HP Wireless and Wireless Support Part 2

Ok I have to update this as HP finally came through and they have been working with me on these APs and we are getting them replaced. What a good way to end the week before some holiday time off.  Don’t know what the problem with them is for sure but the replacement ones we have been rolling out are working and doing what they are supposed to and hopefully I will learn what the problem was with them for sure at some point with this.

Til Later Just Roger

Adara Networks

Has anyone had a chance to check out the offerings of Adara Networks? We are about to look over the solution and from first glance if it does what they say it will do then that would benefit anyone with remote locations. There claim is they can take our MPLs lines and double the speed. Seems to be a outrageous statement but we will see they have some trial/demo equipment that is coming out and we are going to give it a whirl but I just wondered if anyone else has used the product and what your experience was with it. I will let you know how our testing comes out with the product so more later.

Til Later Just Roger

HP Wireless and Wireless Support Part 1

That is my opinion anyways, I Love their servers and their desktops and laptops and their switches but I work for a company that put a lot of money into a HP Wireless Solution that sucks to say the least. The problem started after they had the antennas for a few months the AP’s started to drop off and or the range went down and the people who sold the solution looked into it and said it was because there was not enough APs out that was the problem. You could setup 2 of the antennas 10 feet apart and the meshing still would not work and you still could not connect your laptop to them or if you could get a connection to the AP your traffic was not passed. So how can adding more antennas help when you couldn’t connect to the AP 10 feet away.

Well this was fought for about 6 months and finally we called HP after not getting anywhere with the reseller other than you didn’t buy enough AP’s and sent them a couple of the problem units. They tested them and got them to fail but they came back with you don’t have static guards on your APs so your warranty is voided. Plus because this had taken so long the APs started to go out of warranty which now in their eyes was voided because of no static guard on them and we had them grounded but guess in their minds you needed to buy a item that went on the antennas to protect against static. But if you talked to another part of HP they said that you did not need to have the antennas static guards. Someone make up there mind please and It was also strange that you could take the indoor APs and put them outside in a protective case and they out performed the Outside Antennas. Then we find out there was another location that had problems with their APs and that HP said it was a bad build on those and they was replacing them for that group. We have over 25 of the Units that we sent on to be tested and nothing is coming from that also they virtually just dropped into a black hole and that was it. No one wants to step up and take responsibility for the bad units either from a bad build or by not being sold everything you should have had to protect the Units in certain parts of HP’s eyes.

Another problem that is had is that we have the wireless controller that goes in our HP 5406zl Core switch and this was supposed to make the management so much easier on these Units. Well we have a problem with the APs that the working ones will start slowing down that we have to reboot the AP Controller to get things flowing again. This is not the only location that I have run into this with and when I asked about it all’s I got was it is not supposed to do that or load the next build of Firmware it will be better.

This is the classic example of buying a product that was endorsed by your trusted reseller and then when the solution goes south no one wants to step up and cover the problem. From not enough APs to you don’t have the Static Guard on them to your now out of warranty because of all the screwing around on everyones part and no one wanting to take responsibility of a bad product.

So moral of the story is don’t trust anyone trying to sell a HP Wireless Solution because if it goes south you are not going to have anyone backing you up anyway and HP not standing behind there product that is not working like was sold. Sure we are at fault for letting it go so long but we tried no one would listen but there are others that are just as at fault as we are. So if you are looking for a Wireless Solution in my opinion do not look at HP because they do not stand by what they have out there even though it is flawed and maybe rushed to market after they bought out Colubris and does not do as promised from reseller to HP. So we spent a lot of money on a solution that is slowly dying and no one wanting to step up and say hey that is not right and making it right. What is the old saying you will tell 1 person when you have been treated right and will tell 10 when you are not. Guess this is my way of telling the 10.

Til later just Roger

Why Companies Die or fade away

I was reading an article about Steve Jobs and why Big companies die and really it is any company that can do this big or small. Bottom line is if you forget the ones who really got you where you are in the end that will bite you in the butt. You can read the article I was reading Here but some of the points that stuck out to me from this article are and this one is from Steve Jobs He has a theory about “why decline happens” at great companies:

“The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.” IBM [IBM] and Xerox [XRX], Jobs said, faltered in precisely this way. The salesmen who led the companies were smart and eloquent, but “they didn’t know anything about the product.” In the end this can doom a great company, because what consumers want is good products.

