A cold front moved into the Dallas area over the past 24 hours. When I left the office yesterday at noon it was 68 degrees outside, and now it's down below freezing and isn't supposed to go back up until Wednesday. The National Weather Service says we could get up to an inch or more of ice accumulation, which is very unusual for this area. Having just come down here from the northeast last year, the cold doesn't bother me, but it's strange to only get freezing rain and ice instead of snow.

I downloaded Vista from TechNet on Thursday, and just got around to installing it on another partition on my laptop on Saturday. It's running pretty well so far, aside from a strange compatibility warning on login concerning an audio-related utility. It's only weird because I didn't load any special audio drivers or anything. Whatever it's using is what Vista loaded. I tell it to continue and the audio stills works. I went to Realtek's web site and downloaded the latest Vista driver for their HD audio, but it's still listed as being for the RC version of Vista, and although installing it stopped the warning dialog, it also killed the audio output completely, so I had to uninstall it and let Vista reinstall its own version again - which brought back the warning dialog. Oh well, I guess I can't expect much until Vista is released commercially.

Why do developers make changes just for the sake of change? Right-click on the desktop and there's no Properties selection to modify the Display properties. Deleting a file now seems to take three times longer than in XP, with two dialog boxes to acknowledge instead of one, plus you have to wait for the animation during the delete to complete. A lot of the new look of Vista seems to mean that familiar features have gotten moved or renamed or maybe even eliminated completely. Control Panel's Classic View" is a mess, containing some three dozen applets, again, with some renamed, making them harder to locate. "Add Or Remove Programs" is gone, renamed to something else. The new UI features may be nice, but I'm annoyed that I have to waste my time learning how to do the same things I was doing just fine in previous versions. Moving features around and renaming them and then selling it as a "new" operating system isn't progress. It's just greed.

One of our managers has been complaining because every time she sends a meeting request to a regular group of about a dozen people, she receives an immediate non-delivery report from an employee who is no longer with the company (not one of the group she's sending to). No big deal, I thought, as I've run into this dozens of times in the past. All I have to do is open each recipient's mailbox, and check their delegates list for the former employee, remove it, and the problem would be fixed.

No such luck this time. After reconfiguring Outlook a dozen times and opening each mailbox and examining the delegates lists, the offending entry was nowhere to be found. My next step (which probably should have been my first, but hey, I thought I knew what the problem was) was to determine which recipient was to blame for forwarding a message to the non-existent employee. I sent individual meeting requests to each person in the group, one by one, waiting for a bounce. As luck would have it, I didn't get a bounce until the very last meeting request.

According to Microsoft (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909638/), this kind of thing can occur if delegate's mailbox object is deleted from Active Directory before it's removed from the delegate list in Outlook, which is exactly what happened here. Once the object is removed from AD, it can disappear from the delegates list, but the underlying rule that forwards meeting requests remains, which results in non-delivery reports.

The article suggests two possible workarounds. The first is one of those, "well if I had done that, we wouldn't have this problem"-type things - delete the delegate prior to deleting the object from AD. Duh. The other, and more useful solution, is to use the "/cleanrules" switch with Outlook to remove all of the mailbox's rules, including the invisible ones.

That did the trick, and eliminated the bounces. Oh, and if you encounter a similar problem, be sure to note any existing rules before using that switch, as it wipes out all rules in the mailbox, including those added by the user.

Anyone notice that Flickr is out of beta? Don't get excited, though. The logo now states "Gamma". Wonder how long it'll be at that stage? :-)

One of our servers threw a strange problem at me this morning, following a vendor-requested reboot. When the system came back up, I couldn't terminal service (or remote desktop, depending which term you prefer) into it. Repeated attempts were immediately rejected without so much as a logon dialog. And this was working just fine prior to the reboot. I got in through the raritan switch, opened the terminal service manager and almost immediately noticed that the sessions tab contained nothing but the console session. No RDP listening session to be found, and attempts to telnet to port 3389 (from another system) also failed. Near as I could determine, RDP wasn't running, although the Terminal Services service was running and there were no error messages in the event log. I spent the better part of two hours searching Google with various terms and phrases, and although I found quite a few similar claims, no one had a solution other than rebooting again. In one article I found, the writer claims that his one particular server actually exhibits this same bahavior on every other reboot. As luck would have it, the department's manager came to me two hours later asking to reboot again, and afterwards, RDP was working again and all was right with the world. I don't care for that solution. No sir, I don't.

As I mentioned previously, I've only been with the company for a few months. My time at EB carried over with me, so I've actually got more time in than almost anyone else in the department (14 years), but it's still like starting a brand new job. New location, new people. Only the surviving servers are left to remind me of EB, and it's only a matter of time until they're assimilated - either tossed aside or rebuilt into something new. But that's not what I wanted to talk about today. Yesterday, I got a note from the IT manager in Australia. He had a couple users who were having Outlook problems, and he was asking me if the maintenance I ran over the weekend might be what caused it. Sheesh! I forwarded it to my manager, along with the comment, "I guess no good deed goes unpunished." Didn't think any more about it. This morning, my manager sends me a message, "What were you saying about good deeds going unpunished?", along with a copy of a nice note from the manager of the Corporate Help Desk, expressing his thanks and the gratitude of his entire staff for all the hard work I've done since arriving at the company, and for always stopping to help them when they ask for assistance. I was very flattered, as I've always just thought of it as part of my job. I mean, the Help Desk folks keep the users at bay, which allows me to do other things. Helping them is just helping myself in the long run. The Help Desk Manager even came out and personally thanked me, so it wasn't just a cold, impersonal email message. I was really touched. I still feel like an outsider, but something like this goes a long way towards changing that.

