How to do IT

BES and Microsoft Hotfixes

2006-07-20T17:42:00.000-07:00

Well we got hit with one of those Microsoft hotfixes that breaks other programs. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal except the program that broke was BES. It had something to do with the hotfix removing Send As permissions to user objects unless it was explicitly assigned to it. We got it fixed after billing the client 6 hours of research work.

Stupid Questions

2006-07-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

"So do I want spyware or do I not want spyware?", asks the client after I explained to her that I needed to update her anti-spyware program and that I needed to scan her PC for things that make it go crazy.

Blackberry Enterprise Server Part 2

2006-07-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

Finally found out what was wrong with my BES setup. The new logical BES server name which is different from the actual server computer name has to be the same as the old one. After that was fixed, all I had to do was backup and restore the database using osql -E.

Tickers

2006-07-04T22:02:00.000-07:00

One of our bigger clients, well actually they are our biggest client, wanted a kiosk setup with their sharepoint site on top and a scrolling ticker in the bottom showing CNN and stock news. So I went about researching various tickers that use java and javascript. None of them could pull RSS feeds so I had to write code using VBscript for that part. None of them would work with the length of strings that I was feeding them either.

I found one site that had the nerve to sell their tickers for... get this... $130(or something ridiculous like that) a month + $500 initial installation fee! Are they out of their minds?! All that money for a freakin ticker?! Well luckily I knew about IE's marquee HTML tag and ended up using that instead. The page is basically a frame with 90% sharepoint and 10% ticker in the bottom. It looks pretty good and even displays little images. The ticker is updated using Windows scheduler that runs a batch file that runs my script that reads the RSS xml from CNN and some other stock market site.

Passed 70-290

2006-07-01T22:19:00.000-07:00

Passed it with 880. The test was definitely harder than 70-270 because of the simulations. Fortunately most of the questions and simulations were things that I see everyday at work. Cha ching! $500 bones for me! Well actually.. $450 for me and $50 for Uncle Sam.

Blackberry Enterprise Server

2006-06-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

One great thing about my job is that my boss allows us to mess with things that we really have no clue about. Setting up BES on our network is one example. Well I guess most of the prerequisite work has been done for me since all I'm really doing is moving BES from one machine to another. This means that I don't have to mess with our PIX firewall settings. I'm gonna be using the same SRP identifier and so on. I found an article that said all I needed to do was setup the new server and as long as I was using the same mailbox and the same SRP data, all the user data and stats would magically transfer over. Of course, that didn't happen. I guess I'm gonna have to RTFM. Either that or talk to tech support. *shudder*

Did they pay for their software?

2006-06-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

One of my co-workers went to one of our "cheap" clients to work on a spyware issue. He went and took a look at the receptionist's PC and guess what OS she had? Windows 2000 Advanced Server. This office had 20-25 users and guess what else? They weren't in a domain.

Symantec AV is a PITA

2006-06-28T14:50:00.000-07:00

I spent a few hours trying to install the AV client on a slow computer which our boss uses. I guess Symantec AV doesn't like it when previous versions of Norton/Symantec AV have been installed. It didn't even give me a useful error message. It was something like this:

"The wizard was interrupted while installing SAV. We don't really know what caused it. In a lame attempt for us to be helpful, please try this: Run setup again and see if it works this time."

Well as you can probably guess, their suggestion didn't work. I tried several fixes but none of them worked except for this: Manually hunt down registry remnants of Norton AV Corporate 7.5. I would post the link for the article about this issue but it's really long and it messes up my blog. Just go to Google and type "symantec interrupt wizard".

Yahoo Sucks

2006-06-27T16:56:00.000-07:00

One of our clients had a problem with her Yahoo Groups daily digests getting bounced back. It was setup to go to her office's email address which was running Exchange. Our anti-spam wasn't blocking it. We checked with their ISP and they weren't blocking it. We checked DNS blacklists and what do you know. Some of them were blocking Yahoo Groups' mail servers.

I tried reconfiguring her Yahoo Groups account to send to Gmail instead, hoping that this would somehow circumvent the blocks. Nope. Darn! What to do? Oh, how about I setup her daily digest to go to her Yahoo Email account. Surely, Yahoo wouldn't be blocking emails from their own servers. I was wrong. Time for Yahoo tech support! What a pleasant thought. I quickly found out that Yahoo email support is a blackhole. Oh what if I call them? I was on hold for 20 minutes only for the guy to tell me that they don't provide phone support for free services! Hooray!

Passed 70-270

2006-04-01T22:23:00.000-08:00

Passed it with 900+. Not a bad test as long as you work with Windows XP every day.