A customer had seen that the Exchange System Manager showed an Exchange server as in maintenance mode. This appears in the Tools / Monitoring section of System Manager.

When you see that, it just means that someone went to the properties of the Exchange server in System Manager and checked the following setting in the Monitoring tab: Disable all monitoring of this server.

When you check that box, it is assumed you want to turn off monitoring while you are doing maintenance on the server. By checking the box, you turn off unnecessary alerts while you are doing the maintenance.

If only all Exchange issues were so simple to solve.

Sometimes it is strange to see how Microsoft overlooks the most obvious things. They create all these nice features in Sharepoint Portal Server (and WSS) such as image libraries and the ability for users to post news items but then they forget one thing: link these two together.

I mean, have you ever tried to add a graphic to a news post in Sharepoint that uses a relative path (like /area/image library/image.jpg)? It’s impossible.

Why didn’t they create an image picker that allows you to go to any picture library and select the picture to include it in the news item (using a relative path). It could have been so great. Or even better: they should have allowed the user to upload the image while he creates the news item.

And it’s not that you cannot add a picture to a news item. You can. But you have to use an absolute url. That’s rubbish! Internally we access the site using http://portal, but externally it is another name and we use https. So what do I have to do: put an ISA server in between with link translation? Put in an HTTP handler that changes what Sharepoint outputs? Maybe something like this?

Come on Microsoft, you can do better than that. Fix this in a service pack or the next release. Or even better, work together with an ISV to enhance the rich text editor and news publishing capabilities.

One last thing… I create these posts using BlogJet. If you see how easy it is to post items to a blog with images, attachments and other stuff, you even dislike Sharepoint more. If only I could use BlogJet with Sharepoint.

Ok, enough ranting for now….

If you want to know all the dirty technical details of Exchange 2003, read this guide.

Download details: Exchange Server 2003 Technical Reference Guide

Unslung is a replacement firmware for the NSLU2. It keeps all the out of the box functionalities provided by Linksys and adds a few more. A very interesting new feature is the ability to install packages from the web using ipkg.

After putting the unslung firmware on the NSLU2, you need to configure ipkg. Then, you can get a list of packages using ipkg list.

There are quite a few:

• dropbear: an SSH server… so I can now use PuTTY to connect to the NSLU2
• nano: a pico like editor…. a bit more user friendly than vi
• ntp: a time synchronization deamon
• mt-daapd: an iTunes server… a new version than the one I blogged about earlier
• appweb: a web server
• …

I installed all the listed packages above and they work like a charm. For a Linux dummy like me, it is more interesting to use these packages. For example: the installation of mt-daapd was a piece of cake and it also registered itself for starting automatically. Now, if I restart the NSLU2, the iTunes server comes up as well.

The appweb package opens up the possibility to run a web server on the device. Considering the 250GB of storage, you have enough room to serve whatever you want.

To run a web server from my home, I need to use dynamic DNS. Sadly, my 3Com gateway does not support that. The NSLU2 came to the rescue again. I made a small script that uses wget to update my IP address at http://www.zoneedit.com. ZoneEdit sees that the IP address that makes the request is actually my 3Com gateway’s WAN address and updates the record (of course, I provide a user name and password on the wget command line). The update script is executed regularly using crond.

And when I bought the NSLU2, I just thought I could use it to connect my Maxtor to my home network.

I am listening to their cd Speak. It was released in 2004 but I only learned about their existence from seeing them on TMF Cafe.

Reminds me of PJ Harvey at times. If you like alternative music, you really need to check it out.

Listen to some of their music @ http://www.monsoon.be.

I finally bought a Linksys Network Storage Link to make my 250GB external Maxtor available on my home network. The idea is to store all my music on that drive and to play it from there.

This is what it looks like:

It is very small and very quiet. You simply connect your external HDD to one of the two USB ports and turn on the device. The device connects to the network using a network cable. There is a short network cable in the package.

Installation is very simple. You run an application on your pc that finds the NSLU2. You can then set the IP address or you can use DHCP. At the end of this procedure, you are asked to format the disk. The NSLU2 runs Linux and it formats the disk using the ext3 file system. It actually creates two partitions. A small one with configuration data and the rest for your files. Of course, this means that if your disk contains a lot of data, you first have to copy it somewhere else. Then you let the NSLU2 format the disk and then you copy your data back. It would have been nice if the device supported FAT32 and NTFS out of the box.

Ok, the device is now on your network but you need to configure it further using the web interface because the initial configuration program only does the basic stuff (IP and formatting). You just connect to the admin web pages using http://ipaddressofNSLU2 and you get the following (click the thumbnail below):

From there it is simple. You can configure the name of the device (I called it NAS), additional users, groups, private area’s and so on.

