Andy Kemp

I recently wrote a post about moving my MX records from pointing to Google Mail to point to Hotmail using Windows Live Community. Since then I have switched back as I liked the function of being able to check my email on my iPod Touch.  I did try izzy mail which basically creates an IMAP route to your Hotmail.

Well last week I switched back, I did not close my account I just pointed my MX records elsewhere. Anyway there was about a 6 week gap in my email and I was wondering if there was a way to "Ingest" my Hotmail into Google Mail? In short you can import your email both inbox and sent items into Google Mail.

If you use a regular email account you can import your email from a pst file, however if you use a web based email and it supports IMAP then your almost there too.

I use Outlook 2007 to connect to my email and I connect to a variety of mail types:

• Exchange
• SMTP
• Hotmail
• IMAP

As I was using a Hotmail based email I had installed the Outlook Connector on my PC and that gave me MAPI access to my Hotmail.

I then downloaded the Google Email Uploader and installed it.

When you run the application you are prompted with your Google Mail logon

It is fairly straight forward after that, if you use Windows Vista you maybe prompted to unblock the application for the Windows Firewall. You will then be presented with a list of mail folders, and you can select the folders you want to import into Google Mail.

I have had the beta version of the Mimecast Services for Outlook running for some time now and I have to say it is very useful, I find myself using it quite frequently. As we are not Journaling emails to Mimecast just now I am only using it for external emails, however I am working on a plan to push the final release to the users within the Firm in the coming weeks.

The connector itself is an MSI file so this is easily pushed out through GPO, however the connector requires Visual C++ Redistributable files which are installed by an exe so my answer to this was install both files at computer startup.

The actual Mimecast Services for Outlook I installed as a published software through GPO as mentioned above, the VCRedist_x86.exe I pushed out through a computer startup script as a batch file, the batch file is very straight forward:

if exist C:\Support\Flags\vcredist_x86.log goto installed
vcredist_x86.exe /q:a /c:"msiexec /i vcredist.msi /qb! /l*v C:\support\flags\vcredist_x86.log"
exit
:installed
exit

On our PC's we have a support\flags folder where all flag files/logs are put for software installations, so if we need to keep these scripts in place for any length of time they will check to see if a flag or log file exists and then skip the installation.

And it is that simple to put out the Mimecast Services for Outlook. To be honest I did not check to see if running the setup.exe (that combines the two packages) will work silently or not. But this method works ok for me.

I am just waiting for the global configuration tool so that when I do push this out to the users we have some way of creating their profiles within outlook automatically too.

I was looking for a disk analyser that could give me a comprehensive over view of my disk usage, in terms of file types, folders etc... and I came across Xinorbis. It is a free piece of software available for download from: http://www.freshney.org/xinorbis/. Once installed I ran it on my Data Drive where all my downloads go, files, and general dumping ground. and I have to say I was impressed with the report I got.

If you are looking for something just to do a scan of your HDD Usage then I would recommend this piece of software, as the graphs and reports you get are very comprehensive.

Whilst on a few training courses I noticed that when the trainer was using Power Point he had one window on his screen and the presentation on the projector (or secondary display). I had wanted to know how to do it but to be honest never really got off my backside to look into it until the other day. The reason I looked into this was because my laptop has a wide screen display and obviously the projector only supports 1024x768. Out of sheer laziness and not looking into the settings I would more than often set my laptop resolution to 1024x768 and make do with it all looking a bit stretched across the screen or I could press Shift and F7 and have the two black borders down the sides. But the other day I was just playing around with Power Point and a Dell Projector and thought that it must be simple to do what I wanted to do. So I went and hand a look in the Slide Show option on the Power Point ribbon. The most obvious button for me to press then was "Set Up Slide Show" so I click on it and it gives you the following window:

In there is an option for Multiple Monitors, so I dropped the menu down for "Display Slide Show on:" and then selected the 2nd Monitor (on my laptop it was the projector, on my PC it is Monitor 2). I then also ticked the box for Show Presenter View.

I then loaded up a Power Point Presentation I had been sent to test to see what Power Point will now do. this is what I then was presented with:

As you can see Monitor 1 has the Presenter View and Monitor 2 has the Presentation. And it is as easy as that.

The Presenter View is very handy as it will display any notes that you may have on the slide, Elapsed Time, current time and a few slides on the bottom of the screen so you can then see what is coming up.

I almost kicked myself when I realised how easy it was to setup like that!

If you're like me then you will use the keyboard for a lot of things that every day users use the mouse for. Also for going back a field, rather than cycling through the entire form/window using the Tab butting you will use Shift and Tab Key. However for some strange reason it stopped working on all my vista machines. Initially I thought it was a profile issue, so I deleted the locally stored profile, renamed the network profile logged on and let it re-create, but no that did not fix it.

I then installed a new PC with Vista and the Shift and Tab worked, I then installed Office 2007, it still worked, then ran Windows Update, still worked. Installed a load of stuff and it still worked. I scratched my head a bit more and wondered what could be causing it. I then installed Windows Live...

... Live Writer fine, Live Messenger, fine. Live Toolbar, and I had the problem!

So I then uninstalled Windows Live Toolbar off the PC's affected and shift and tab worked straight away.

Today I received my bill from Virgin Media, I had signed up to the paperless billing, do my bit to help with the environment (so they got that wrong too)! Anyway I received my bill and thought it felt a bit fat, a few too many pages... My first thoughts was who has my wife been talking to on the phone? Anyway as I looked through I noticed that I also had some one else's  bill too as well as mine. I have some times not received my bill and I am now wondering if that is what has happened?

Anyway Virgin Media have opened up a complaint for me and said that some one will get back to me in the next 5 - 7 days, but what can they do?

