Posts by timhowarduk

Ah, unintended consequences

This reminds my of my first encounter with that Exchange 2000 directory service sync tool, to bridge the gap from the days when Exchange was independent and AD didn't exist.

I remember my first migration/upgrade from 5.5 to 2000, I was a stand-in last minute consultant when my colleague was ill (or bottled it) and I was supposed to know what I was doing, the only problem been that I'd never done a 5.5 to 2000 upgrade before. I was desperately reading notes on the train, and trying to memorise the sequence. This wasn't a nice small client either, there were at least 200 people working locally, and they had 4 other sites, all with ISDN connections, remote BDC's and remote exchange servers.

Anyway, I went for it, and everything was going SO well. People were able to connect to their mailbox on the new Exchange 2000 server. Fine.

To achieve this you has to use a sync tool to hook up two products that had previously never communicated, Exchange 5.5 directory Service and this new shiny Active Directory.

In the sync tool were several options. The one most people wanted was 'create AD object for any directory service objects not in AD'. I'd guessed correct and been running that one for hours. Everything was going great. There was also a checkbox labelled "delete Exchange directory objects where there is no matching object in AD'. Having run it for several hours I couldn't see the harm in experimenting with that option, as in my mind AD now had everything that mattered. Little did I know how lethal that option is.

It instantly created two serious problems - firstly the CEO and board chairman only accessed his email using POP3 on his Psion and had no AD account, so he didn't get hooked up. Consequently his mailbox got deleted as there was no trace of it in AD.

Secondly, as I learned very fast, I hadn't yet migrated distribution groups, so running this option removed ALL distribution groups in Exchange 5.5. For all sites.

Luckily the IT department treated it as a huge joke and were able to restore the mailbox, and then phoned up every department head asking what staff they had. Somehow I kept my job.

Reboot anyone?

Reminds me of turning up to a new site, arriving ahead of my boss, and having to spend considerable energy explaining who I was and why I was there to be allowed into the building, and then a good deal more energy to get permission to be led to the server room. We had been called in after the regular sysadmin had reportedly done a complete reinstall of everything, and then promptly gone on holiday for a fortnight, and the staff were saying almost nothing worked, specifically mentioning printing, internet access, Sage Line 50, their database etc. The parting shot was "OK, LOOK at the server room, but don't do anything that will take systems down without talking to us". So I set about analyzing what was there, reflecting that there was apparently little left running in terms of systems to take down even if I wanted to...

The first odd thing was that server 1 was already logged in as Administrator. I had a good look around it, noting it seemed to be file and print, DHCP Server, DC, DNS and Microsft ISA Server. There was a netmask of 255.0.0.0 for the entire network (which was only about 40 workstations), a giant DHCP pool size and signs someone had been in a great hurry. The server didn't have a static IP address, in fact it was all really odd and nothing was configured 'normally'. I'd arrived at the conclusion that someone had basically just followed the install wizard and rapidly set up some shares. There were two other servers there and eventually I wondered what they were doing. The servers were all set up on a Belkin KVM switch. I was familiar with these switches and knew you change which server you are controlling by pressing scroll-lock twice then the server number you wanted.

So I pressed scroll lock twice, and to my horror the server 1 promptly appeared to shut down in front of me. I looked down and the keyboard someone had installed was Swedish (I think) and it had a "Sleep" key in the place where scroll lock normally was.

Within 10 seconds I had the guy running in asking why "everything is offline", and the chance of making a good first impression was lost forever. But after a very long day and a lot of configuration we left with them happy enough. I later learned the sysadmin was the son of one of the directors, and a lot of things suddenly made sense, like how he was still in a job after hosing everything then going on holiday....!

Reboot anyone?

Remember how touching almost anything in the network settings (including IP address) required a server reboot? Tell the kids of today that, and they won't believe you....

I still have rather fond memories of this era though, supporting NT server, Exchange 5.5 (isinteg -patch forever ingrained), Proxy Server etc. when the more glamorous sites had these revolutionary ISDN lines...

These days servers are so dumbed down and 'user friendly' you can't work out which of the sugar coated answers to a wizard lead to the configuration you know you want and live in perpetual fear of unwanted side effects that it will decide you must surely want....

Spot on

I had to do a cultural intelligence survey recently asking me to comment on my bosses cultural intelligence.It was cringe worthy.

Questions included "This person is suitable for an international role" (he already has one, how long do you think I would have one if I disagreed!) and "When addressing people from different cultures this person increases their use of hand gestures" (the mind really does boggle). All from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree.

