OWA problems

Been having some weird problems with our webmail access to our mail server today. The MD of the company said it was giving him an error (which I eventually tracked down to the main page that comes up after you’ve logged in.) A couple of hours later, with no changes made, this page was coming up ok. When I then got home and tried to access the page with internet explorer (the best browser for Outlook Web Access) I get a http 500 error message, yet the pages are fine using Mozilla Firebird – ie6:0, Firebird:1 🙂
Will have to wait until tomorrow to see what the problem is as I’m not in the office!

Does blogging get you good tech support?

In the past couple of weeks I have blogged my thoughts about two pieces of software – Awasu and Zempt. Within 24 hours I’ve had posts from either the writers or users of the software updating me or asking for further comments on the software. This has been due to them monitoring services such as technorati and all the other blog consolidation services. This is what you call customer service and has gave a very good impression of the product and also the ability to update any misunderstandings users of the products actually have. Maybe Microsoft should take note! On the other hand, my experience with Netgear is that I had to wait other two days for a response to my email asking for support and only when I rang them up did I get a (very satisfactory) response to my problem. Spot the difference! I guess it would probably be a lot harder for Netgear or Microsoft to monitor individual blogs and post feedback on them due to the numbers involved – after all a lot more people have Microsoft or Netgear products than Awasu for instance.

Awasu update.

Thanks to Tara posting on my comments, I have discovered that the newsfeeds in Awasu are actually available offline as long as you don’t click in the right hand window which contains the headlines of each feed. If you do that, the body page returns a 404 not found as it’s trying to return the individual entry webpage. So you have to click on the feed in the control center window to view them. Apparently it also integrates with mozilla, but I’ll need to investigate that when I’m back on a lan connection to the net and not on a mobile dialup!

Sobig Virus

What a morning….so far I’ve had 116 notifications that we’ve received the sobig virus into our mail servers. These are running NAV and delete the attachment and were previously configured to send an email (for historical purposes of the quantity of virus’s) and a Windows Net Send Message to my desktop to notify me of the problem. However, with the amount of notifications and also notifications when the manual scan failed to open certain attachments in emails, I was unable to work as I had to keep clicking ok. Therefore I had to turn the notifications off – must remember to turn them back on again.
There would be major resistance in the company to blocking attachments at the mail server so unfortunately that option is a nogo.
At the same time I’ve had to arrange scans on three remote pc’s that managed to get the Blaster or Welchia worms on their machines as they got infected between us updating at 4am with no patch updates, and the 11.30 manual update we initiated!
One of the laptops (from a remote site) has no firewall, runs w2k and no service packs or fixes. I’ve spent the last couple of hours installing sp4,rebooting and installing all the various hotfixes, ie6 and the multiple reboots needed to do them all. WHAT A MORNING!

New virus – sobig

Thanks toSOBig was very fast spreading and by 12pm we had at least 8 copies in our mailboxes and our antivirus software was updated at 4am in the morning and nothing was found when the emails came through. Thankfully (that I am aware of) the users didn’t open the emails – I guess I’ll find out when I am in the office tomorrow.