Loz’s ALITs Blog

As Bill tries to get us all to run Vista & the OEMs withdraw XP machines it is getting much harder to get drivers for XP machines. I have only a handful of business customers who are running Vista. It certainly doesn’t justify paying for an upgrade cause what do you get? Well spotters will argue til the cows come home with the same level of angst as the Mac & Linux preachers. But point is in the real world where we need to run Outlook, SQL, Sharepoint etc etc to connect to grown up enterprise level applications there is no alternative. Thats why big business doesn’t have iMacs on the desktop. But anyway back to my point… I installed two Dell machines with XP. One with XP Pro & the other with XP x64. Found all the drivers after a bit of searching except the VGA board. Both were nVidia and neither had a Dell driver & nVidia at best was crap. In the end it was a case of hacking the INF file to fool the OS that the driver was an XP version & not Vista. Right old hooha. Costly for the punter - almost more than the machine is worth. But what else can we do? Run it in Ubuntu…

To allow Timemachine to backuup via network:

1. Mount your network drive & check you can access it.

2. Change the preferences by running following command in Terminal
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

3. Start time machine

4. You should now be able to select the network drive.

5. In you loose the network mount, you’ll need to reset the preference set in step-2, by running following command again in Terminal
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 0

As for the Avaya thing… Don’t start me!

On an Avaya 4610SW IP phone. This was a mega feat of investigation. You know you’re on to an odd one when you have a £22k IP phone system attached to a £7k core layer 3 routing switch and your DHCP server has an issue - & the fix is to shove a £20 Netgear switch inline between your shiny Windows 2003 DHCP server & your CM3 loaded Avaya S8300 call server & the problem goes away…

That’s what fixed my problem today. Microsoft say its not thier problem, HP (who make the core switch) say its not them as other Vendors kit does same thing & Avaya just shrugged thier shoulders 7 said ¨you’ve got a fix what more do you want…??¨. Hmmm, I’m not convinced that a £30k comms system should be ¨fixed¨ with a £20 switch from Maplin… Or am i asking too much?

There is a tale to this. One i shal shroten somewhat. Punter moves location. Wants to take number with them. Can’t. Migrate to VoIP? Ditch the switch? No money to do that. So get a Vegastream and plug into the trunk ports of old skool PBX. Then port numbers across to a SIP host & away you go.

http://www.vegastream.com/vegastream-portfolio/vega50.asp

We have a couple of partners we work with who peddle the SIP trunk facility. That bit was easy. Setting up the Vega box to talk to the SIP account was easy-ish. Setting up the Vega box to talk to the switch was easy enough. So job done….? No. Not by a long shot. The Vega box needed some “dial plans” built. In a regular telephone PBX switch this shouldn’t create much of a problem. I thought this would be easier still as it is a web based GUI. Oh no. Proper weird syntax and code to reference interfaces and trunk ports. For example:

IF:99..,TEL:<.*> IF:1001,TEL:<1>

Then

1001 IF:0301 IF:0302

Snappy?

Started well then the Scot got whacked out on the first or was it second corner. Bet lets fast forward to when Lewis went done to 7th or 8th whilst tyres were changed and fuel taken on. Bounced up to 4th, then passed down to 5th then down to 6th and on the 2nd to last lap looked like it had all gone away only for Glock to drift and let Vettell & Lewis past & on to a championship place finish - 5th and one point ahead of Massa. I shouted like I haven’t shouted in a long time. Top race.

Made a changte to my morning activities revising for an MCSE exam. ZZzzzzzzzZZ. Very dull and as 2008 exams are looming I really must get the previous stuff done. Such a chore.

So customer says to us “change the system over and we have until 1pm - then we must be clear”. It was yesterday morning - be onsite for 08:30 - Northern Line suspended cause someone under a train. Hike to mainline station in a long line of others…. zzzzz. Arrive onsite at 9am. Press on with the mission. Not to complex, just lots of it. Program up 6 network switches with a single VLAN and admin stack. Config two XP clients and test. However they were all on different floors in a building spread across 9 floors - each floor being close to 80,000 sq/ft. I walked vast distances and climbed enough stairs to take me past the moon.

