Archive for June, 2010

What about the channel partners?

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Microsoft exec Frank X Shaw last week blogged about their favourite numbers here.  Now for an organisation that we are told is so channel focused, it really surprises me that in all the favourite numbers, this MS exec failed to mention how proud he is of the channel partners, the channel partner program or ANY of us that are out here selling his products for him.  In fact he failed to make mention of any of the channel at all.  I can only guess that in the drive towards the cloud, that this MS Exec is not so concerned about the channel partners that actually SOLD all those units that helped MS get to where they are today.  Surely the MS Partner Network is something to be proud of, given MS say they are not interested in a direct sales model. 

I should give thanks though… to the people like Eric Ligman and some of the local MS Australia people who do work in the channel – they are the stars…

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If you are going to the cloud…

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

image You might as well go with someone who knows a bit about it…. Robert Crane is not only knowledgeable in Sharepoint and how to get the most out of it, but he’s also the first to say he’s “Cloud and proud”…   Rob’s been living in the clouds for the last few years (and I mean that in the nicest way.

As part of his knowledge base, Rob is now going live with a BPOS Portal offering of his own.  Everything he knows about BPOS, you will find on his new BPOS portal.  Yes he’s putting a subscription on it, but heck – it’s a small price to pay for one place for all this valuable information.  Check out Robs announcement here

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EBS 2008 is dead… no wait… it’s not…

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

It seems that just days before the official death of EBS 2008 (June 30, 2010), someone within Microsoft has decided that maybe it’s not so dead after all.  I reported back in March, that Microsoft had discontinued EBS 2008, but it seems I may have been wrong… or am I?

This blog post posted on June 25, 2010 shows that someone missed the memo about EBS being dead… Further more the author links to this article June 15, 2010 which talks about how good EBS is and how well suited for the market it is.  Sorry mate – Microsoft killed the product…or have they???  I wish they’d get the story straight.

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Tweetmeme.com Infected with Malware again

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

Today I clicked on an tweet I was following with the URL below.

image

It immediately took me to this site

clip_image001

Obviously (to me anyway) a Fake AV site.  It was supposed to take me to this location http://wordpress.tweetmeme.com/story/1465642530/woopra-wordpress-plugin-145-updated

When I attempted to close the dialog box, it then tried to download this to me.

clip_image001[6]

 

Naturally – I didn’t allow it to run. 

I’ve attempted to reproduce the issue a couple of times but can not.  I therefore suspect there’s something not quite right with their site.  I can only conclude that the Tweetmeme.com site is again infected with some advertising based malware that autoredirected me to this rogue site.  Watch out people there’s bad stuff out there.

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Sydney Business Development and Cloud Services workshop – Registrations NOW OPEN

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

image Robert Crane – leader of the Sydney SMB IT Professionals group has announced this morning that registrations for our next workshop are open.  These workshops have been outstanding successes for all involved and if you are not part of it, I suggest you get moving along to be part of this.  Just because you don’t live in Sydney, does not mean you can’t be part of it.  We’ve webcast these events in the past and it’s open again.

 

Please enroll now for the SMBITPro – Sydney Business Development and Cloud Services workshop, places are limited. Details are:

All information and updates are at http://event.smbitpro.com.au. The front page has an RSS feed for you to subscribe for regular updates.

Date : Friday 20th and Saturday 21st August 2010

Time : 9am – 7pm

Location : North Ryde RSL, Magdala Rd North Ryde 2113

*Dress code applies

Costs (no GST):

Onsite – LIMIT of 35 Attendees per day

Attendee (per day): $96 no GST SMBITPro members, $240 no GST non-members

Attendee (2 days): $166 no GST SMBITPro members, $415 no GST non-members

Inclusions :

Attendee (per day): $46 no GST SMBITPro members, $115 no GST non-members

Attendee (2 days): $90 no GST SMBITPro members, $225 no GST non-members

Inclusions:

Please make payment to (discount codes available from your user group leader. If not contact director@ciaops.com for information on obtaining a discount code)

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Community Highlight – Radek Tkaczyk

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Radek-Headshot Radek is a member who has been involved in the community for some time. His day job is with TLC IT Solutions, an IT reseller in Brisbane, and he also works with VMvault. Radeks knowledge of the VMWare virtualisation infrastructure is extremely solid and many in the community go to him when it comes to this :-)   Certainly I did – SBSfaq.com is actually hosted on VMVault technology and I could not be happier.

