hit the “connect” button it does normally mean that you want to get email from the server so why tell you? Like I say this is posted a couple minutes after installation and I’ve not read any documentation, manuals, help files or menus – I’m a techie remember!
Count the number of people, wait a few seconds and then count again. Then scratch your head and work out how on earth they’ve done this.
Cracked the problem with Feed on Feed not detecting gotdotnet blogs and posted the one (simple) line change to the Feed on Feed forum along with a suggestion on what to look for with radio pages so they could also be autodetected. That would take a bit more work but I reckon I could do it….someday.
If you go to the Microsoft Office homepage in Phoenix it tells you that you need to be running ie5.01 (which isn’t supported by Microsoft anymore!) or Netscape Navigator 6 or later. NOw I would have thought Phoenix is later than NN6 as it comes from the same source originally (i’m sure Neil will correct me if i’m wrong). So you click on the “more information on supported browsers” where they pop up a message saying people may get problems even when using a supported browser. Then asks you if this page helped. When you say No it asks you WHY ….after selecting “information is wrong” the Next button doesn’t do anything. Unfortunately if you use ie6 then you are unlikely to see the error message and therefore can’t go through the wizard.
GFI have updated their Email Anti Virus and Security Testing Zone with some more checks for recent vulnerabilities. Well worth a scan on your exchange server (as long as you have the approval of your administrator as some of these tests may trigger security notifications). I’ll be testing our server tomorrow morning.
Lisa writes an open letter to her pets which i’m sure all animal lovers will agree with.
Microsoft’s technet website is getting worse and worse. I searched on the technet site for 0x00000050 and it came back with no results found. Search all of Microsoft and it comes back with 4 results plus links to more results (4 of them). NONE of these results brings back article A “Stop 0x00000050” Error Message Occurs During an Upgrade from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000. Surely the Indexing service should find results. They can’t disable number searches as most of MS errors will have a number to query against (otherwise whats the point in putting in on the screen in the first place?) If you use the google interface and search for 0x00000050 it returns 1790 results with the first 3 being different microsoft articles all with 0x00000050 in the subject.
If you remove IIS from an exchange server then you are really going to be in trouble and you will need a reinstall of ii2 and then exchange. A Technet article, 323672, explains what happens when the Exchange Routing Engine Service Does Not Start Automatically or Manually After You Remove IIS and Then Reinstall It which normally happens after you get a Event id 7000 When Attempting to Start Exchange Services (and no it wasn’t me who did this but I did have to recover from it)
Apparently you can’t backup exchange 2003 and the system state on the same backup set. This is a change to how e2k worked and seems a bit weird although there is a technet article explaining that the 820852 – Backup of the Exchange Server 2003 Information Store and the Windows Server 2003 System State Data Does Not Complete Successfully and Event ID 8019 Is Logged. I guess you could set two jobs to run with the second job appending to the end of the tape. My nly concern is that if its not done as part of the normal backup then its unlikely to get done at all – just how many people update their rdisks – and I mean the floppy version – of their NT4 servers.
I’m really struggling to do an inplace upgrade of nt4 to windows2000 (and there *are* good reasons for doing an inplace upgrade as opposed to a clean install) and one of the suggestions to get around a bsod when it boots is to disable the cache on the motherboard. When I did that and booted into nt4, just clicking start and then run took 12 seconds to fire up the run dialog box. As you can imagine the rest of the process is painfully slow which means its going to take even longer to do the upgrade. The difference in speed when you have no cache on the processor is pretty amazing (although I guess I could have cheated by interrupting the reboot process of the upgrade to disable the cache at this point in time instead of at the beginning of the upgrade)