Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 05:12 PM
This is just something that I feel the need to vent about. It works great with SBS 2003 (generally takes us 3 hours to get the first BlackBerry syncing with the BPS server). But with SBS 2008, the only way to do it is to have a 32-bit Server 2003 member server that takes care of the BPS needs. And this can be expensive. This has been an issue for over an year, and I think it is all the more reason not to use BlackBerries if you work in a Small Business environment. Exchange Activesync is pretty much a standard these days (for a licensing fee from M$). And there are plenty of phones out there that will talk directly to the Exchange 2007 (or 2003) server and sync up email, calendar, contacts, notes, tasks, etc OTA no problem, while keeping the advanced security requirements.
Other phones that do this well are:
Windows Mobile phones
- iPhone
- Palm Palm OS
- Palm WebOS
- Android
- Any phone compatible with RoadSync (made by DataViz)
and the list goes on...
Except for RIM's BlackBerry phones.
RIM drives me crazy that they are unwilling to let their phones talk directly to the Exchange server. They just don't want to give up the revenue they get out of the BIS service and BES and BPS licenses....
Aargh!! :-)
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( 3 / 443 )Sunday, September 20, 2009, 11:01 PM
They have since been bought out by Citrix, but I still really like their virtualization platform. I use it & rely on it every day for my business. I currently have 5 virtual servers running on one Dell PowerEdge 1950 w/ quad-core Xeon 1.6Ghz CPU, running Citrix Xen Server 5.0. I am planning on upgrading to 5.5 soon so that I can use Debian Lenny as a guest VM OS. But first I want to get my NAS up via iSCSI, and a 2nd Xen Server physical host. This way I can move running VMs from one server to the other without incurring any downtime. This will allow maintenance during business hours, etc without any customer service disruption.
This stuff is pretty sweet indeed.
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( 3 / 662 )Thursday, July 17, 2008, 03:22 PM
Well, quite some time back I decided to make some adjustments to my Citrix XenServer to allow to have a subinterface (a.k.a. a second IP address) on the internal interface that I use for connecting to and managing it with XenCenter. This was only temporary while I was moving offices. Well after I finally moved the physical server to our new office I did everything that I could think of and find to reverse my initial changes so that everything dealing with the XenCenter management would be back to the defaults setup when XenServer 4.0 was installed. In addition to changing some of the system networking within the CentOS 5 host operating system, I also had to change some files that were specific to the XenServer and its admin connectivity. It took me forever to finally get it all back to normal. It wasn't too bad getting connectivity from XenCenter again, but after that I could never seem to get the console tab to actually show the console from any of the child servers, or the XenServer itself. I couldn't find anything on it on the internet. This kind of leads me to believe that most other admins have either been smart enough to not mess with some of the intracacies of the XenServer settings, or they were smart enough to note what they were so that they could reverse them, or they weren't smart enough to change them in the first place :-)
In any case, the file /etc/issue needs to contain the IP address that the XenServer will be managed from using XenCenter. If not, the console functions in XenCenter don't work.
At the same time that I modified the above file to reverse my original changes, I also removed the subinterface. So I'm not positive which change fixed it. But the IP address listed in /etc/issue was the one that I had used temporarily on the subinterface, and I'm pretty sure that I had modified that file, as it turned up in my list as one of the files that had been modified on the system since 1/1/08.
So for any other XenServer sysadmins who may have fouled up access to the console function in XenCenter, I hope this helps you!
Oh yeah. One more thing. After changing those settings, things didn't start working again until I restarted /etc/init.d/xenapi and /etc/init.d/xenapissl
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( 3 / 1095 )Wednesday, July 2, 2008, 04:02 PM
This is the first time I've blogged about anything political or seriously important to humanity. But today I read a news artical called "Why Zimbabwe? Why Now" from MediaMonitors.net.
The current Zimbabwe situation is something that I am very concerned about and have been following very closely. Their article seemed very inaccurate and I felt that it was unfair and wrong to the situation of Zimbabweans, so I took the opportunity to write the following letter to their editor. I feel that the information is good enough and important enough that it can be shared with all who are interested and should enlighten some, and confirm to others the things that we've been hearing in the media.
The Letter:
I just wanted to take an opportunity to let you know that I feel that the article on Zimbabwe posted today is largely misleading. I do not know whether this is due to intentional divisiveness of the writer, or his/her own ignorance. From November 2002-October 2004 I lived in South Africa and Botswana. I worked there as a voluntary missionary, paying my own way. I spent 99% of my time among the native indigenous Africans. I rarely even interacted with white people, so much so that when I returned home to America, it was quite a culture-shock for me to need to adjust to living among white people again.
The people I associated with were generally the common middle to lower-class people of South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe. I also became very good friends with indigenous Africans from Kenya, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Namibia and other parts of Africa. Some of these people had university degrees, others from technical colleges, and many were largely formally uneducated beyond Primary & Secondary school (high school). I only mention this background to establish the fact that my experience & knowledge came from Africans, and that it is about as authentic as it can get.
Before going to South Africa, I’d known since I was a teenager that Zimbabwe was a country, although it would have taken me time to find it on the map. Now I know exactly where it is and much information about it. Again, this is all from my experiences in South Africa & Botswana.
It was first in South Africa that I heard about Robert Mugabe. By the time that I had arrived, he had already taken the farms from the white farmers and given them to people who didn’t know how to run the farms. At that time I had never heard whether he gave them to the original families owning the lands, or to his loyalists. The media I have seen since returning home has repeatedly stated that he gave them to his loyalists instead of the original owners whom he was supposed to give them to. I tend to believe this. In either case, at the time I arrived in South Africa the inflation of the Zim-Dollar was already such that it exchange rate to the South African Rand was 100 to 1 and to the US Dollar 1000 to 1. If nothing else, this should give some kind of indication that the current Zimbabwean government has done a very poor job to manage and help their economy. Throughout my stay in Southern Africa I continuously heard reports of things getting worse and worse there. This was often from Zimbabweans who were either my peer missionaries, or others who had migrated to South Africa and Botswana for work, since there wasn’t any in Zimbabwe.
