Windows 7 RC FTW
I think Microsoft may have finally created an OS that can replace Windows XP. Of course I’m only speaking about my personal experiences with the latest incarnate of Windows, but it’s all pretty positive.
Same spec’ed laptop as the Windows 7 Beta review I posted a while back. Running its native Vista 64bit installation, I decided to try the upgrade path instead of a clean install. The worst result is an unstable install that I would nuke and do a fresh 7 install.
The upgrade took damn near 2.5 hours, mostly thrashing the hard drive moving files around. The installer was detailed enough to give me a percentage of completion on each task plus an overall progress bar – but never an estimated time (that has never been correct in the history of any Microsoft progress bar anyway).
After the upgrade – everything worked. The laptop was still a member of the domain, fingerprint scanner, graphics driver, network adapters, bluetooth… heck even iTunes and Outlook 2007 was working.
I’m fairly impressed and it seems to be catching on around the office – two others have upgraded or installed a VM to see the buzz. I think we made the right choice to skip Vista on the desktops and wait for 7 to bake in the Microsoft oven long enough to be a worthy replacement.
Sophos ES4000 Active Directory Fun
The college recently purchased a new Sophos Email Security appliance model. It was very easy to setup and I’m looking forward to having PureMessage filtering our spam and crapmail attacks, it’ll be a good thing.
The Active Directory integration is not a polished as their Web Security appliances’ are. We have two WS1000 appliances, also from Sophos. Both hooked right into AD and pulled down both students and staff accounts without issue. Even indicated what sub-domains it found during the process. Top notch, no brainer installation.
The problem I’m writing about is the ES4000 appliance’s inability to detect our second domain in the same forest as the domain our service account is in. First off, it couldn’t even automatically detect settings using the same service account using the “Detect Settings…” feature. An undocumented bug was documented on experts-exchange.com with the workaround being you have to use an account with Schema Admin privileges in the domain’s original Users OU. Once detected, you could move the user and modify the DN used to authenticate.
Okay, that one was fixed. But I still couldn’t sync both staff and students – even if I pointed the Base DN to the top domain or left it blank.
I opened a case with Sophos and went through first level support. After 48 hours (plus a weekend) of remote support they kicked me to second tier.
Second tier connected remotely and continue the troubleshooting. After an hour or so they found a workaround and had me test it. Success.
Fix: Replace the Base DN for users/groups with a single space. Done and now it works. I’m not much of an LDAP junkie, but I would consider that a bug.
Anyway, it works for me and I hope it helps someone else out there scratching their head wondering why the eff their ES4000 is not working.
Side note: All in all, Sophos support is pretty good I just wish they would read my entire email before firing back the first canned response that essentially was exactly what I had already done. For anyone absolutely buried with this product, I can highly recommend leveraging their consulting services. Well worth the small price to get it done right the first time.
Rotten BlackBerries Make Good Whine.
Now to be perfectly fair, I’m not going to blame all of my issues on BlackBerry or their Enterprise Server. I will however, consider their method of message relay and integration with our environment quite a hack and their support staff a challenge to work with, especially late at night.
That being said… here’s my problem and what I’ve found that fixes it – I hope it may help you.
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Journalspace – overwritten
Popular blogging site journalspace.com has been wiped off the Internet by a suspected disgruntled engineer. The engineer was fired months ago for stealing from the company but may have planted a logic bomb or delayed virus that initiated a full server wipe.
The server in question held the database for journalspace.com, which is the contents of every blog on the site. It was confirmed today that DriveSavers was unable to recover the data on the mirrored hard drives. Journalspaces did not Use any other form of backup so they are unable to recover their site or any used content. They, however, recommend checking Google’s cache to attempt to save published content.
There is no excuse for not having backups on tape or even an external drive. This disaster could have easily been recovered from with minimal data loss using free software and a hundred dollar hard drive.
Vendor Hell
A vendor that shall remain anonymous (for now) has almost guarenteed they won’t be getting future business for me any longer. The sad thing is that it wasn’t directly related to any mistake they made, but how they follow up on mistakes made by their suppliers.
Frankly, I don’t care who makes the mistake – they sold us the product. And on three seperate occasions couldn’t tell us when it was going to be delivered or where it was in transit. Another incident happened yesterday where we received the completly wrong product, even though the packaging slip shows the correct one. Sure, nothing we can blame our vendor directly – they put the order through correctly. But when I call and get no response on when the right one will be arriving, I begin to discover why these schmucks guys were the lowest bidder on our government contract.
Unfortunately this little snafu has thrown a huge monkey wrench into our schedule. A typically lenient college schedule only affords us a few weeks of network and service instability before everything must be running again. A luxury in most companies, I’ll admit that. But then again, we’re working with a smaller budget. Now everything is on hold and nobody can give me an answer.
I’ve unleashed the dogs and hopefully we’ll get some answers today, but I have to say a certain company has lost a lot of respect in our department.
Charley Delta Whisky… folks, it can’t get much clearer than that.