In Windows, you just connect to the NSLU2 with \\nas. You then get this (click the thumbnail):

Of course, what do you do when you want to use the disk directly with your Windows system? Options are a bit limited:

• You can use Explore2FS. This tool gives you an explorer view on the ext3 partitions on the disk. I only managed to read from them. Writing did not work. Too bad…
• Use a file system driver. The author of Explore2FS also created a driver for windows that can read ext2 and ext3 file systems.
• Use Linux.

Of course, I am not going to use Linux as my main operating system. But to read and write to this NSLU2 formatted disk, I did use Knoppix in a VMWare session. Since VMWare supports USB, the partititions showed up on the Knoppix desktop after plugging in the disk. You can then right click on the icon to make the partition read/write (it is read-only by default). Nice solution when you need write access but maybe a bit complicated.

Now for the cool stuff!!! On the net, you can find a lot of information about hacking the NSLU2. Kudos to those guys because I could never find these things myself. The first thing I wanted to try was to telnet into the NSLU2 to get root access to its operating system. Here are the steps to do this:

• Enable telnet by surfing to http://nas/Management/telnet.cgi and clicking the Enable Telnet button. This is an undocumented feature.
• Telnet into the device and logon as root. But wait: what is the password? Well, there is a passwd file with all the passwords (remember, this is Linux). I used Knoppix to get write access to the configuration partition. I opened the passwd file and replaced the password hash with the known password hash of a user I created myself with the web interface.
• Now I can telnet to the device and logon with root. Cool !!!

Telnet:

What is the fun in having telnet access? Well, there are packages out there to enable NFS on the device (out of the box it is only SMB). But there is a much more interesting package out there: mt-daapd.

What is mt-daapd? Well, it allows you to setup an iTunes server that announces itself using RendezVous. This means that one this package is running, the server will show up in iTunes like this:

This means you just start iTunes and you see the mp3 files served by the NSLU2. No need to map a drive to the device and add your files to iTunes. Multiple machines on the network can use the server simultaneously. And if you have an Airport Express you can stream the music to that. You will still need a pc because you need iTunes to connect to the NSLU2 to get the files and to stream the music to the Airport Express. There are devices that can handle this more elegantly of course and doing it like this is not for everyone.

The installation of the mt-daapd package is a bit complicated. You can find more information here and here.

I did not build the package myself, I just downloaded the archive at the end of the tom’s networking article and installed all files on the NSLU2 according to the instructions (for that I needed telnet). It was a long time since I last used cp, mv, mkdir, and vi.

I had one problem. The mt-daapd server did not want to enumerate my mp3 files. You have to make sure the mt-daapd server has access to your collection of mp3’s. Run  chmod o+r -R /share/hdd/data/public/mp3 to fix that. When the mt-daapd server goes over your collection you might see some errors in the log file. Something like Bad mp3 header in xxx.mp3. Not all my mp3’s had this problem, and this issue is solved in newer builds of the server.

All in all, it is a fun thing to play with. For a low price, you have an SMB server, an NFS server, an iTunes server, a web server (also possible), access to your files from the internet and more.

The new BMW 3–series will soon be out. Great car this one. Especially the new 320d with 163 hp.

The sad point is that the price is considerably higher and because of the 163hp, taxes in Belgium (BIV) are also higher. And from the first press releases, I suspect that an electronic airco is an option.

The 318d will be available in the fall and will have a lower price tag and lower taxes. That leaves a bit more room for options.

Take a look at some pictures at Tuningnews.

The Exchange IMF spam filter is easy to implement but what do you do with mails archived at the gateway? Read the article at msexchange.org to find out:

IMF Managers

They have a product called “Google Mini”. An appliance to index and search up to 50 000 documents. I wonder how this compares with the search features of Sharepoint Portal Server? For example, is it possible to index documents on file servers or Exchange? They say they support over 200 document types. That is a lot more than Sharepoint.

I installed VMWare 5 build 12206 after VMWare sent out the e-mail to try this version. I tried earlier builds as well but they did not work well on my machine.

What new features do I like?

Linked clones
The concept is simple enough. Take an existing VMWare image (e.g. Windows 2003 Server Enterprise) and use the Clone this virtual machine option. You are then presented with a wizard that asks you some questions. One of the questions is Linked Clone or Full Clone (see below).

The linked clone option will then put all the files needed in the folder you specify. The disk image will contain the differences from the original image. Of course, this saves a lot disk space, especially if you create all your images from the same base image. It is a bit more difficult to distribute your images because you need to include the base image and the linked clone. The .vmx file of the linked clone possibly contains a link to the base image using an absolute path so that needs to be edited. All things considered, it makes things a lot easier and saving disk space is always a bonus.

Notes:

• This can be done in Virtual PC as well and could be done in earlier versions of VMWare but without the nice wizards.
• Your base image needs to be in VMWare 5 format. Your older images will need to be upgrade. Use the menu VM —> Upgrade Virtual Hardware.
• It is recommended to sysprep the base image to avoid identical SIDs and to have an easy way to specify the computer name.

