I’ve been an XM subscriber for almost 5 years.  I pay my bill on time each month. I bought a second radio for my girlfriend’s car. Everything was great.  I was getting good service at a fair price. Then came the merger.

On July 28th, 2008 XM and Sirius officially completed the process of merging the two companies. The two companies claimed there would be a great cost benefit to satellite radio subscribers. Since then, they have raised the monthly price of secondary radios from $6.99 to $8.99, started charging $2.99/month for the “high quality” Internet stream, and still charge extra fees for “premium package” stations previously only offered on the “other” satellite radio providers system. Read the rest of this entry »

Now before I get into it here it should be known that I have nothing against Internet Explorer.  I think it does a great job and it performs well considering the types of strain some sites put it under – specifically such as ActiveX IE-only sites.

The primary reason I use Firefox as my main browser is that there are many extensions for it that make my life easier as a systems admin…and yes I know there are a thousand other lists on other blogs about “must have Firefox plug-ins”.  This is by no means a complete list and this post is partially to share my experience with the world as well as a reference for me if my laptop ever explodes and I need to re-install them

Check out the staples in my Firefox plug-in collection after the jump.

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Over the past couple months there have have been at least two instances where a good number of Internet users and socialites alike that have been complaining about some recent changes to two of the hottest social networking apps out there:  Ubertwitter and Digsby.

Ubertwitter is a Twitter client for the Blackberry.  In my opinion it far exceeds the quality of any other Blackberry Twitter client currently available, and I’m not alone. Since it first became available a few months back it has caught on like wild fire. Other Blackberry client features pale in comparison to Ubertwitter. Then about a month ago an upgrade added a small advertisement to the top of the Twitter feed.  Advertisements were added without letting users know beforehand. Kicking and screaming ensued (READ)They then began to offer users the choice to pay $4.99 to get rid of the ads altogether.

Digsby is the hottest IM/Social Network aggregator on the market (w00t upstate NY!).  I first started using Digsby back when they were only allowing users to download it with private invitation codes – I don’t remember where I found that code, but I haven’t looked back since!

Read the rest of this entry »

So this morning, like many other users on the web noticed Twitter was down.  Checking the Twitter Status Page first showed they were aware of an issue and investigating. Then several minutes later the page was updated with the following message:

We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.
Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.

I sent an email to the guys over at Internet Storm Center (ISC) notifying them of the outage, probably just as many other ISC readers had done. When they updated their site with the information about the possible DD0S attack directed at Twitter I had a good and painful laugh at what I saw.

The share to Facebook and Twitter buttons sitting there, mocking me as only as a Social Network can do. How do I get the word out that Twitter is down if Twitter is down?!? It’s a paradox of the worst kind.

With the reports that Facebook is also having problems is my only choice to blow the dust off my Digg account and hope that it gains some attention and gets bumped up? Time for the next new idea? Social fads are only as good as the networks running them.

I got around to installing the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview yesterday. All in all I’m very impressed with what I’m seeing.  I’ve beta tested Office 2003 and Office 2007, as well as run all their Technical Previews and I think I can already say this one runs much smoother than any I’ve tested in the past.   It runs fast, smooth, and as desired with only a few problems so far.

64bit
This is long overdue. I live out of Outlook and it gets put to the test on a daily basis. Any bit of extra power I can get out of Outlook is a huge plus in my book.  Granted there aren’t many functions that will make use of 64bit processing, but again every bit counts.

Splash
The first thing you’ll notice upon launching Outlook 2010 is the new splash screen. I know it seems insignificant, and this change lacks any sort of functionality, however it’s nice to see all aspects of the product being improved.  One very small thing the splash screen does do is show the progress of the startup process, which might prove to be helpful in the future.

Outlook takes a while to load up the first time.  It seems to have sped up with each subsequent launch.  I suspect that is due to caching and indexing finally completing.

Ribbon
Microsoft did what I thought they should have done with Outlook 2007 – give the same style ribbon that the rest of the Office products received with Office 2007.  This is long overdue in my opinion.