Another snippet from the article was this one here “This isn’t quite the whole story. It’s not just the salesmen. It’s also the accountants and the money men who search the firm high and low to find new and ingenious ways to cut costs or even eliminate paying taxes. The activities of these people further dispirit the creators, the product engineers and designers, and also crimp the firm’s ability to add value to its customers. But because the accountants appear to be adding to the firm’s short-term profitability, as a class they are also celebrated and well-rewarded, even as their activities systematically kill the firm’s future.”

You can see that this can be translated to whatever situation you are in and have been through but the idea or framework is the same to fit whatever situation you was or are in. What it says to me is you forget the ones who made your company great and turn the company over to ones who make the bottom line look great and forget the ones who got you there in the first place your just hanging out and waiting for something to happen and not pushing the envelope like you use to then your treading water and looking for a place to sink. That’s my opinion anyways.

Til later just Roger

Defragging a Exchange 2010 SP1 Database Part 3

Ok now that I have moved the Hidden System Mailboxes and I did this because I did not want to have any issue with the existing Exchange Users having any problems so I moved everything to a live Database while I didthe defrag of the default database.

What I did to defrag my default database was and because my Exchange Server runs on a Microsoft HyperV Shared Storage Cluster I added a temp drive to my exchange server for the temp database to reside in while the server defraged. I opened the Exchange Power Shell and got to drive location of the database that I was going to defrag and in this case it was

E:\Database\

Once I was there I opened the Exchange Management and dismounted the database I was going to defrag and once that completed I went back to the powershell and ran this command.

E:\Database\eseutil /d “databaseName.edb” /t “F:\Temp.edb”

You then see the Utility do the defrag on the database and then once that completes you see the temp database moved into the one you was defragging. And you now have shrunk your database and cleaned up the whitespace. Once this is completed you mount your database and do a backup of the server. I had read where it would do the defrag at about 4 Gig per hour and that was way off I was suprised that it only took the whole process 15 minutes to do this on a 200 Gig Database Start to finish.

Til later Just Roger

Defragging a Exchange 2010 SP1 Database Part 2

I first ran this command from the Exchange Power Shell to see where the Arbitration Hidden mailboxes resided Get-Mailbox -Arbitration | fl -wrap -auto and that will allow you to see the full name of the Arbitration mailboxes. If you have more than one Database you will need to be a little more specific and break it down to this command Get-Mailbox -Arbitration -Database “DataBaseName”  I then moved them to another one of the Databases that I had created. This procedure will also work if you are wanting to remove the default database on your Exchange 2010 SP1 Server. But the command to move them has to be done through the Exchange Power Shell command. That command is Get-Mailbox -Arbitration -Database “Source DataBaseName” | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase “Move to Database Name” This should move all 3 of the Arbitration Mailboxes if you want to do this one at a time the command is New-MoveRequest -Identity “SystemMailbox{and a bunch of numbers}” These are the 3 that displayed when you ran the Get-Mailbox -Arbitration | fl -wrap -auto command 2 of them will say SystemMailbox and 1 of them will start with federation you move those 3. You should see some output that the move request has been Queued and once you have all 3 moved run this command  Get-MoveRequest -SourceDatabase “DatabaseName” this will display if the move requests have been completed and once you show that they are you want to remove those Move Requests and that is done by running this command. Remove-MoveRequest “SystemMailbox{bunch of numbers} and you do this 3 times one for each of the ones you did the move request on. Once this is done you have now completed the move and can continue with what you are doing or removing the default database.

Til Later Just Roger

Defragging a Exchange 2010 SP1 Database Part 1

We had our email users basically out of control with the email they stored in the mailboxes on our Exchange 2010 SP1 Server and they was from 100M to 10 Gig in mailbox sizes. So we made the decision to implement some changes and add some Retention Policies for the Sent Items and Deleted items folders and mailbox sizes. We have the sent and deleted items deleting every 7 days and we limited the users to a 1.5 Gig Mailbox size. That is still a pretty big mailbox but we let the COO clean up his mailbox and then we seen what it was and then we added a but for fudge factor and went with that. I know very scientific but if anyone wanted to know how we found that magic number we pointed out how we did it and went from there. Basically it was buy another HP MSA or do the limits and we went with these limits and we can live with that.

I then created 3 databases and moved the users into the departments Exchange Databases and left the users who got the Double Secert Allowances to have a larger mailbox on the default database. But that left me with a Database that was 200 Gig and full of whitespace. So this is what I did to correct that and to shrink that database down to the size it should be.