Teams
Now this is something cool. A lot of times you have images that belong together. For example: a domain controller, a member server, a client, a router, etc… These often need to be started in a specific order . VMWare 5 lets you define a team as a number of virtual machines that start in a specific order and stop in the reverse order. In addition, you can specify the amount of seconds between each startup and the networks that connect these machines.

Click on the thumbnail below to see a screenshot of a team with four virtual machines.

Click on the thumbnails below to see the configuration screens.

As you can see, you can define LAN segments of a specific speed to simulate slow connections with packet loss. I did not test this yet but it is an interesting option.

Once your team is defined, you can start and stop all machines with one click. But more interestingly is the ability to suspend and resume all machines at the same time. By the way, suspend and resume speeds are faster than in previous VMWare versions.

Memory use
This versions uses less memory than before. I don’t know how they did it but my machine still runs smooth enough even with a domain controller, Exchange 2003 back-end, Exchange 2003 front-end, a Windows XP client and a router. And that is on a 1.7Ghz Pentium M notebook with 1 GB RAM. The VM’s run on an external Maxtor 250GB hard disk.

If you work with virtual machines a lot, I can recommend to try VMWare 5.

A tool to mount floppy images in Windows. Interesting to access VMWare flp images.

Virtual Floppy Drive

At last a utility that hides folders you don’t have access to. Just install on the file server and done.

Cloak

A new version of the SDK for both SPS and WSS has been released. Download from the links below.

Download details: SharePoint Products and Technologies 2003 SDK

Windows Sharepoint Services SDK

They came to pick me up around 8.30 AM. That is early, considering that I almost did not sleep.  At the customer, I started with the installation of Exchange 2003. I tried to logon to the member server and I got an error immediately. The server’s clock was more than 5 minutes out of sync with the domain controller. The time was correct but the day was not. After that delay of about 10 seconds, the installation started.

Of course, an installation of Exchange 2003 is simple so I am not going to bore you with that.

Something more interesting. On the way to Romania, I read an interesting article about Macromedia Captivate. It allows you to create training and demo videos in the Flash format. The result: very small and easily published demo’s. Try to do that with Camtasia or other similar software and you will immediately see the difference.

Now I should try to find some time to play with a demo version…

I am in Romania for business reasons. A customer is connecting a division to their existing network infrastructure. It involves Active Directory, Exchange 2003, ISA 2004, Trend Micro Interscan and a load of other stuff such as configuring anti-virus, backup and the clients.

I flew with Tarom, the Romanian airline company. The flight was fine but they could do something about the interior of the plane. Not quite up to standards. After a flight of three hours, I was picked up by a guy from a limo company who drove me to the hotel in a Mercedes E220 CDI. The whole way from the airport, the guy talked about cars that he had driven and seen. And that while he was driving at a really really low speed. The price of a speeding ticket can be very high in Romania, especially when you compare it to the average wage. So I guess he was right to go slow.

Of course, I took a bunch of electronic devices with me. A while ago, I bought an Apple Airport Express and I thought it was a good time to test this in the hotel. By the way, I am in the Howard Johnson hotel which is very new and quite nice. A fast internet connection is available in the room and they provide a small network cable to connect your laptop to their network. The connection is fast. According to www.bandwidthplace.com the speed is around 1.2 Mbps. Nice!!!

The moment I got in the room, I plugged in the Airport Express and turned on my laptop.  Of course, at home, the Airport Express just acts as a client in my existing wireless lan so I had to reset it. Resetting an Airport Express is always a trial and error experience as I do not exactly know when it is resetting. It should be after pressing the reset button for 5 seconds, but I always have to try that multiple times.

Anyway, after resetting the device, I could see a new wireless network on my laptop. I connected to it and launched the Airport Admin Utility.

I selected the base station (it had another name of course) and used the Configure… button to configure the Airport Express. Of course, that is very simple. Just enable the WAN port, set some wireless lan parameters such as encryption and MAC address filtering and it is done. After the device restarted, my laptop saw the new network. I can now wirelessly go on the internet from anywhere in the room. By the way, the rooms are nice but simple. Here are some pictures of the Airport Express and the room (sorry for the quality, they are taken with an I-mate SP3i SmartPhone).

The room is not that big so I could have used a longer network cable but what’s the fun in that?

I can recommend this Airport Express gadget to anyone who would like to have a wireless lan anywhere. It is portable and easy to configure. One tip: do not use the wizard to configure it because that is a pain. The Airport Admin Utility is much better but requires a bit more knowledge.

An interesting read. I did not know that the extended rule only got created in certain circumstances.

http://blogs.msdn.com/evand/archive/2005/01/31/363935.aspx