I also note that without fail there will be a sentence of the form "this will take you about 4 minutes to complete" in the email. Also you will gasp when you click the link and it says "page 1/64"....

This is a beautiful moment for me because last year I worked with a team to turn an international IT policy document that was 80 pages long and no one ever read into a 10 page long principles-based policy document of which 3 pages were the contents. We basically cut out implementation details that were generally already out of date by the time the document made it through the organisations approval process.

As someone commented above, training some people that they are allowed to actually think and identify the best solution for their situation has been interesting. Otherwise I love this new world and it's been a success. People actually read it now.

I think it's the first time I've implemented an ISO standard even before it was written too!!

I just take exception to not being allowed to know what processes are really running on MY phone that I paid for with MY money.

The icing on the cake is to be told that it improves my security if I can't access this information.

I love it, and feel motivated to spend Monday, sorry Tuesday creating something similar. Thank you.

My favourite sales call to date was:

Caller: Can I speak to the CIO please

Me: Sorry, the CIO is deceased

Caller: Wow, sorry to hear that. What is your position?

Me: The CIO

Caller: Gosh, sorry to bother you at this traumatic time. I'll call back. <click>

Glorious Irony

The last thing I was doing yesterday was reworking our risk management plan. Yep, I saved the file on OneDrive for business.

The final item we discussed last night was impact on the organisation if Office365 cloud services were offline for various lengths of time.

This morning, of course I can't open the risk management spreadsheet we were working on from the web portal. Due to unlucky coincidence the sync client also fell over yesterday and I didn't notice, so I don't have the usual offline copy to carry on working either.

The irony of all this is not lost on me!

The real problem

I'm a lorry driver and a cyclist. There are idiots in both these groups of people. Most cyclists are sensible people. Most lorry drivers are sensible people. (You have to pass 3 driving tests to drive an artic, being observed for over 2.5 hours). Monitoring your left mirror when turning left (and right mirror because the tail swings right) is drummed into drivers during training, and those that don't do it don't pass.

The real problem is a combination of the EU driving rules and freight planners planning too many drops in a day. After 4.5 hours you have to stop for 45 minutes. Towards the end of that time period, drivers under pressure will take risks to get to their delivery, or a safe stopping place before the time runs out and an infringement is logged on their smart card. The old (non-EU) domestic rules were much simpler, a maximum number of hours a day, and much safer.

This idea might help, but if it leads to significantly longer routes then drivers won't use them as their first priority will still be the available driving time.

Steve Wozniak - Brian Blessed

Bill Gates - Rowan Atkinson

should be a laugh!

Often the airline staff do not know their own policies. I travelled with [well know airline] from Luton to Inverness with a 9 month old baby. Their documentation on their website said (at the time) that children under 2 didn't need photographic ID. Fine. Had no issues at all at Luton.

Then I try travelling back a few days later and the lovely lady at Inverness tells me the 'rules have changed' and your baby needs a passport. I showed her the printout from the website and pointed out that she can't reasonably expect me to anticipate rule changes between an outgoing and return journey. She remained adamant and I suggested maybe we could find a manager to discuss it. Suddenly she said she would let me off with a warning, and let us go. But oddly enough I was selected for random extra security checks. Guess they have to exact their revenge somehow! When I got home I checked the website and the rules were exactly the same.

Lesson I learned was to always take a printout of the rules with you if you rely on them.

Spot on. Self confessed 6502 goody goody here. Telling todays computer science graduates about the old world where you had to code your own maths routines for handling numbers bigger than 256 and had no multiply instruction usually makes their eyes bulge incredulously....

I think I witnessed the big IT Curriculum change. For a start it wasn't called IT....But my first two years of secondary school (Year 7 and 8 in today's speak) we were taught programming. Real programming using BASIC.

Year 9 came, the national curriculum came in, and suddenly we jumped to the world of word processing, database, graphics programs, in fact the 'structured programming language' requirement of the national curriculum was delivered using LOGO of all languages. PENDOWN FD 10 RT 10 PENUP doesn't teach that many programming concepts!

RTS

Tablets <> smartphones

Order of events:

1) I get HTC Desire and like it.

2) I get macbook to complement windows laptop and like it.

3) I get iPad and like it a LOT.

4) I wonder about iPhone to match and get one. I couldn't live with the smaller screen size and (personal view) inferior keyboad compared to Desire and gave it to my wife, who loved it.

Equally I am not tempted by an Android tablet (yet), and until someone can manage roughly the same battery life as iPad for significantly cheaper I won't be shifting.

To my mind they have different jobs and at the moment (for me) the best tool for each job happens to be in different worlds.