 

 

 

 

Who are you?  Radek Tkaczyk. Now that is pronounced Two-Car-Chick! :)

Where are you based?  Brisbane, Australia

What kind of business do you run/work in?  Among the many things I’m doing, I’m working for TLC and VMVault. I also teach IT at the Queensland University of Technology.

What type of clients  do you work with? Mostly SMB’s and resellers, but also larger companies with dedicated IT departments, and some government departments – eg. mining companies, councils and defence.

What’s the best thing you like about working with those clients?  Large companies are not afraid to spend money to purchase quality enterprise grade IT equipment, and have it implemented properly with a proper implementation timeline, and a budget suitable for the project. Small companies try and do projects with shoe-string budgets and use substandard equipment to keep costs unrealistically low.

What’s the worst thing you dislike about working with those clients?  The bureaucracy involved in dealing with a large company with boards that have to make decisions. Government departments are particularly bad, as so many people have to sign off on things, and that can mean a project appears to have stalled while it gets signed off. When dealing with small companies, you are usually dealing with the business owner, and can get decisions and sign offs pretty quickly.

What’s the next big challenge you think your clients face? The cloud movement. It’s taken the industry by storm, just as virtualisation took the industry by storm 2-3 years ago. I think the next couple of years will see a huge shift in the way many IT companies, and general companies use IT services. Microsoft, VMware and all the big IT companies are getting ready for this shift, so it will be sink or swim for some industries I think.

What is your favourite breakfast food?  Pancakes and ice-cream. I LOVE ice cream! When I was doing contract work for a mining company in Papua New Guinea I was nicknamed ice-cream boy, because every second day was ice-cream for desert and I kept going back for seconds and thirds! The food wasn’t the best up there, so I was making the best of a bad situation!

If you had a million dollars how would you spend it? I would be really, really boring and say invest it. Maybe spend a little, pay off my mortgage and invest the majority of it so that I can retire very comfortably.

If you could meet someone living or dead, who would it be and why? I would like to meet the president of the United States. As I think he is the most powerful man in the world, and I would like to have a discussion with him regarding how the US is viewed by the rest of the world (well at least the way I see it)

What was the funniest thing you have ever experienced?  At a going away function that was being held for me (I was resigning from where I was working), A bunch of us guys went down the pup to celebrate/say good-bye and one of the guys present was not really liked by anyone in the group. He was the BIGGEST nerd ever, and had all the stereotypic traits – skinny, pale white skin with coke bottle glasses to suit. He wouldn’t stop talking about his home ADSL2+ connection and how his ISP had a "slider" to adjust the settings, etc etc.  Each of the guys in turn would go do something (like get a beer, go to the bathroom, etc) to try and get away from him :) You had to be there to see the funny side of it, but I was laughing so had that I started to cry! (hmm, yes you had to be there to get it)

What one thing has had the biggest impact on your life on who you are today?   My wife and kids. One’s family is always the biggest impact on anyone – above work, and all else. I’m lucky enough to have a gorgeous, wonderful wife, and two amazing kids – with a third one on the way. I wanted a total of two kids, my wife wants four, so we settled on three :)

What is something that not a lot of people know about you but you wish more people could know? That I have an Australian accent! My name is Polish and because its so unusual people may think that English is not my first language, and that I may have a strong European accent (the spelling of my surname sort of gives it away). I came to Australia when I was 4, so I consider myself a true-blue Aussie!

