Category: General

While I generally loath exchange as a mail server and have successfully avoided it since Exchange 5.5 on NT4 I’ve been handed the Hosted Exchange build out project at my new job. Exchange 2003 is actually not as bad as I thought it would be, it has some decent features (OWA) and is well integrated into Active Directory (if you’re into that sort of thing). I’m not a fan of the Single Instance Message Store (a massive proprietary binary database that stores all the Exchange data). Having to restore a 30GB file on a standalone exchange server to recover a single mailbox does not sound like a lot of fun.

Hosted Exchange on the other hand is a completely different kettle of fish; it’s quite complex and largely undocumented which makes building a production Hosted Exchange environment almost impossible without 3rd party consultants ($$). I’ve also found that its quite buggy and very easy to break which makes me cringe when I think about supporting it. Plus with the closed source nature of Exchange and it’s Single Instance Message Store you really need to spend a lot of money to build a proper Exchange environment with redundancy and a good backup/disaster recovery plan.

Also, I’m quite shocked that Microsoft didn’t include a working, feature-rich user control panel with it. The customer is stuck either writing their own or shelling out big bucks for something from a 3rd party. The sample control panel that ships with exchange is pretty sad, from a user perspective the only options it provides are updating your AD information (name, department etc) and change your password (completely broken).

And lastly, when are they going to port outlook to the mac platform or build MAPI support into entourage?? The only people that can use the extra exchange functionality are running Windows XP SP2 and Outlook 2003. Anyone with anything different is out of luck! I could build a killer mail system that was completely redundant, screaming fast and able to support 5-10 times the amount of clients on the same hardware using open source software for FREE!

That’s my rant for now, hopefully my experience with hosted exchange will improve (or we hire someone else to wear that hat so I don’t have to care about it anymore).

Was your first computer from the 80’s? Was 360KB enough to store ten or more cool games? Do you remember when floppy disks were actually floppy? Then have I got the site for you!! The Wabash and Tandy sleeves brought back memories for me. Makes me want to bust out the Vtech Laser 128 and play a little Choplifter or BC’s Quest for Tires! Half my youth was spent waiting for and loading 51/4 inch disks.

Hard disks are for sissies, long live the floppy disk!!!

My last phone was a Nokia 3568i and while it was a solid little phone it was definitely time for an upgrade. When I went to give the phone to my wife to replace her aging Motorola V60 I tried to reset the phone so she would start fresh but was stopped by a ‘Lock code” that I didn’t have. The phone was supposed to ask for a 5 digit Security code after 3 successive failures to enter the lock code. Unfortunately it wasn’t prompting me for the security code. The following code let me enter the programming mode of the phone where I was able to clear it’s contents and reset it to the factory defaults.

*3001#12345# Programming for CDMA/TDMA (12345 is your security code if you haven’t changed the default)
*#837# lets you check your PRL and software version.
*#639# will allow you to manually program your phone with the MIN and SID.
*#7780# Will restore factory settings

These codes saved me a trip to the cellular dealer!

I had a minor duh moment this week. For years I’ve worked on servers, big and small with SCSI disks. I’m familiar with SCSI technology and the quirks it has. In recent weeks I had purchased an ultra 320 SCSI hard disk for my linux workstation and an Adaptec 29160 card to drive it. I got the card used with a 68 pin SCSI cable complete with terminator.

I installed all the bits and mirrored my IDE disk onto the SCSI disk, rebooted and everything worked. Just to ensure there were no issues I was looking over my dmseg output and noticed the disk was running at 40mb/sec! I spent an hour going over jumpers and driver settings trying to figure out why this disk was running only at 40mb/sec. Then I actually looked at the cable connecting the two and realized that the cable was a plain old 68 pin Ultra SCSI cable. Doh!

For the curious, the way you can tell an Ultra 160 or 320 cable from a regular SCSI cable is the wires on a U160/320 cable are in twisted pairs. They use the same shielding idea as UTP ethernet cable to maintain speed at long cable lengths. Anyway, I’ve located some cheap U320 cables on ebay and they should be here any day now. Then I’ll be running at U160 from the disk to the SCSI card anyway. It won’t make a big difference since I’m only running the one disk on the SCSI bus and the data rate from the platters to the bus is only 60MB/sec.

Now if only I could get my DDS4 drive working with the 29160 card I’d be happy.