Andy Kemp

Zimbra Desktop is an email client that has been released by Yahoo, it will run on Windows, Mac or Linux. It is apparently the next generation email application that makes email easy again.

It offers connection to the mail free email providers:

• Google Mail
• Yahoo (obviously)
• Zimbra
• AOL
• Microsoft Exchange IMAP Account
• Other POP/IMAP Account

It also offers a contacts list much like all the other email clients/applications but it also has a calendar feature too, where as applications like Thunderbird do not.

The calendar function has a feature to sync with a server so I tried syncing with my ICS feed on my google calendar but I have not yet got that to work.

The contacts are locally linked to the PC, so I do not know if there is a way to sync them up yet with the server. but from my first glimpse of Zimbra I have to say that it is pretty good. I look forward to playing round with it some more.

Zimbra can be downloaded from here: http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html.

 I recently downloaded a copy of GIMP from www.opensourcewindows.org as I was just curious into what software is out there, and looking to see if I could run with a laptop/computer with complete open source software on it. In short I think that I could, if it is just for day to day stuff like email, word, Internet I think that I could quite comfortably use Open Source products.

For my testing/looking into Open Source I used a Windows XP laptop with only the bare minimum MS products installed. I mean don't get me wrong I would be out of a job if it wasn't for Microsoft! I am at a complete loss when it comes to Unix and Linux systems but I am slowly learning! 

I had the trial of Flash installed on my PC and I found it really useful for doing things like editing pictures for my blog and adjusting the light etc on photo's, but it is a bit too expensive for me to buy just do do that to be honest! so I thought I would try GIMP. I had used it before when I was playing around with Linux in the past but never really spend the time getting to know how to sue it. I have since then downloaded a copy for Windows and I am starting to quite like it.

You can download GIMP from www.gimp.org.

I recently purchased a set of Bluetooth Headphones the Motorola S9. I got these primarily for my Mobile phone which supports Bluetooth Stereo. The headphones double up as a hands free and a set of headphones.

The bonus when I got them was that they came with an adapter to plug into my iPod touch and lets you listen to music from your iPod through them too.

My next thought was will they work with the Bluetooth on my laptop (Dell Latitude D630). I tried to do a simple pair up of the Device but Windows could not find it

I did a bit of digging around the Internet and found a couple of posts, but this one helped me the most: http://forums.techarena.in/vista-help/788012.htm 

It turned out that it was something to do with the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack and the way it interacted with the Device as it did not support A2DP Connections. The post I was lookng at mentioned that Toshiba Bluetooth Stack worked with A2DP however the Toshiba software is linked to the laptop and if it is running on a non Toshiba laptop it will only work for 30 days.

The other option that the post mentioned was Bluesoleil http://www.bluesoleil.com/products. This software works differently to how the general MS Stack works apparently and also enables the A2DP. So after playing around with installing and uninstalling different software for Bluetooth I installed the Bluesoleil software, rebooted and it worked! It detected the device and recognised it as an advanced Bluetooth Audio device and also as a Bluetooth Hands free device.

I then wondered if uninstalling the Dell Software that came with the laptop would cause any problems.....  Opps! it did! I then tried re-installing it and it didn't want to see any Bluetooth Device! so I uninstalled Bluesoleil and then rebooted and went through the process of installing the Dell Bluetooth software, rebooted and then I was going to re-install the Bluesoleil software, but before I did that I thought I would do a quick scan for devices and the Motorola S9 Headphones were listed! so I paired up with them and hey presto they were then shown as an Advanced Audio device.

So to listen to music through them I just had to change the default output device from the Sound card to the Headphones.

So not only can I listen to music from my Phone and iPod on them I can also listen to music from my Laptop too. This saved me another £15 as you can purchase a USB Bluetooth dongle that will enable Audio (ok a lot simpler but you would be out of pocket by £15 and have an extra Bluetooth device which will stick out of your laptop).

One thing to mention the Bluesoleil software works as an Eval but it costs €20 for the full software but I would rather pay that than buy a separate USB device to plug in my laptop.

For the last couple of days I have been looking at the options that Windows Server 2008 Enterprise offers in terms of Clustering. I have never really looked at clustering before (apart from playing around with Hyper-V and clustering last week).

As we do not use any live Virtual systems here in the office I thought that testing and playing around with that would not be good business development so I looked at the option for File Share clustering and also printer clustering.

Up until now Clustering had been rocket science, you needed the same hardware and some would even say you needed sequential serial numbers on your kit, same BIOS revisions and even then it would still take a lot to get the cluster up and running. For my testing I had a Dell PowerEdge SC440 and a Dell Optiplex as the clustered servers and a Dell Precision Workstation running Windows Storage Server 2003 r2 (WSS 2003 r2).

Currently we have the following setup:

We have a single file server providing shares for all our data that is stored on the SAN. The problem we face is if the server fails then we will find ourselves With data in the excess of 1TB that we cannot access.

The server we have has full redundancy in it, redundant disks for the OS, redundant power supply redundant fans etc, but if we have an OS crash then the data that is connected to the server will be unavailable.