In South Africa, I heard reports that Mugabe was allowing the majority of the people of his country suffer in unemployment, hunger, & poverty, while sharing his wealth with his select group of loyalists. In the recent media this has also been reported, including him printing excessive currency to distribute to them while there was no real monetary backing to it, thus fueling the inflation and causing his loyalists to prosper while the general Zimbabwean public was suffering. I tend to believe this media report as well.
I knew a Botswana man who had recently returned from his own 2-year missionary service in Zimbabwe. He told us that there was regularly no bread on the shelves of the grocery stores in Zimbabwe.
I can’t and won’t judge and say who is at fault with the whole Zimbabwe situation. But everyone I talked with who had first-hand experience with it, pointed to Mugabe and his regime. And perhaps we can give Mugabe the benefit of the doubt and say that he really is not behind it all, but is the “front” representative and is basically trapped in his political position as others in his party pressure him to stay in power to prevent their trial for crimes against humanity. I really can’t say.
But what I do know is that your article seems quite inaccurate. I’d appreciate it if you removed it, modified it, or added my comments afterward in order to give a more balanced viewpoint.
Particularly:
• Zimbabwe’s sanctions from Western countries started coming after he kicked out the white farmers around early 2002, and started to let his people suffer.
• Morgan Tsvangirai is criticized in your article as a Western stooge. The truth is that you and I have probably NEVER gone through and hopefully never will go through the brutal beatings, unjust jailing and terrible persecution that he has. It is a shame to slam the reputation of someone who only tries to be a leader of people who want change in his country. He has shunned violence and even rejected the proposal for African nations to bring in military force to balance Zimbabwe’s current militia, army and others who are currently a bit out of control. He does not want violence or his people to suffer. I honestly feel that it is quite pathetic to criticize someone like him.
• Blaming the West is something that I NEVER heard from anyone who suffered from Zimbabwe’s problems. I heard them blame the West for other things. I had some Africans telling me that Americans were terrorists, especially in regards to the Iraq invasion. But never did the West come up in relation to Zimbabwe’s problems. Again, to my knowledge, the sanctions didn’t start coming until the Mugabe regime stopped taking care of the general public of Zimbabwe.
So to answer the author’s question of Why Zimbabwe, I have to say that I certainly feel that their situation is deserving of our attention. I pray every morning and night that peace may come to the people of Zimbabwe in such a way that is for the good of all of the people. There are many problems in this world. And I think that there are many of them in which the U.S. and other Western countries are involved. I don’t mind at all that the problems of Zimbabwe are being considered by Western powers. They certainly need whatever help they can get at this point. They have the worst inflation rate in the world. Additionally, Western powers are not the only ones condemning the currently situation in Zimbabwe (including Mugabe’s regime and how the recent run-off election was carried out unfairly [not to mention the 1 month delay with producing the results from the initial election]). Botswana, Zimbabwe and Ghana are just a few African nations openly condemning all of this. And two of them are Zim’s neighbors. Many South Africans have recently condemned it. A clear indication of this was the refusal of South African port workers to allow Chinese arms to be undocked and shipped by truck through S.A. to Zimbabwe. They refused to allow such things, given the Mugabe’s violent election campaign. Also the G-8 recently publicly condemned the same Zimbabwe situation that you are defending. The G-8 includes USA, Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Italy and France.
You’re going to have to do a lot more to convince me that things are anywhere close to “right” in Zimbabwe at this time. In the mean time, I hope and pray that things will get better there soon for the good of all of their people.
Yours respectfully,
-
Doug Mortensen
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( 3 / 1025 )Thursday, June 12, 2008, 11:49 AM
So I use a Mac. I have used Macs for years. However, I hadn't owned one for about 4 years until Apple switched to Intel processors. Now we can run Windows natively on a Mac. Excellent. It's like 2 computers in one. And there are 2 ways that you can run Windows on a Mac. You can dual boot (Apple calls this feature Boot Camp). Or you can use virtualization software like Parallels or VMWare Fusion to run a virtual machine with Windows simultaneously along side the native Mac OS X.
Then the virtualization people got creative and decided to let you virtualize your Boot Camp installation. This way if you dual boot and use virtualization, you only have to have 1 Windows installation.
Simply put. This has botched my Windows Vista SP1 installation. It had been running beautifully using Boot Camp, and then I decided to try Parallels to access the Vista installation from Mac OS X without having to restart. Bad idea. about 4 working hours later, I still use my Windows programs under Boot Camp. Instead Microsoft sends me to an Internet Explorer only shell and tells me how to get a genuine copy of Windows.
My business is a Microsoft partner. My copy of windows is genuine.
Now I've reactivated Windows Vista SP1 twice, rebooted between Mac OS X, Boot Camp and Vista in Parallels about 12 times. Updated Parallels to the newest version & reinstalled their tools in Vista. And on and on.
As convenient as a feature this virtualizing BootCamp may be, it is not worth the frustration & lost productivity that occurs every time that Microsoft releases a major update.
As soon as I get Vista happy again in Boot Camp, I'm not using Parallels anymore to run the Boot Camp OS. Bad idea. Waste of 1/2 of a business day where I'm supposed to be generating revenue helping clients with their networks and systems. Not nursing my own crippled Vista installation back to the land of trusted functionality....
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