There's something else that's new to me - a monthly scheduled maintenance window. We never had one of those at EB, at least not very often. Sure, the 400 was put in restricted mode every Saturday night for backups, but the Windows servers - I just performed maintenance as needed, usually on my own time, usually late at night. Not any more (well, mostly). GS has a regularly scheduled monthly maintenance event that begins at 3 AM, and at that time all available engineers come in and perform whatever maintenance tasks need to be done that might cause an outage. This past Saturday was my first. My primary task was to run eseutil to defrag and compact our Exchange databases, but I also helped verify that all the servers had the latest patches installed by the Altiris agent. There were four of us working on the list, so it went pretty quick, and we were out of there by 7 AM. I went home, had some breakfast, and then took a nap (I only slept about 2 hours before going into work), cut the grass, spent some time in the pool (the temp's in triple digits this week), and chilled out until around 4pm, which is when I had to perform maintenance on the servers overseas. Six hours later I finished up and went to bed. Long day.

It's been a few months now, and I'm settling into the new job. It's kinda strange. The company is roughly the same size as my old one, but things sure work differently here. The old company was grown from scratch, starting with one store and building into the 2000+ store company it was at the end. As such, we went through a lot of growing pains - not enough staff to handle the resources the users wanted and needed. The new company was built from other companies, in large chunks. As such, the IT department grew muchquicker and bigger than EB's ever did. Both companies were roughly the same size at the time of the merger, but GS's IT department is at least three times the size of EB's, and has three times the number of servers, plus a lot more relatively high-end equipment, like SANs and tape libraries, a staff whose only job is to monitor the systems, separate help desks for corporate users, stores, and customers. And, at least from an engineering standpoint, everyone on the staff really knows their stuff. There are no "grunts" like at EB. Everyone may have a specialty, but I believe I could count on any one of them to pitch in if needed.

I got a surprise in my email this afternoon - an FYI message from my GM World Mastercard account, confirming the successful change of the email address on my account. The surprise was that I hadn't made any change, and the new address wasn't mine. I quickly went online and changed it back, verified that no new charges had been made, then called the customer service number and reported the incident. They cancelled the account and they're issuing me a new one, but it really annoys me that someone managed to get into my account and change it without much trouble. The customer service rep said there was no log of the change, but that they only log change requests when they're done by phone, so it must have been changed over the internet.

Does anyone remember those annoying Enzyte "natural male enhancement" commercials with some guy named Bob that was always smiling real wide, that, I think it was the FCC that forced them to stop showing some months back, had this 6 note whistling tune in the background?

If so, have you noticed any similarities between that tune and the one Wendy's is using in their latest commercials? I swear, it's the exact same 6 note tune, and it makes me think of those old Enzyte commercials every time. That's marketing for ya, I guess.

Wow. I didn't realize how long it had been since my last post. A lot has happened since then. Due to a merger, our jobs moved half way across the country, and being the adventurous folks we are, we followed. (It was either that or we'd both have to look for new jobs!) The company has been really great, taking care of all our expenses during the move, and making the process of selling one house and buying another pretty painless. At least we're not alone, as several of our friends from the old office were offered jobs, and moved down here with us. Now that we've gotten settled in, I hope to start posting more often.

I had to chuckle. Yesterday, I read an article concerning fast-food drive-thrus, and how they're experimenting with outsourcing the person who takes your order. Another idea involved replacing the order taker entirely, replacing him/her with a self-service panel, where the customer would be responsible for entering their own order. That's where the chuckling began, and I'm still smiling just thinking about it. When was the last time you were behind someone at a drive-thru ATM machine? The choices at those are very limited, yet it takes people forever to do their business. Now apply that same logic to a drive-thru food joint with literally dizens, if not hundreds. of possible combinations of selections. Multiply that by the guy I always get behind, who is ordering for his wife and three kids... .

This is pretty cool. Microsoft now has an interactive calendar of webcasts, making it much easier to see what's scheduled for today, tomorrow, or next week.

http://www.microsoft.com/events/webcasts/calendar/monthview.aspx

Am I alone in thinking that “Windows IT Pro” magazine is becoming nothing but advertisements any more? I was just thumbing through the January 2006 issue, and I've already encountered two “Essential Guide to...” inserts that almost look like useful articles, but are actually sponsored by vendors. I don't know about you, but that immediately makes me suspect that the content might be slanted to favor the vendor, regardless of who wrote it (one was by Paul Robichaux, one of my favorite Exchange experts). The Letters section had only two One was from a vendor, correcting statements made about their product in a previous issue, while the other was one of those self-serving, “thanks for printing that article” letters. I've only just reached page 27, on which begins yet another “Buyer's Guide” article that looks more like ads for the various vendors. Mark Minasi has an article that I know I'll enjoy and learn from, and there are a couple of DNS troubleshooting articles, so it's not a complete waste of paper, but I'm not sure if I'll renew again.