This whole thing raises concerns as the data that is on this box is critical to the functioning of the business and without it we would not be able to work. So I thought that I would look to see how I can setup a Failover Cluster in an iSCSI environment to test what would happen if a server did crash..So my testing setup is:

As this is a test environment the iSCSI is running on the same network card that gives the servers access to the LAN. Ideally you would have a dedicated network card for your iSCSI setup so that you can reduce the network traffic on your actual LAN.

For the test setup I created a 2 VHD's on the WSS 2003r2 box 1 x 100GB and 1 5GB then added them both into the same target group and then added the two initiators (server1 and server2) to the target group.

I then connected to the disks from Server2 using the iSCSI initiator. Once connected I formatted the disks and assigned the drive letters. Once that was done I ran the iSCSI Initiator on the server3 and connected to the disks.

I then followed this guide on: Configuring a Two-Node File Server Failover Cluster

Once done I could then access my failover Cluster from any PC or server on the LAN.

I then created a share on the Cluster and copied some data to it. Opened up a Word Document in that was stored in the cluster and then started working on it. I then simulated a failure by pulling out the power cable (some of you may have actually experienced this when BT have been on site).

Once I had pulled the cable out of the server that was currently the live node I noticed that the file view I had had frozen, however the word doc was still open and I was still able to edit it. after a few seconds I hit the close button on the doc and it prompted me to save changes so I hit yes, and it saved.

So in light of this I thought if it works for iSCSI it should work for a SAN. Although I have not configured it on the SAN yet I would imagine that it would be in the same way I would just zone in 2 servers to a zone rather than just one. like you do with the iSCSI. so I would imagine it would look something like this:

The current Zone I have setup for the File Server on the SAN is:

Switch1:
FileServer HBA_Port1
SP_A1
SP_B1
Switch2:
FileServer HBA_Port2
SP_A2
SP_B2

However I guess for the Cluster Setup I would need the second server listed in the zone too.

OK so I had my mini domain up and running: superheroes.com

1. Domain Controller superman.superheroes.com Windows Server 2008 Ent x64
2. Hyper V Primary batman.spuerheroes.com Windows Server 2008 Ent x64
3. Hyper V Secondary phantom.superheroes.com Windows server 2008 Ent x64
4. Storage Server spiderman.superheroes.com Windows Storage Server 2003 r2

As I was going to be doing Clustering on the two servers running Hyper V I installed the following roles and features:

• Roles:
• Hyper-V
• Features
• Failover Clustering

The reason for installing Windows Server 2008 Ent was for the clustering option as it is a free option in the Enterprise version.

The release of Hyper-V I had with the OS was a pre release so I had to download the latest update.

Once installed and restarted I was ready to get the Cluster up and running.

In order to get the cluster up and running I had to create a Target drive on my Storage Server and then using the iSCSI initiator on the two Hyper-V server I then connected to it.

Once that was done I created a Simple virtual machine on the Hyper-V Primary box just a bog standard 2008 server with a 20GB HDD. I placed all the files for the VM in the newly connected disk.

I then set up the clustering, I could not believe how simple it was in Server 2008 I had never set acluster up before and with in moments of configuring it I had an up and running cluster.

I'll be posing a How To: on Clustering and iSCSI with Windows Storage Server 2008 shortly.

I was at a Microsoft TechNet Road show yesterday where tehy were going over the Hyper V and some other features in Windows Server 2008, up until now I have not really done much with Server 2008 apart from trying a test migration from Server 2003 to 2008 and playing around with IIS 7.

I have to say I was really impressed with what MS has to offer with Hyper V. I was and still am a fan of VMWare's ESX server, However after seeing Steve Lamb and James O'Neill getting Hyper V installed on an iSCSI cluster in 32 minutes I have to say I was impressed.

OK so the demo setup was on three laptops all running Windows Server 2008, and one box running Storage Server 2003 providing the shared storage for iSCSI. but they got the cluster up and running with a pre-built Virtual image within 32 Minutes.

So since seeing it in action I decided to have a go myself. I have got a mixture of 4 PC's:

1. Dell Latitude D630
2. Dell Precision 370
3. Dell Optiplex GX 620 Midi Tower
4. Dell Optiples GX 620 USFF

The Latitude and GX620 USFF both support Virtulisation for their processors so they made Ideal candidates for the Hyper V servers.

The GX 620 Midi Tower PC I used as a Domain Controller for my test domain called SuperHeros.com and the Precision I used with Storage Server 2003 R2.

A trial copy of Windows Server 2008 can be downloaded from here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/cc137123.aspx

For a trial copy of Windows Storage Server 2003 go to: http://microsoft.download-ss.com/

So firstly I need to install the physical Servers. Each server only has one NIC but this is on its own Gigabit LAN and only running 4 Servers.

I created a domain called superheros.com and then each server was named after a superhero.

I have now got all servers installed and joined to the domain. The next step is to seup Hyper V and the clustering. I will do this next week.