Til Later Just Roger

Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 user move errors Part 2

Ok was doing the Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 migration/transition whatever you want to call it and we got an error when trying to move a user and it had to do with corrupted items in the users mailbox. Which could be a piece of junk mail or who knows but it did not like it. So I increased the amount to 50 and it still failed and if you look at the details on the user move it will show how many items it stopped at unless it is over 50 which is the limit that is in the Mail Move for corrupted items unless you add the switch below and run this from the PS. So I ran the command below from Power Shell and finally got the email moved but the user had 74 items in their mailbox which was corrupted. I think the next limit is 100 with the switch below and then the fix would have been to export the email to pst and then fixed the pst if possible and import into Outlook for that user if possible.

Till later just Roger

Failed

Error:

Large BadItemLimit (50) is specified. Please confirm your intention to accept a large amount of data loss by specifying AcceptLargeDataLoss. This information will be kept in the logs with ‘d065654.local/Users/Administrator’ as the identity of the requestor.

Click here for help… http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.285.0&t=exchgf1&e=ms.exch.err.ExD15B33

Command to run

New-MoveRequest –identity UserName –TargetDatabase “Mailbox Database Name” -MRSServer NewExchServerName -BadItemLimit 60 -AcceptLargeDataLoss

Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 User move Error

I was doing an Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 migration and when I went to move the users I got this error below. The fix for this was Open Active Directory Users and Computers click on the view Tab and select Advanced and then find the user you are having problems with and right click on the user go to Properties and then Secuirty and then Advanced and check the box that Says “Include Inheritable Permissions from objects parent” hit apply and then ok your way out of this and then go back and move that user and away you go.

Till later just Roger

Username
Failed

Error:
Active Directory operation failed on server.domain.local. This error is not retriable. Additional information: Insufficient access rights to perform the operation.
Active directory response: 00002098: SecErr: DSID-03150A45, problem 4003 (INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS), data 0

The user has insufficient access rights.
Click here for help… http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.285.0&t=exchgf1&e=ms.exch.err.Ex6AE46B

Exchange Management Shell command attempted:
‘domain.local/Location User Groups/Location Users/username | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase ‘Mailbox Database name’

Elapsed Time: 00:00:04

The Cloud or is it Partly Cloudy with a chance of meatballs

I keep seeing articles and articles about moving to the cloud. Are you doing it because it makes sense to or are you doing it because everyone else is? Why move to the Cloud? Does it make business sense for you to or are you doing it just because your trusted solution provider is saying that is what you need to do? What is in it for you and what are they getting out of it? Is it really safe and secure? Do you want to put your business and your life’s work in the control of someone else to be secure and to be backed up. Are you really sure it is secure? Are you really sure it is being backed up? Does it really make sense or are you just being a lemming.

There is billions and billions of dollars being spent on Cloud services and the only ones making anything really off it is your trusted service provider and the hosting company themselves, are you really seeing a return on that investment. Those hosting companies and your trusted service provider are only interested in one thing and that is that monthly recurring stream of money you are pumping into them. It is easy money the trusted service providor just sits back and watches it come in and that is a high margin revenue stream. They don’t need techs that way and only need the sales guys selling it.  So who’s best interest is this really in it isn’t because they care about your well being or are they are in it for themselves and that is there bottom line. Maybe you don’t care about the cost more power to you but is it really what you need?

Are you really secure with everything in The Cloud? How do you know that the location your data and apps are residing are really secure? They say it is but is it really? Also is it really in the country you reside? I was reading a while back about how China had redirected all Internet traffic through them not once but twice that is known about.  Ok is your data really safe you tell me and don’t be so naive to think that it don’t happen. At least you have that ability of monitoring and locking down the network with your firewalls and tools. You don’t have to worry about your traffic as it is inside your network being redirected to China or whoever decides they want to do that.

What about backups lets look at what happened on the web a while back with Amazon’s Cloud problem and Googles Gmail to name a couple. It took a long time for them to get that back for the users what if that was your business that was in the Cloud and had that happen. How much would that have effected you. Guess if you want to play solitare on your computer while you waited not a bad deal but if you had a high volume business how many dollars would you have lost because of this? At least they got them restored but at what cost to you for down time?

I use to work for a IT company and this and managed services was a big push for them as it was all recurring revenue with low costs to them. I was still trying to figure out how that was so beneficial to a company when the costs of said services was much higher than if you owned the equipment and had a tech come when needed. Unless you was big enough to have your own tech and the cost was still cheaper. Only one benifiting from this was the IT company.  Guess anyone will buy something even if it is a bridge to nowhere.

Til later just Roger