Quick Steps
One of the cooler things with this release is the inclusion of “Quick Steps”.  Thnk of them as customizable repeat actions. You can create a quick step to take care of things you do all the time, such as forward an email to a specific person or manager, reply or reply all to a message with a Meeting Request, move a message to a specific folder and much more.  You can even create a quick step, that will with on click, Reply (all) to a message, change the subject and insert predefined text in the body. I know this was all possible with rules and templates with previous Outlook versions, but never this simple and quick.

My one hope for Quick Steps is that Microsoft opens up the Quick Steps to allow users to create Quick Steps with much more detailed actions that they don’t offer by default. Currently they only give a short list of very basic functions.  You can’t tease me with an awesome idea like this and not expect me to want more

Search
Search within Outlook 2010 looks to be much more useful to the common user. Microsoft has including some predefined search criteria options which made often made it a pain to do more complex searches within Outlook 2007. It seems so simple, but we never had it like this before. I think Microsoft is really starting to listen.

Active Directory Authentication
The only, and potentially fatal problem I’ve had so far is since I’ve installed Outlook 2010 my Active Directory account seems to be getting locked out.  Its happened twice within the last day.  I’ll open Outlook and it will keep asking me for my username and password.  Then, I’ll log onto my Domain Controller and see that my account has been locked out – and yes I am typing the right password.  I’m not sure what is Outlook is trying to do, but it’s doing it unsuccessfully. My Domain Security Policy is vanilla, so Outlook is failing at authenticating something the magic number of times. I hope this is a bug that Micrsoft has assigned some resources to.

Conclusion
Other than the major problem with my Active Directory account getting locked out Microsoft is right on track with this one.  The interface is clean and fast and there few improvements I’ve seen thus far scream the fact that Microsoft is putting in a lot of effort.

I don’t usually have much of a need for the other Office apps, but when I do I usually work in them all day for a special project. I hope to get some alone time with Visio 2007 next week.

“I’m not the techie, you are”

We’ve all heard things like that.  Usually they are in the form of an excuse for a user that can’t figure out how to do something, find a setting, format something they way they want. We’re the IT guys so we’re automatically supposed to know the answer. The answer magically exists in a deep corner of our brain, just waiting to be summoned to the front for action.

Yes it’s true; we often do know the answers.  We don’t always, but doing what we do means we will come across all sorts of issues along our travels. Usually we come to the answer by way of Google, F1 (Help), or a little something I like to call Common Sense.  Now, Common Sense can’t be implied. We can’t assume someone will be able to dig deep into their being and work out the answer with deductive reasoning, however often we expect others to do it as we do.

So that leaves us with a few options: Google for the answers, search Help for the answers, or ask someone else for the answers.

Yes, sometimes it is pure laziness on the end users’ part that forces them to ask someone else instead of fixing their problems on their own. Usually we techies assume it is either laziness or lack of intelligence. End users are people too, so we can’t expect them all to be rocket scientists, but we also can’t expect them to all be lacking any sort of intelligence.  Many of my customers are in fact extremely intelligent.

So whats the difference between them and us? It dawned on me this morning as I was supporting a user that is neither lazy nor ignorant – We expect to be able to find the solution while they expect the solution to find them.

“No shit sherlock!”

That’s what you probably just said. Well maybe the problem is that we continue to make users think they are always lazy or always ignorant. We might get better results if we show them that solutions don’t usually just present themselves; show them how to F1 and Google for answers.

We should take all the blame here.  We are afterall bigger, faster and stronger than end users

A few months ago I started the process of getting all my ducks in a row for a migration that involved moving all physical servers a customer had to a VMware ESX environment. This environment wasn’t anything special: 60 users running Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange 2003, Blackberry Enterprise Server and Sage Timberline Office as their accounting app.

The Microsoft parts were easy.  I was sure there would be no problem those. My one concern was with the Sage Timberline software package. This program never ran particularly well, and its obvious it is running using very old programming languages much like alot of the LOB apps companies use these days.

I needed to make sure this package would both a) run within a VMware environment and b) be supported by Sage from a technical perspective. When I called the Sage Customer Support desk and asked their response was:

Sage Timberline Office is not supported running as a virtual machine, however we will troubleshoot any issues you have to a reasonable extent, while not allowing any support calls to be escalated to the engineering department.”

