Microsoft Licensing Fun or is this Hell

You ever get off the phone with Microsoft and feel like you have been sitting there poking yourself in your eye just for the fun of it or banging your head on the wall or that you need to go take a shower? We had a License Agreement that had expired and for whatever reason no one had caught it or it was mentioned or not who knows at this point it is irrelevant got missed some how and since I have taken over the IT Manager role here I was going over everything and found this. Of course this had our SA for the Office and Servers and Exchange and RDP and all the licenses that goes with that on it. So I called and after a while of bouncing back and forth and all around they said we could update our licensing and continue with the existing agreement. Ok that was cool I liked that answer and life was good.

Well they called back sometime later and said because the agreement expired in 2010, but right on the MS Licensing Website it says you can renew it by 2013 and be ok nothing about yaBut’s. That was one of the questions that I had asked was can we continue with that and the answer was yes you can…… BUT yes here comes the BUT now after everything was all agreed on and PO’s given out and things was ordered they called back and said oh yea BTW for you to be able to do this you have to catch up the 2 years you missed and then redo it again next year when this expires. Pregnant pause here while a short flash back of a car salesmen doing the same thing to me when I was getting my first new car or thought I was. Guess I have stupid written on my head or something but I said what? After being reviewed by the MS Sales guy and by 2 different people at MS Licensing while we was doing this no one had caught or knew this? Come on that is just crazy talk.

First thing is they really want the sale BUT ok too me that says they don’t want it that bad I guess as I won’t go for that in anyway shape and form or it might have been the statement they made that this is the only Option I have…….. well maybe in there mind it is but can we say Google Apps or Linux and Open Office. I seemed to recall there is a price difference here between the MS License and Free plus then you have me telling 10 of my friends who tell 10 of there’s and it just blossoms from there when you have a cranky customer.

Or I suggested lets move forward with what was agreed on and I will stay on top of things going forward and life will be good, well they didn’t like that answer as if they did it for one they will have to do for all. Guess if there is this kind of problem everyday they would find other options to help and not and try to limit you to there “One Option” As my wife would say they was trying to put me in a box and I don’t play in boxes very well or at all.

I like MS Products but I don’t have a problem moving to something that does not have this insane crazy licensing system they have there especially when I am told I only have one option. I have more than one option to move forward with all of this and it don’t have to include them in this. I have no problem learning new things but I like the second option better they step up and we move forward. Oh yea and I walked away from getting the new car those kind of tricks are not my style.

Long story short I walked away from that discussion and did something different and also went and took a shower.

Til later just Roger

Sharepoint 2010 and opening PDF Files

I ran into a problem with our Sharepoint 2010 site not allowing pdf files directly it would only prompt you to save it. I found the fix was pretty simple and that was to do the following. Just be aware you are opening up the security on the sites with the files.

1.Verified Adobe Reader option “Display PDF in browser” was selected (it was by default) by opening Adobe Reader and going to Edit -> Options -> Internet -> Web Browser Options 

2.Set SharePoint Web Application Browser File Handling to Permissive by opening Central Administration and going to -> Manage Web Applications –> select my web application –> General Settings –> Scroll down and set “Browser File Handling” to “Permissive”.

Till later just Roger

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