I needed to do a restore of some voicemails on a server and the calculations on how long it was going to take were slightly off as you can see from this screenshot – it actually got as far as 150 days before it reached the data on the file and started the restore off. Typically I have to do this when the voicemail server crashes (due to a power outage when it wasn’t on a reliable UPS). Everytime the server crashes I would have to restore 2 peoples voicemails (out of about 70 voicemail boxes). They are the only two who have their voicemail wiped and Avaya don’t care about the problem. What is weird is that this time the server had a controlled shutdown and not a sudden crash.
I sent the user this screenshot and told them it might take me a while but I’m working on it – they replied saying they didn’t think they had *that* many voicemails!
I’m off to the Heroes Happen Here event in Columbus on Thursday – any other readers going? I’ve not managed to get my hands dirty with the Windows2008 server yet so this event should be interesting and hopefully pretty fun too. The last Microsoft held event was packed which spoilt it a bit but I’m hoping this one won’t be as crowded. It is a sellout which hopefully means they’ve only allowed enough people that they actually have room for this time.
One of the things that annoyed me about Lotus Notes was the inability to easily mark emails as unread once opened. However today I accidentally found out that by pressing the Insert key this will toggle the read/unread state of the email. However, if you have a mixed state of read and unread mails, then all the mails turn to one state which will be the opposite state of the currently selected email.
I asked around in the office and nobody knew this trick – I discovered it by accident when trying to delete an email and I missed the key. The only downside to the trick is if you miss the insert button and hit delete instead – I am not responsible for any sudden outbursts of swearing if this happens!
My taxes are finally filed and I’ve got about 3 times the refund that I got last year which is very nice. Most of this is due to the medical bills that Kristen had last year with her thyroid surgery. One neat trick that I didn’t know is that Giant Eagle can give you a list of prescriptions purchased through them – very useful for the medical bill section of the Tax form – naturally this only works if you get all of your prescriptions from the same place. However I also found out today that Anthem can also provide this information but for ALL prescriptions filled and also for all the co-pays and Dr visits etc. It’s a shame that the US doesn’t have a prescription pre-payment form – in the UK you could buy a certificate that would last a whole year – Kristen’s prescriptions (copays) were $735 last year!
I e-filed my federal taxes but used Ohio’s pdf file to efile (rather than pay Turbotax $18 to do it). I did have to open the pdf with Adobe Reader rather than my default foxitreader. I also found I had to run the pdf twice as the first time it wouldn’t recalculate the entries in the form for some reason.
Hopefully this year I won’t have to wait about 5 or 6 months to get my Ohio refund back like last year.
The very useful post from EHLO has a good walkthrough on how to allow other servers to relay via Exchange2007. At first glance it looks complicated, but it was actually pretty simple. I had tried to authenticate my smtp session from the NT4 IIS smtp session but that didn’t work so I followed up with the document above.
RIM have come up with a fix for the issue of the 8703e reboots. A couple of our guys have installed it and haven’t had any more problems with them rebooting so it looks good.
The handheld OS update (4.2.x) for the 8703 has been posted publicly on the RIM site
The update was released to fix reboots in several markets (Richmond, Chicago, Raleigh, Honolulu, Cleveland, Columbus OH, Norfolk, Knoxville) and will need to be downloaded to a PC and loaded with desktop manager (v3.2 or better suggested). If on a BES, the customer will need to do a new enterprise activation after update.
In addition 4.2 software supports WAV files. The first point of contact for support is Blackberry care 877-654-9111.
Well after being thrown in the deep end I think I have ironed out most of the kinks and I’ve learnt a lot about the various Movable Type tweaks needed. A lot of the old plugins have been ripped out and I’ve discovered that using widgets to include code as needed in the site will make it a lot easier to migrate in future – no need to go hacking around in the template files to remove references to plugins that are not used any more (the chief culprits for this were the scode and comment challenge plugins).
The header image was taken by Tim Perdue and was drastically cropped to give an image of the Columbus skyline. It was hard to find a picture that was sufficiently wide enough to give a recognizable skyline when cropped.
