Loz’s ALITs Blog

I am sat at a customers premises waiting for a bike to arrive with a router on its back. This router should have been here yesterday. An account manage at the ISP said it would be. Nothing that unusual about that you might think & indeed not. However It beggers belief in this day & age that something as simple as sending out a £90 router on a £40 bike travelling all of 4 miles from one south west postcode to another south west postcode that things can go so wrong.

We deal with many ISPs. Big ones & small ones. This mob is not massive but probably employs 100 - 150 people. They provide services & on the face of it seem like a good bunch - that is until you need some help. Real help with a problem that is going south. Something with square wheels. Suddenly they are not helpful. The shutters come down & the finger gets pointed. Everything except them. No apologies & certainly no come back. Total blame culture. I can think of only one sensible bloke but unfortunately the others beneath & around him just don’t come up to scratch. What can you do….?

 Go else where.

We’ve all got to grips with Windows Small Business Server 2008 when along comes version 7 - and another edition called (code named) Aurora. For most version 7 will be the one to get to grips with. Microsoft say that Aurora is aimed at up to 25 users & 7 scales to 75 users.

For us the bulk of our installed base is SBS 2003. These users will therefore probably leapfrog 2008 & go straight to version 7 - which itself is based on Server 2008 R2 & Exchange 2010.

Betas of both are floating around out there. When they go to release (RTM) then Action Pack subscribers will get to run it on their own systems for internal use. MSDN & other elevated Microsoft subscription services will get a bite of the cherry as well. Not sure if Technet gets one - maybe only eval.

All of this certainly keeps the IT pro on his/her feet. The constant shift in technology means we must all keep running. Or loose the edge on getting the most from your/our clients hardware & revenue!

I have preached this sooooo many times. However I have fallen into this trap twice in as many days. Not good! Firstly I built a 3CX based phone system some months ago that has been happily humming along on a Dell desktop computer. Time for a proper hardware setup. So i merrily created a new install on an HP DL360 and away it went. Did a couple of test calls out - fine. Rang in and get voicemail - also fine as it was weekend. Nice. Monday I have a number of jobs to do around the East of England. My car needs attention so i drop it off on my way intending to collect on my way home. Have a loaner for the day.

8am - phones down. WTF? New system worked fine yesterday?? Now stuck miles away with someone elses car & no Internet connect. Dull. Then I learn from the garage that my wagon needs to stay overnight as a filter is incorrect. Need to get part. Right so now the wheels have really come off my joy cart.

I resolve the phone issue, trek back to London - & now I have to travel back to the East to recover my car which i should have done yesterday. Oh the best laid plans. Always trust your guts. I had a thought “…shouldn’t do this on a Monday should i…” Why didn’t i listen??

A handy small downloadto use when you do an upgrade to Windows 7. As you know with Windows XP you can’t slap the Win 7 DVD in the drive and do an inplace upgrade -oh no. You have to use the settings wizard… Or use the Sysinternals converter to create a virtual drive of your old XP box. Do your clean install of Windows 7. Then run Virtual PC on your shiny new Win 7 install and fire up your old XP client as a virtual machine. Best of both worlds! Neat that.

There are some thing that cause my to clench my ass - and this is one of them… Never seen this error before. Will it recover? Is it WSUS SP2 doing it?

Of late I have been dealing with a client who has a VoIP install. The trunks for this install are carried across a regular ADSL circuit. Unfortunately the client has suffered a number of service drops. Nothing mega but things all fall apart for a few seconds or minutes & this leads to lots of frustration. The supplied is now regrading the ADSL circuit to one with better SLG’s covering latency, packet loss, jitter etc.

However it still remains that an ADSL is a cheap consumer lead product. Business shouldn’t be relying on a £40 connection for something they consider critical. Yes ISDN2e is similar in cost for a simple setup but you don’t get the flexibility you do with a SIP service. Increasing channels on SIP is a two minute job. Extra ISDN channels take days if not weeks to get provisioned.

I liken ADSL to audio DAT tape. Sony dreamt up DAT as a near perfect audio format for consumers. However the record industry kicked up a stink fearing mass piracy with no loss of quality. So every DAT machine & every DAT tape had a royalty built into the price that was paid to the record industry. The format only took off in professional circles or high end “prosumers”. Just one look at the mechs in the units or the tapes themselves show they are not built for hard use.

ADSL however is a really cheap way to get downstream high bandwidth. Great for consumers. Crap for business who really need the bandwidth in both directions. But money talks. Just like with DAT. And so a consumer format has become a professional user format even though its not designed as such.

O have been through three different ways to install a Hyper V solution. I have done it so far in the following ways:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition running the Hyper V Server role.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition running in core mode with the above role.
• Windows Hyper V Server 2008 - as it comes.

 A steep learning curve to discover what the practical everyday differences are. And I won’t even touch the licence methods - ok I will just slightly. If you aquire a Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter (it’s American remember) then you can run many Hyper Vs (is that the plural) as you want. Just make sure you get the correct number of proc licences for your physical host server. Don’t confuse procs with cores or you’ll pay waaay over the top.

Any my test install is on a Dell R710. And let me say the the handy “coreconfig.wsf” is a god send when you do your first install. And with the Dell boxes you need to understand the Broadcom drivers & how they fit into all this. Creating a team was fun & games! I shall delve further into this in coming posts…

I have a sat nav built into the dash of my car. It does get lost quite a bit. Driving along the Axx & suddenly I am (according to the screen) in a field. My eyeballs however tell me I am still on the Axx following the tedious Picasso in front. Not only does it get lost it also has a habit of hanging in the critical part of a journey & the only sure fire way to breath life back into the unit is a reboot. A procedure that needs you to delve into the arse of the car, wrench some cables out of a black box, count to 10 then shove them all back again, in the correct order… So this really takes the shine off what was probably a stupid amount of money optional upgrade. Thankfully I wasn’t the mug that ordered this car or indeed paid the forecourt price. I am the third owner - so the stoopid nav isn’t really a deal breaker. More of an annoyance. Having said you’d think that the nav being a dedicated computer that I would work straight off? It hasn’t got to run a browser, or connect to a domain or anything else. SO WHY DOES IT KEEP BREAKING…. grrrr.

My un-scientific test via a popular speedtest website has suddenly seen a big increase in speed. Have lept from 13kb/s to pushing 400kb/s of downloads. We’ll see if this continues over next few days. So for now I am going to visit my usual bolt hole haunt and drink some ale.

Am holed up in our North Yorkshire hideaway - right on the edge of the Moors. It’s always been disconnected from the wobbly web. 3G is laughable on any network & although there has always been a phone line installed - it only accepted inbound calls. However it was decided that having broadband up here would make it more usable more of the year. So a service was ordered & here I sit tapping away on my trusty Dell lappy. One of my missions whilst here was to complete some drawing for a client. For this I needed Visio. For reasons I won’t bore you with I had not got the current version on my lappy. So using my Microsoft Action Pack Subscription I downloaded a MAPS version of Visio 2010 Pro… Well I tried to download. Currently the 293meg download is running at 20kb/s… The best it got to yesterday was 15kb/s! Given the Exchange is 320m away (according to samknows.com) I should be flying along.

So my mission for Monday is to find out from the ISP why this service is crawling along - & yes I have plugged into the master socket, taken off extensions, replaced the filter, tried different router, left it for weeks on end to train blah blah. My guts is that it has to be either an exchange/line fault or the cabling is just plain ancient. It is the original installed by The Post Office probably!