It does make me ask how many people have they done this to before? and how secure are our details with them?

Well watch this space and I will update you with what Virgin say.

I have still not fixed the issues that we are having on our servers, but I have a temporary fix in place which gives the users un-interrupted usage during the business day.

At the moment I am having to re-start the servers at 0630 and 1930 EVERY day that's including Saturday and Sunday. Up until now I had not set a scheduled task to re-boot the servers as one of the servers needs to then be logged on and applications run.

There is also another PC that is logged on and runs something that is called a grs queue. The way the applications work is server1 is the SQL server, Server2 is the application server for the Database it provides a userapps$ share that hold the exe's and the dll's that are required for all the web apps to run. It also provides the Web Menu for the system. Server2 needs to be logged on as an event monitoring user which runs outlook, the event server and event scheduler. And then there is PC1. PC1 is then logged on as a queue user which monitors the print queue on the application.

Server1 and Server2 are the two servers that are having the issues where every 14 hrs it looses its ability to talk to other servers on the network. (this issue is really bugging me now as every fix I have come across has not worked at all).

The problem is when I reboot Server1 the applications that are running on Server2 and PC1 start complaining as there is no SQL connection. Once I have re-booted Server2, logged on and start the applications the server work as normal. However PC1 is still throwing up errors about loosing connectivity to the SQL DB but everything else on the server is running ok.

So here is my answer:

Firstly I set Server2 to use the auto logon feature on Windows. see the following MS article to do that:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/234562

once I had enabled the auto login I then created a script on one of my Windows 2003 Server's to remotely restart Server1 then wait 2 minutes and then restart Server2 every morning at 0630 and 1930 the way I did that was like this:

shutdown /r /m \\Server1 /t 10
ping localhost -n 120 > nul
shutdown /r /m \\Server2 /t 10

The reason I have put the ping in there is that it will send itself 120 ping requests (which work out to be 120 seconds or 2 min).

The reason I wanted it to wait was the SQL server (Server1) needs to be up before Server2 is up.

Once the 2 servers re up Server2 logs on automatically and then in the start I I than put a batch file that starts outlook, waits a few seconds and then starts the event server, waits a few more seconds and then starts the Event Scheduler.

For PC1 I created a batch that used PSKILL.EXE from PC Tools. This kills the proces grsproc.exe and then waits 8 minutes (again enough time for the SQL server to come back up on line and then starts the process again. This again was set to run at 0630 and 1930 every day.

So this should then save me having to wake up early, restart the servers and and make sure I am home for the evening re-start. Hopefully tomorrow will bring in some positive news!!!

Obviously this has not fixed the issue which is still really annoy as there is no real reason for the servers having network connectivity issues every 14 hrs.

The problems that I was experiencing that I listed in my previous post are still occurring after trying so many options, I still could not get the servers running properly, it is a really strange one as there is nothing to indicate what is causing it apart from the events appearing in the Event Logs.

So after running a Windows update on the servers last night and the problem showing itself 13 hrs after the servers had been re-booted we decided to go with the option of moving SQL from one server to an other. But it is not a straight forward move as the new server is windows 2003 server. The other server that is having the same problem only has a share on it that users run files from and also provides the Web Menus that we use to access the Databases, again this is a Windows Server 2000 box and is being moved to a Windows 2003 Server box.

We have in the excess of 11 or 12 10.6GB databases on the SQL Server and of course the migration needs to be done out of hours, which means 30 min to back up each DB so potentially 6 hrs to back up all databases, switch the old server off, rename the new server to the name of the old server then install SQL and service pack as SQL will  complain and not run properly if you install and then rename the server, but alas! I had only really experienced this in the days of SQL Server 7.0 (if any of you can remember what that is), SQL 2000 picks up the new server name when you rename your server, Excellent! so this means I can restore the Databases as soon as they have finished being backed up (ie one DB finished being backed up can be restored to the new server whilst the next DB in the list on the old server is being backed up), thus saving several hours! and then once all the DB's are on the new server switch the old server off delete the computer account from Active Directory and then rename the new server to that of old server.

Although it picks up the new name there are two stored procedures that you will need to run from with in a Query Analyzer:

EXEC sp_dropserver 'Your_OLD_Computer_Name'

GO

and:

EXEC sp_addserver 'Your_NEW_Computer_Name', 'local'

GO

Once you have run those re-start your SQL Services, connect using Query Analyzer again and run the following command (it should display the new SQL Server name)

SELECT @@SERVERNAME

GO

That's it your server is now the same same as your original SQL Server.

I have recently come across an issue that is happening on 2 of my Windows 2000 servers in the office where for some reason they loose all authentication to the domain. I get the following events appearing in the Event Log:

In the Application I get:

Type: Error
Source: Userenv
Event ID: 1000
User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Description: Windows cannot determine the user or computer name. Return value (1722).

In the System Log I get:

Type: Warning
Source: MrxSmb
Event ID: 3034
User: N/A
Description: The redirector was unable to initialize security context or query context attributes.

and:

Type: Warning
Source: w32time
Event ID: 11
User: N/A
Description: The NTP server \\tmsrv-dc1.law-desk.com didn't respond

I am still looking in to these errors and warnings, as at present we have to restart the servers in the morning to get them operational, but then 24 hrs or so from when the first error and warnings were logged they start happening again. So it narrows it down to something running on those 2 servers.

All the Events point to a DNS issue so I have looked at DNS but it looks ok, just on a glance with a quick look at one of my DC's the next thing to do is run a dcdiag and netdiag I guess to see if DNS and the domain is functioning with no problems.

In the mean time watch this space.

I hope to have an answer soon.

I have tried several things already including removing the servers from the Domain, deleting the computer accounts in AD and then re-joining the domain. but that did not work.