Working hard to keep you happy...

As we progress into Web 2.0, blogging has taken off with leaps and bounds. Practically anyone that is a "techie", no not a "Trekkie", has a blog and writes in it from time to time. 5 years ago forums were the popular item. They still are, but blogging has expanded that idea into the next century.

Collaboration. That's what's it all about. It is the new buzz word and I have been hearing more of this word lately and more and more companies want to be a part of it. Basically, it is communication, making decisions about something of importance, an idea, etc. Web 2.0 makes collaboration easier because of the way communication is interactive. Web sites that have static images and text are boring. People want to be able to interact with the site, it makes them feel as if they are part of the "big picture". And really, when you think about it, they do become the picture because they contribute to ideas.

Take wikipedia for example. Some of you have probably never heard of it. It is another Web 2.0 idea. People can go to this site and contribute to definitions and ideas. Just like an Encyclopedia has information on a subject, Wikipedia has information on any subject and is constantly growing, but with one major difference. It is not just the ideas or information on one person, company, or group, rather it is a collection of ideas from anyone who wants to contribute to it and that can support it with a fact or experience.

What's the whole point? I have no idea. That's fun of Blogging.

Now this is what I am talking about!

It seems that solid state drives are going to be the direction pc makers will go pretty soon. Samsung just announced here that it will be shipping a 64 gig hard drive as a direct replacement for a traditional hard drive. Below is a quote from the article at Infoworld.

"Solid-state disk drives are intended as replacements for conventional hard-disk drives and use NAND flash memory rather than a rotating magnetic storage disk. They offer several benefits including faster data read and write times, greater shock resistance, and lower power consumption but are also more expensive. "

This means that once they hammer out the kinks, people like me will be freed from replacing and reloading "dead" hard drives. It also means less power consumption, less heat dissipation, and faster read/write times.

I can't wait.

Weekend Trip - Badly Needed

Hey all. It's been a while since I have taken any kind of vacation so this weekend Anne and I are heading to Savannah and staying on Tybee Island. Be sure to check back for pics next week.

Event 537 in SBS 2003

I decided to battle a few lingering problems with one of my SBS 2003 servers today and thought I might share with you my results. One of the symptoms was a very high number, over 25,000 to be exact, of Event 537 in the Security log. The exact error I got was below:

Logon Failure:

Reason:
An error occurred during logon

User Name: ***
Domain: ***
Logon Type: 3
Logon Process: Kerberos
Authentication Package: Kerberos
Workstation Name: -
Status code: 0xC00002EE
Substatus code: 0x0
Caller User Name: -
Caller Domain: -
Caller Logon ID: -
Caller Process ID: -
Transited Services: -
Source Network Address: -
Source Port: -

This was weird to me since it did not show any other info other than the username and domain. After reading a few articles online, I came across this one that stated to check to see if there were any HP printer management packages installed on the pc. I thought how odd because most of the errors I was reading about said to check the net time, but I checked it out on the machine that user was logged into and sure enough there was an HP Document management tool running in the tray. Turns out it was for a printer that was no longer in service. It seems this issue can be caused if there are applications from client computers trying to logon by incorrect accounts and password. So I removed the application and rebooted the pc and so far there are no more events in the Security log.

The link to the newsgroup I got this from is here. I hope this helps someone out there.

WSUS on SBS 2003

For those of you who don't know what WSUS is, it stands for Windows Server Update Services. In a network where you have a lot of pc's, this makes Microsoft Updates easier and faster especially when you have 25 pc's downloading the same update 25 different times. The updates are syncronized with a WSUS server and distributed from there. When Automatic Update runs on the clients, a GPO tells them to use the local WSUS server instead of downloading from the web.

I took a look at this package about 2 years ago but at that time the company I worked for was using a workgroup so I could not use the software the way it was designed. Today I will be using a Microsoft article to setup WSUS on an SBS 2003 server, which I will post a link to here for you to see.

SUS which is WSUS's predecessor will not be supported by Microsoft after July 10, 2007 so if you are using this technology, you will want to upgrade to the latest. By then WSUS 3.0 will be released and will support an even broader range of products.

Be sure to check the basics first

Let me explain. One of my customers experienced a loss of emails coming into their network yesterday. I started with the normal checking, making sure services were running, drive space, etc. The error that people emailing them were getting was an NDR saying Unknown User.

After a few hours of troubleshooting and removing email filters and such, my boss and senior engineer found a problem with the mx record in dns. It seems that the local ISP that hosts the web site for this company had a system wide problem yesterday with changes made to the mx records of all their customers' domains. This meant that everyone that was sending mail to this domain wasn't even getting to the server.

Seems they forgot to let us know about this outage.

So next time a hard problem comes up that you can't figure out, be sure to check all your basics because it may be staring you in the face like it was for me the whole time.

Trend Micro C/S/M and Vista

Just found out that if you are using any version of Trend Micro C/S/M on your Small Business Server, there will not be Vista support until sometime April '07. Vist the Trend Micro Beta Portal to find out more. Also, view this page to get more information about Vista and Trend Micro.

Prepare your SBS domain for an additional R2 Domain Controller

I came across this article the other day and found it an interesting read. It's called, "How to prepare the SBS domain for an additional R2 Domain Controller". It walks you through how to upgrade the Active Directory Schema on an SBS server to R2 if you purchase a new member server preloaded. Basically it uses the disk from the Server 2003 R2 set and runs the adprep tool from within it. After that you can insert additional domain controllers that are Server 2003 R2 into any SBS network. Click here to view the article.

SBS 2003 R2: Vista and Office 2007 compatibility update

To all of you that manage an SBS network, this is for you...

An update will be sent through the Microsoft Update to Windows SBS 2003 with SP1 and Windows SBS 2003 R2 customers in the March timeframe. If you need the update before then, it can also be downloaded. For more information on how to download, please read the Vista and Office 2007 FAQs.

The download will be available as of February 9th in the English, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, French,German,Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Czech, Hungarian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Greek.

For additional details, please see the following resources:
Vista and Office 2007 FAQs
Related Knowledge Base Articles
KB 926505 – Update for Windows Small Business Server 2003: Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 compatibility
KB 911829 – Outlook Web Access (OWA) update
KB 929556 – Firewall Client for ISA Server
KB 930414 – ISA Server 2004 update package for Vista 64-bit editions
KB 930955 – Vista User Profile WMI Provider
KB 931095 – Regarding Outlook users; note: this is a catch all KB for someone who has XP with Outlook 2007 – a separate update is not required, it is the same update as mentioned in KB 926505 Microsoft Download Center - Using Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 in a Windows Small Business Server 2003 Network:
https://mail.techisc.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=46E95C56-1A4C-45BD-8D69-5F41FF8F1F22%26displaylang=en

Related Microsoft Blogs:
https://mail.techisc.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/
https://mail.techisc.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://blogs.msdn.com/sbsdocsteam/default.aspx
https://mail.techisc.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://blogs.technet.com/kevin_beares/default.aspx

I'm back

The last time I posted in this blog was in the beta days, man things have changed. I am still here, alive and in one piece. I am liking the new version being integrated with gmail. Since I had a gmail account already, I was able to upgrade smoothly. Google will rule the world someday.

Anyway, from this point on my blog will be used for posting general updates about myself and technical information on products I work with in my day to day job as a field technician in the I.T. field.

I hope you find it as useful as I have found others to be. Please feel free to post comments as they have been opened up for anyone to post.

See ya soon.