What kind of car do you drive & why?  A Red Mazda-3 Max Sport. It was the most suitable, well priced, well featured medium vehicle when I bought it. Its great for getting around and general use.  I also have a Toyota Kulger 4WD, for when I need to carry around large servers and SANs, and it’s a great people mover for the family.

What’s the one thing you want people to remember you for after you die?  I’d like to be remembered as a hard working individual who is trying to better the life of myself and my family by working hard and doing what I do well.

IMG_0243

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How can I learn to troubleshoot problems better?

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

One of the things I’ve tried to do here on my blog and in public is to teach others about how to investigate and troubleshoot problems.  It appears to be rubbing off as the SBS Support team at Microsoft are doing the same via their blog now.  They have started a new series of articles around Corner Cases – that is those funky issues that do not appear all the time but can take a while to resolve.  More importantly they are showing HOW they resolved the problem, what tools they used and why.  Here are two of the corner cases they’ve done recently – I’d suggest you follow them so as to learn more.

The Case in the Corner Series- Session Pool Exhaustion

Case in the Corner Series- Spiking CPU

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Congratulations Amy for SBSC Partner of the Year

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

Amy Babinchak – Owner of Harbor Computer Services and ThirdTier.net and fellow MVP has had her company Harbor Computer Services named as the winner of the Global SBSC Partner of the Year by the Microsoft Partner Awards team

This is a huge honour and due in no small part to the dedication of Amy and her team show to their clients and the market place in general. Congratulations Amy!  Well Done.  You can read a little more about their award here

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What group policy objects should I remove when doing a migration to SBS 2008?

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

When doing a migration from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008, there comes a point where you need to remove the old Group Policy Objects from the domain.  This is a one way process so I recommend you do an export of the GPO before you remove it – that way if you (like me) make a mistake and remove the wrong GPO, it’s actually simple to re-import it again without the need to do a Directory Services Restore to the servers/domain.

 

The GPOs to remove are;

 

As well as the GPOs, you need to remove a couple of WMI filters that the GPOs use to filter which systems they will apply to.

 

Once you are done removing these, you have a “native” SBS 2008 domain.

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Exchange 2007 SP3 on SBS 2008

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Word is out that today Exchange 2007 SP3 was released.  It’s “compatible” with SBS 2008, however you really need to read this KB before you install it so that you can ensure you don’t have problems.   Basically if you have ForeFront Security for Exchange installed, you need to disable it for the duration of the service pack – the KB includes instructions on how to do this.  Also if you HAVE NOT RUN the Internet wizards on SBS 2008 then after the service pack, you WILL HAVE PROBLEMS.  Below (from the KB) are the instructions on how to fix it.

Here are the known issues from the KB article above

Known issues that may occur after you install Exchange Server 2007 SP3

After you install Exchange Server 2007 SP3, you may be unable to access the following Web sites:

  • https://sites/owa
  • https://sites/remote

Note This issue occurs only if the Internet Address Management wizard has not already been run on the computer.
To resolve this issue, edit the bindings for the SBS Web Applications site to select the correct certificate. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
  2. Expand server_name.
    Note The server_name placeholder represents the name of the server.
  3. Expand Web Sites.
  4. Right-click SBS Web Applications, and then click Edit Bindings.
  5. Click HTTPs port 443, and then click Edit.
  6. Under SSL certificate, select the Sites certificate.

 

For those of you that recall the issues with Exchange 2007 SP2 on SBS servers, you will recall that we had to wait for an additional SBS patch before installing Exchange 2007 SP2.  I have it on good authority that this is included in Exchange 2007 SP3 and therefore we can reliably install SP3 on top of SBS 2008 provided we’ve already run the various SBS 2008 wizards as mentioned above.

Have I tried it yet – No.  I’ll be leaving it till the weekend when I can plan some downtime, do my backups etc.

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