Well the upgrade seems borked somehow – the comment links are broken. I thought I would use the refresh template option to restore the templates back to the factory default (and then edit my changes back in again but when I try to use the Refresh Template option I get the message “Error creating new template: Template with the same name already exists in this blog.”
Unfortunately it doesn’t mention which template has the problem and I can’t see any of the templates that it is trying to replace. A bit of troubleshooting guidance to mention which template would not have gone amiss in the software.
In the end I had to use the “Delete all templates” option, but it was able to backup the templates for me. Doing the refresh option did not work.
Well I took the plunge and upgraded the site to MovableType 4 this afternoon. The whole process took about 40 minutes and most of that was trying to unpack the tar.gz file as I was using the AIX commands to extract instead of linux ones! I have a new layout design from my beta tests of MovableType so the design of this website may change drastically over the next couple of days. If you see anything broken then please let me know.
Ok – the problems were with some of the plugins that needed changes made to the template code such as my captcha plugins. As these plugins were not installed in the new installation some of the pages wouldn’t work and I was actually unable to publish documents until I stripped out the scode information (which was actually fairly easy due to the comments placed around the required code).
The migration from NT4 and Exchange 5.5 to Exchange2007 and Windows 2003 is almost done. This weekend was the installation of Exchange 2007 and the move of mailboxes. Unfortunately it did not go to plan. Upromote worked great on the first server that needed the software and after two or three reboots it was acting as a member server. The second server however did not go well. Instead the server bluescreened in the middle of the process and I was left with a server that was neither in a domain or in a workgroup. The logon box did not include the domain option but the local SAM was corrupted and wouldn’t let me login. As the machine was out of the domain I couldn’t connect to it remotely apart from ping activity. After struggling for a long time with a multitude of recovery tools we ended up with a parallel installation of NT4 on the machine so that we could access the data on the drives. This was not without hassles – the RAID controller drivers would not recognise the disk in NT4 – you would have thought that downloading the drivers for the raid controller that appears in the BIOS boot would work but nope – we had to use different drivers! I tried to access the machine using Microsoft’s Dart Tool – the rebranded ERD commander, but this tool doesn’t support NT – in the end I had to go back to ERD Commander 2002 to get a version that worked with NT4 (although it didn’t actually help). The parallel installation of NT also needed SQL 7 reinstalling but this needed ie4 installed (and where do you get *that* from?) Fortunately it would also accept IE6 too.
Installing the Exchange2007 sp1 was not a fun experience either – the process stopped half way through with an error saying that a file was in use and that I needed to reboot the server to continue. When I did so, the installation would not continue as all of the Exchange services and several other essential windows services had been set to disabled by the previous installation and the upgrade needs the Information Store to be running. As the other services were stopped the machine acted like it was behind a firewall – you were not able to ping out or into it. Setting all the services to automatic and then starting them got through this problem – I had to boot up my Virtual Exchange 2007 server to see which disabled services should normally be running though. I actually had to try the upgrade about 3 times before I got through with no errors but the whole experience made SQL2005 look stable.
Now I am having major trouble getting the remote outlook clients to connect through to the exchange 2007 server using RPC over HTTPS – it worked great with the Exchange 2003 server but just will not work with Exchange 2007 – if you have any bright ideas then let me know – tomorrow I’ll be logging a call with Microsoft for some assistance.
At the end of the weekend I felt like I had installed every piece of Microsoft software just to get Exchange migrated onto new servers. I have got some great ideas for future migrations and I know that I don’t want to repeat the process sometime soon!
Then to top it all off, the advert shown in this blog post arrived stuck to the front cover of my Technet magazine today – talk about bad timing. Having said that, I have received the white paper and I don’t think we’d use their services as it sounds expensive. The advice was pretty basic but did include the steps of removing old mailboxes and cleaning up the database. One REALLY annoying thing to see when you are moving mailboxes on a weekend without pay is a lot of “moving 1 of 3654 spam messages” and “moving 3 of 12876 deleted items”. I had told the users to delete these items before the upgrade but this hadn’t been done. I think next time I will include a step of telling the users to delete their spam, junk and deleted items BEFORE the upgrade as it will be done as part of the upgrade “automatically” (and if anyone has a tool that will walk through a message store deleting items in the spam, junk and deleted items then let me know)