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.

I kept my two XM radios, begrudgingly. I decided to give Pandora my money for high quality Internet streaming. Two years later the satellite reception quality has declined, dead spots all over, and with no word from the two companies Sirius XM if it will ever improve. The only communications I get from them is a sales spam asking me to buy more radios.

This week I purchased a brand new 2010 Ford F-150 SuperCrew – pretty much my dream truck. It came “Sirius Ready”. All the research I’ve done tells me there is absolutely no way to get XM service working in a Sirius Ready vehicle – at least with the built-in Sirius controls.

I spoke with Sirius XM customer service expecting they would be able to transfer my account to Sirius XM.  She stated that even though the companies we merged they still operate completely independently and that I would need to call Sirius XM and sign up for a new account with them. Furthermore, I would be force to turn my girlfriends Sirius XM service into a “primary account” rather than the discounted secondary.

Fantastic.  So the cost benefits the previous two companies were talking about were for them – not the consumer.  I will now be required to pay Sirius XM for a primary, full price account, as well as paying Sirius XM for a primary, full price account.

How can this be legal? Aren’t these the types of things the FCC is supposed to be protecting the consumer from? If only there were some other satellite radio provider I could give my business to instead of Sirius XM.  If only….<sigh>

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.

Download Statusbar (link)
Download Statusbar allows you to view and manage all your downloads from a tiny little status bar at the bottom of Firefox.  These files can be launched directly from it, and it is uniform across all open Firefox windows. Definitely a useful tool for most people doing a lot of downloading.

I personally hate the Downloads popup box that Firefox ships with. I don’t want a new window to popup each time I download something, yet I still want my downloaded file to be easily and readily available without having to open up Windows Explorer and browse to it.

Domain Details (link)
I manage alot of webservers on many different platforms. It can get difficult at times to keep track of what server I’m working on, where an application is hosted and so on. Enter Domain Details.

This plug-in is indispensable in my opinion. Visible from the status bar, this plugin displays Server Type, Headers, IP Address, Location Flag, and links to Whois Reports. Shows links to check server status and cache when page fails to load.

XUL/Migemo (link)
This add-on gives Firefox extremely powerful “find” enhancements. It seems to be made by a Japanese developer that has dictionary assisted functions for the Japanese language, however it’s usefulness goes far beyond that.

My favorite feature is it’s inline search function.  This allows you to be on any web page and just start typing typing the term you are looking for on the page without having to hit CTRL-F or manually opening the Find box. It also allows you to highlight the search term as you type and it will identify the locations on the page it is found, and place little arrows on the side of the Firefox window to jump to the next found location.

It might be a bit difficult to understand exactly what this plug-in will do for you until you actually use it, so take it for a test drive.  If you are like me and scour the messages boards everyday you’ll love this one.

Extended Statusbar (link)
This is another statusbar plug-in that makes the lives of the sys admin and web developers alike. This statusbar enhancesment keeps track of the speed and success of the page loading, much like in Opera.

Adds an Opera-like statusbar that shows:
– percentage of the page loaded
– number of loaded images
– bytes downloaded
– average download speed
– load time

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!

Now Digsby has a bunch of nagware you need to filter through and disable during the installation process – and it’s not difficult as long as you are awake and have your eyes open! Back in December of 2008 Digsby released (READ) an update that included, and enabled by default, a research module that uses only idle, low priority CPU power to help work on various grid computing projects.  The majority of users didn’t realize this was happening until just recently, and let me tell it you it was a shit-storm for the crew over at Digsby. They’ve since changed how they present these functions to the end user.

Now let’s look at this – here we have two free applications that generally speaking people are huge fans of – yes I’m a fanboy.  They do what they are supposed to do, probably better than their competition, quick releases and responsive developers. People seem to neither want them to stay free nor pay for them.  You know what happens when you get neither? The application ceases to exist!

I for one have absolutely no problem looking at a tiny advertisement at the top of my Twitter feed if it means I can use my favorite Blackberry Twitter client for free.  Nor do I have any problem with Digsby using a tiny piece of my idle CPU, at low priority no less, if it means I can continue to have all my social and IM networks aggregated together better than any applications does it for free.

Is it simply human nature to complain and be unhappy about stuff? Well yes I guess you can make that argument. I’ve been known to be a cynic. However I think it’s something different altogether: People just want to get onto the newest fad faster than ever before. Technology and the speed of communication is moving so fast now that the changing of trends and fads can’t even keep up with us. We for the most part are not willing to slow down and accept and appreciate what we have.  When you have something that is good – KEEP IT GOOD, then just try to make it better.

…..and Digsby and Ubertwitter are real good.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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