Soon after playing with a friend's iPhone I was hooked. Then, to obtain my own handset, I was forced to change onto the o2 network because of the exclusivity deal they initially had with Apple to resell the handset in the UK. Since owning an iPhone, I honestly don't think I would ever consider purchasing a non Apple handset in the future! But, like all devices, even the iPhone has it's flaws. I had an issue recently when I tried to change the length of time my iPhone rings before voicemail activates.
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Since I recently changed employers, a new responsibility that I have undertaken is the upkeep/maintenance of a single BlackBerry Enterprise Server installation and the handsets used in conjunction with it. I had never owned a BlackBerry handset but I had looked at both BlackBerry server and handset technology in my previous role as a consideration for mobile workers. Last week, I was given a BlackBerry Curve 8310 handset by a user that reported they were unable to open any attachments - although in this case more specifically a PDF.
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With its recent release, I decided to apply Service Pack 1 to my Exchange 2010 installation. I had read about many of the new features it offered and I was more curious about the Outlook Web App (OWA) improvements than anything else. I set about extracting and running running the SP1 installer, installing any prerequisites that the installer prompted me for before the upgrade. The upgrade lasted around 45 minutes and I was surprised to see that I was not prompted to restart the server post installation (even though I did out of habit!) Shortly afterwards I ran a few checks to make sure everything was OK and I began to notice a few peculiar issues.
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I have a sound understanding of Exchange server 2003 but skipped a whole generation by never really testing/playing with Exchange 2007. However, I recently undertook a server migration where I deployed Exchange 2010 and decommissioned an old Exchange 2003 server. I replaced the server like-for-like and so the Exchange 2010 server was also a single server operating in the domain.
Before hand, I decided to try a deployment on a test server just to see if I had any issues. The server is a single box that is also a Domain Controller. For testing purposes I also installed Exchange 2010 onto the same server. Initial installation and configuration was a breeze and I was soon sending and receiving email internally and externally. Upon investigation of some of the more granular Exchange configuration I soon had an issue when I tried to enable Recipient Filtering, there was simply no option to do so.
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I recently read a post by Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks where he tried to resize the VMDK of a Windows XP VM running on ESX\vSphere. When he used the VI Client to try and resize the VMDK he was actually unable to because it was ghosted out. By coincidence I had experienced the same problem a week before Duncan after building 5 Windows XP VMs for stress testing of a new SharePoint website. As Duncan mentioned, the only other time I had seen this happen was when a snapshot existed for the disk that needed to be resized. Quickly checking the VM's settings I noticed that by default, when you create a Virtual Machine using the 'Microsoft Windows XP Professional..." Guest Operating System container it actually attaches an IDE disk rather than a SCSI disk (Server 2003 and 2008 Guest Operating System containers use a SCSI disk by default.)
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I recently came across a problem when uploading a document through an ASP application to an IIS 7.5 web server. When I attempted to upload the document I received an http 500 internal server error. It turns out the issue was caused by an IIS setting restricting the size of the entity-body of the ASP request.
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When I received my Windows 7 upgrade media for a new HP laptop I wanted to perform a clean install of the OS. During the installation process, I was able to perform a clean install using the Custom (advanced) option when prompted for the 'type of installation' to proceed with.
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Something I have frequently seen implemented incorrectly on Windows Server domains is time synchronization. Many admins think that by creating a GPO with a modified policy setting for 'Configure Windows NTP Client' (and using it to address an NTP source) all Servers and Clients will synchronize their time with that source. This isn't entirely true and there is actually a time hierarchy that should be considered when implementing time synchronization for each domain.
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When I first started using VMware ESX I was testing VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to dump my virtual machines to a staging area before being copied offsite. I noticed that one of the VMs had a VMDK attached that as far as the OS (Windows Server 2003) was concerned with had all of the data deleted on that volume. After initiating a VCB dump (backup) on the VM I noticed that the VMDK that was dumped to my staging area strangely appeared to contain data. The VMDK size was considerably larger than it should have been for a disk that Windows reported as containing zero data.
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I'm personally not a big fan of iTunes but I recently noticed an issue where a couple of users had installed it and it had defaulted to saving their music library to their Home Directory. This usually wouldn't be an issue for most people but I redirect Home Directories to a share on a file server. In order to mitigate against what could have potentially been a requirement for additional disk storage I decided that advising users to change the location of their iTunes library from the default (which unknown to the users was a file server) to a local location on their computer was the best option. Here is a generalized version of the instructions I gave to network users.
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