No more Boy-Toy on Amazing Race 7

I forgot to mention this past week, the Boy-Toys were kicked from the Amazing Race — the were beat by the old people!!  See my post from March 22, 2003 to see about my dislike of the boytoys!

On the phone with Microsoft Support

This weekend marked my long awaited upgrade from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003 at the office. I have been planning situation after situation and while I know it is not possible to cover every situation, I feel as though I have. So this morning finally came around and I got into the office at a cheery 9:00 AM and figured I would get a good jump on things ... After all between upgrading Exchange then upgrading and basically rebuilding our voice mail (Cisco Unity) connections with the email server, I was looking at a good 11–14 hours ahead of myself.

So I got into the office and got started on making sure the backup from the night before went off without a hitch, running the Cisco guidelines for the upgrade and made their backup (recommended a manual backup).  Then I got to step 5 on the Cisco instructions which state to install Exchange 2003 according to Microsoft Guidelines, no problem, right??

Well after spending a few hours of running into the same problem (but by the way, never once receiving an error message and the machine did not hang either), I decided it was time to get Microsoft on the line.  I called Microsoft and after trying a few dozen things, they are still on the phone … oh don’t forget to mention it has been 3 hours & 15 minutes SO FAR and my support guy just told me that it is getting near the end of his shift and basically he is going home, so someone else will be coming in to help me.  Well thanks a lot Aslam Shaikh, but the last 3 hours PLUS could have been spent much better than you stabbing in the dark and then saying, “let’s try it again, oh that didn’t work? well, let’s reboot”.  Finally we did bet the problem fixed, it was only 3 hours and 50 minutes and it was a solution that I suggested trying about 2 hours earlier!!  Let’s rename the Mailroot folder and let SMTP recreate it.

I may be able to write more later… 

$245.00 US per request   ——   ITPro  (800) 936-4900

Apprentice & the Pontiac Solstice

Tonight on The Apprentice, the two teams had to design a brochure for Pontiac for their new sports car which starts at a paltry $19,995!!!  This car is so cool looking that I fell in love at first site, THEN I heard the price and immediately went online to find out more about the car.

I hope you like my new car, I will let you know when I get the thing!!  Till next time, drive safe so we can race when I get my Solstice!!

Bark in the Park 2005

Fundraising for those less fortunate

We have something very important to discuss with you! This year (as in all years past) Casey & Riley will be taking part in Bark in the Park**. The difference this year is that we have the ability to raise funds online as well as through the manual method. Of course the online method is preferable since that gets the money to the people (and dogs) that need it most a little faster. If you can find it in your heart to make a donation to our boys cause, please visit http://www.justgiving.com/pfp/caseynriley and make a donation to this most worthy of causes.
** Bark in the Park raises money for the Chicago Anti-Cruelty Society and is a 3 mile walk that dogs must complete (with their owners trailing behind).

Thanks from all us!!

Exchange Server - Front End-Back End

Working on rolling out a front-end server at the office in Exchange 2003.  The items which have proven invaluable in this project include:

RPC over HTTP Deployment Scenarios
Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server Front-End & Back-End Topology

Once we do this, all of our phones will be able to synch on the fly.

Google Enterprise Solutions : Google Mini

Inquiry into the Google Mini.  While looking into our search engine functionality at the office (on our Intranet), one of the options to consider is the Google Mini.

This basically allows you to turn your entire intranet into a Google searchable (and secure) network.

http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/