Anyway we approach the last hour of work before 13:00 and then suddenly a request is made that requires use of the new network. Eeek - we’re not quite there yet - & there seems to be a patch lead missing - a key cable - fibre LC to ST - not what you pickup in Maplin! Anyhow the long and the short is we made do with what we had and got it all completed with 15 mins to spare.

Happy customer. Sat around til 19:00 to ensure all was happy. No glitches. Installed some monitoring apps to “watch” the system. All clean. Customer happy. Techie knackered with all the stairs - but after a K1664 & a Chicken Tikka all was restored to normal.

So the point of this little tale has been lost and now i can’t even remember where i was going with this - so on that note I will sign off. Til next time.

Is it out? Who knows properly… So the feature list over and above SBS 2003 looks a bit like this:

SBS 2008 is based on Windows Server 2008
Exchange 2007
Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange
Microsoft System Centre Essentials is bundled. Enhanced management & lower TCO
Windows Sharepoint Services Version 3
Windows SQL Server 2005 / 2008 (in the Premium edition)
Backup by default disk based with snapshots every half hour for easy recoverability.
Max number of users rumorsed to increased from 75 to 250 seats - mid market ‘Centro’ Server solution.
Premium edition also supports a second server (licence included) & virtualisation via Hypervisor.
Pure 64 bit environment - got to run an a 64bit server.
ISA server no longer part of the premium solution. Put in a hardware firewall.

Doesn’t look like there is a direct upgrade path, and you’ll probably be installing SBS 2008 on new 64 bit capable hardware anyway.

We are going to attempt our own internal upgrade soon (eeeek) so should fall down a few holes before it has to be done for real as it were…

I read that Asda, Tesco & Sainsbury’s stores have chip n PIN machines that steal your Mastercard number & PIN - then zip it off to Pakistan where Bin Laden uses ur money to buy a shooter or two!!?? Tiny ¨bugs¨ are being hidden in the machines at the factory in China. By the time they get to the UK & installed in stores, the damage is done. Quite how they hide a SIM and mobile device is a mystery yet to be solved. All very odd. But the plod are taking it seriously as shoppers in High Wycombe have already reported losses. All too much. I thought this was supposed to be safe…??

My trusty old Dell Optiplex GX270 (with replacement mobo…) has been retired from shed duties. It is being reinstalled with XP Pro and so i have installed in its place a Dell Precision 390 that i thought had a 64bit CPU - but it appears to be 32bit. As it turns out this is probably just as well cause driver support for x64 XP Pro is a bit all over the place. HP Printers being a real nightmare. So this Dual Core machine with 2GB RAM is somewhat quicker than the GX270 - but then you’d want it to be really. I have also seen my first Dell E series Latitude notebook. very black & very sleek. Will get one of those to replace my D610 i think. Although I am not sure i am ready for widescreen - not when all the systems I look after are all on 4:3 which makes VNC a real scroller when viewed from a 16:9…

Got over the Dell thing. 7 days. Shocker. Not helped by Dell’s Gold support being quite rigid in the approach. When its a system down you need to be flexible to get the shooting match back up as quickly as poss…. Its also worth noting that in Windows Small Business Server 2003 you cannot restore just AD. In a regular domain you have authoritative & non-authoritative restore options. No such luck with SBS. Its system state lock stock & barrel. Registry, AD, the whole 9 yards. So if you overlooked something or indeed simply got a path wrong - it’ll mess up the system & take eons to clean up. Hmmmm. BackupExec no help in this situation either as it is simply looking at the Windows API’s etc to do its restore.

So I have decided its time to stick my nose back in a txt book and get 70-282 under my belt. No doubt this exam will be retired soon as 2008 comes mainstream. Oddly it is an elective for MCSE but not valid for MCSA…? Mostly you pass through the MCSA bracket on the way to MCSE. But not if you do this elective. The Exchange 2007 exam didn’t look too easy so i left that one for now!!

Onwards…