January 2010 Entries
The problem
I have a few Windows 7 Home Premium machines at home which I network together. I don’t use HomeGroups yet, and may not in the near future but I do keep some resources on the network that each machine has to access. Windows 7 Home Premium (and lower) does not remember credentials for other Windows machines (if you click the “Remember this password” checkbox in many authentication dialogs, Windows will not remember them and re-use them on next logon) so this becomes a problem when you are using service accounts to access shared media across machines (I...
Today I encountered a weird issue with a new machine I was setting up. The NIC on the machine worked to PXE boot and install Windows XP off the WDS server at work, however once I installed the drivers for the NIC on Windows XP and obtained an IP address from DHCP I couldn’t reach anything.
I couldn’t ping my default gateway, any DNS servers, couldn’t ARP an IP address, nothing. I tried to release and renew the IP address, ran diagnostics (which all passed except the connection diagnostic) and I was getting an IP address on the correct subnet and...
I just recently migrated my data to another machine (to use as a file server) since it has a Sans Digital NAS attached to it. Normally working with files across the network (I now map a shared drive to the share on the server) is perfectly acceptable – however, there are some operations better left on the remote machine, for instance: extracting or compressing [rar/zip] archives. Ideally, I’d prefer to have a solution where I can (in this case) right click on an item on my machine and run a command on the remote machine, and with...
I recently came across an issue where an administrative assistant needed to search her boss’s huge mailbox while it was attached in Online mode to her Outlook profile. Normally, Outlook search will work for certain folders (like Calendar and Contacts) because it caches those folders from attached mailboxes so that they can be indexed; however in this case the amount of items in each of those folders was either too large or something else was going on and search just wasn’t working.
After searching online, I was able to find out about the CacheOthersMail registry value which can be set in...
Google Apps with Exchange ActiveSync
I am an iPhone user, having adopted the device with the iPhone 3G (as soon as Exchange ActiveSync support was added). Needless to say, I depend on the excellent ActiveSync protocol for push email, calendar and contact synchronization. I think I started considering Google Apps a viable solution for my personal email when I learned that Google had licensed this technology from Microsoft.
I have setup my mail account on my iPhone with minimal issues, following Google’s instructions. Everything works the way you would expect, and while I have noticed that some folders sometimes take a few...
Outlook issue: duplicates everywhere Once the Google Sync tool completes the first synchronization of the mailbox you will see a replica of your Google Mail inbox in the mail folders pane in Outlook. Aside from the built-in Outlook folders (of which Inbox, Sent Items, and Deleted Items are mapped to Inbox, Sent Mail, and Trash respectively in the cloud, there is also a new [Archived] folder created in Outlook mapping to All Mail online) you will see each of your Google Mail labels show up as a folder in the Outlook folder list. The Contacts and Calendar will also...
Migration pains The Google Apps Sync tool for Microsoft Outlook creates a new Outlook profile so that you can keep any other accounts separate from your Google Apps account (Exchange promotes this type of profile use as well). This tool is what eventually keeps your mail, contacts and calendar synchronized between Outlook and the cloud. The sync tool also provides the ability to import your existing Microsoft Exchange mailbox to your Google Apps account, I naively accepted Google Apps Sync’s offer to do this and let it get to work. The tool successfully migrated my calendar and contacts...
Why I made the decision Google Apps is Google’s response to Microsoft Exchange environments. Each have their pros and cons, and honestly, in the workplace Google Apps is still playing catch-up to Exchange but I was looking for something I could use for my personal email account. Having access to all your emails, calendars and contacts in the cloud is almost a necessity, especially since we are constantly on the move and are utilizing our mobile devices more than ever before. If you are daring enough you can keep your documents online as well. If you spring out the...
I am sure this has happened to more people than would care to admit it: Your clients’ (or your employer’s) backups are running smooth and you correct any hiccup right away but you are lazy about your own backups. So I start my (somewhat shameful) and hopefully eye opening post. A few days ago I saw a Windows Delay Write Failed notification in my taskbar. I think most of us know it, this notification usually means a write operation failed, and if your [external] hard drive is plugged in, on, and should be working fine, you start to suspect...