That actually sounds pretty fair. The woman I spoke with sounded fairly knowledgable about the Sage product and had been one of the technicians to previously work with another Sage customer that had issues running their software in a virtual environment. I asked her what the specific issues encountered were and all she really could tell me was that the Pervasive Database performed very badly and lots of unexpected things would happen while using the software.

So here I was – ready to get a signature for a proposal that would cost my customer 10’s of thousands of dollars and I had no factual evidence that showed that the accounting package they used would even work. If there were ever going to be a problem with this software it would be related to performance alone, right? There only about 10 users that access this application, so that shouldn’t really be an issue, right?

Well it turns out Sage Timberline Accounting software runs just fine in a virtual environment. It runs better running in VMware ESX 4 than it ever did on its own dedicated Dell Poweredge 1650 with RAID5.

I guess the moral of the story is that if it should work and it isn’t, you’re probably doing something wrong. Fight through the problems with a sense of resolve, do your research, follow guidelines and procedures and most things will run just fine in a virtual environment….and never take no for an answer.

The goal at my customer’s site last night was simple:

1. Ghost the Dell PowerEdge 2950 Windows Server 2003 C: and D: drives
2. Pull out the 3 old 36GB drive RAID 5 Array  and replace with 5 shiny new 146GB drives in a RAID 5 Array
3. Put the ghost image back on the new RAID 5 array
4. Go home and have a good night’s rest

My night can be summed up in two simple words:  MISERABLE FAILURE

Almost two hours into the project I finally realized that the PERC3/Di drivers are actually inserted into the PERC2/3 bundle of PERC drivers rather than the PERC 3/4 bundle of drivers.  There are PERC Di’s,, Si’s, DC’s, SC’s, and QC’s.  The Di and Si versions apparently are the bastard child of the PERC drivers.

Once I was able to boot into Bart PE Ghost kept crashing with Error 32000.  Symantec basically says this could mean anything, or nothing.  Thanks Symantec.

I was finally able to take an image of the machine, however it was useless.  It turns out the previous IT guy decided it would be a great idea to turn the RAID 5 Array into a dynamic partition.  Ghost, and from what I’ve read cannot clone RAID 5 volumes – only spanned, striped or mirrored volumes.

What upsets me more than the fact that this just a stupid decision by the last IT guy, and more the fact that several hours were wasted by me trying to get it to work is the fact that the last guy must have made a concerted, conscious effor to make this change in Windows. This was not a case of simply choosing the wrong choice – Door A or B. A colleague of mine reminded me this morning as I was venting that Microsoft suggest making all volumes Dynamic (or at least they did a while back).

I take full blame for not preparing for the w0rk I was embarking upon last night.  It just goes to show that you really can’t trust the work of others. Nothing is safe.

After all these years.  All the upgrades, complaints, replacments and new versions – we still need to interact with our Windows Update process. It started out years ago with the special program interaction that was required with IE installations for WU.  Then it was the Malicious Software Removal Tool and Service Packs.  Now we have this silly Microsoft Live Installer.

It would seem to me that the easiest way to get more users to install updates would be to actually make it easier for them to do! Could Microsoft not really want users to install updates?  Do they enjoy being lambasted in the blogosphere about how insecure their systems allegedly are?

Maybe the folks over at Microsoft have been misunderstood all along. Maybe they make these boneheaded decisions on purpose.  Maybe they are just masochists and they thrive on pain and torture.  They’d rather fight the big fight rather than do the little things that might make our lives easier.

I suppose on some level we all like the pain.  That’s why we still put up with it.

I had the need to manually reset the Admin password for the Administrator’s Web Console for a Trend Micro OfficeScan Server 8.0 today.  Oddly enough, my googling failed me and I was forced to call Trend Micro for some quick and free support.

Everything I found while googling showed me how to reset the Uninstall password for the OfficeScan Client.  However none showed how to reset the Administrator Web Console to manage the network. It’s just two simple steps

1. Edit: C:\Program Files\Trend Micro\OfficeScan\PCCSRV\ofscan.ini
   Change master_pwd= to be master_pwd=70
   Save the file
2. Edit: C:\Program Files\Trend Micro\OfficeScan\PCCSRV\ofcserver.ini
   Change master_pwd=!CRYPT!blahblah to be master_pwd=70

You can now log in using a password of "1" – minus the quotes of course. Happy resetting