Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

A long title overall but that pretty much sums up my favorite new feature of Exchange 2007. It will most likely change again as time goes on but I've always fought with RUS in the past and now that changes will no longer be asyncronous, I am very happy.

Runner up is the '-whatIf' functionality in PowerShell.

Bob Baranauskas tipped me off to some updated Intel wireless links - many thanks to him!
I'm passing them along here.

http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/cs-010623.htm

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3947

If anything, I think this shows that the Live Communications Server team and the Exchange team were talking before they merged into the Unified Communications team.

This feature reminds me of the 'publishing' you do with LCS so that you don't have to individually configure each workstation to find the right server for your environment. It also replaces/suppliments the Free/Busy system from earlier versions of Exchange.

It isn't going to work out of the box so it will require some setup, but overall, it is a lot better than the previous methods you had to use with the custom installation wizard/etc. Publish the right information on your intranet site, and your Outlook 2007 clients will automagically configure themselves when given a little bit of information about the user account.

Excellent.

http://www.exchangeninjas.com/AvailabilityServiceFAQ

This might be a fluke but overall, the 'ping times' and amount of overall connections made and broken over the link seems to be much less compared to Outlook 2003. This is with Exchange 2003 SP2 as the server, so whatever changes have happened, seem to be backwards compatible. I suspect they are taking advantage of keep-alive connections more than before but without doing a full network trace, I can't be sure.

This is just an armchair observation over a mobile phone data connection back to the server. Not entirely scientific. It does look like there are a few more fields that show up when you do 'Outlook /rpcdiag' also.

It is a hotfix you have to request but if you need the functionality, it is available.

More information here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920185

I was curious what exactly spurred on this feature being added in between service packs/server releases when I bumped into a "Rapid increase in database size" KB article, that specifically mentions some misbehaving "3rd party search engines" integrated into Outlook - KB 919207 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919207

KB 919207 mentions KB 920185 as a possible fix for the problem. I'm curious what search engine/program is making the transaction logs increase in size that much.

I was right! I suspected that due to the strange crashes and stale connections on some Linksys BEFVP41's were due to some new exploit and it looks like this might be related to it.

http://securitytracker.com/alerts/2006/Jan/1015490.html

The news of buggy drivers seems to be hitting the web more and I've noticed a lot more traffic in the past few days.

Here are some of the bigger name news places reporting about it now:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3887

http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1633

I've even noticed some hits from Intel's IP space visiting here.

One of the driving forces behind me getting more involved in clustering is the upcoming support for CCR (Cluster Continuous Replication). It also explains why KB 921181 came out around the same time that the public betas of Exchange were released. KB 921181 adds support to Windows 2003 for some of the features needed to use/enhance/enable CCR.

A much more involved video series can be found here:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/08/09/428642.aspx

I was just finishing up another 14 hour day at work when I noticed that there was a huge package jammed into our mailbox at home. Normally I'd be pretty mad because our mail carrier has a habit of stuffing overly large items into the mailbox.

The package was definitely addressed to me but I didn't remember ordering anything, and I didn't know the address listed on the return label. Perplexed, because I haven't ordered anything in a long time, I opened up the white plastic sack.

It was a messenger bag. A white messenger bag.

This confused me even more because I certainly didn't order any type of luggage lately.

It was then I saw the Live Messenger icons on the front of the bag and then it all made sense. The marketing team at Microsoft are pretty clever. They sent messenger bags to beta testers of the Windows Live Messenger program.

It is a great bag, so thanks to whoever sent it out. I know I didn't post a lot of bug reports during the beta cycle but I sure did use and abuse it a lot.

Updated drivers for the Intel Wireless 2200BG, 2915ABG, 3945ABG wireless chipsets.

It is a bit hard to find on Intel's site when I went looking for it but here is the direct link to the page. I don't know/don't think this includes the service that likes to leak memory like crazy so I suggest only using the bare drivers with the default XP support.

http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df-external/Detail_Desc.aspx?&DwnldID=11342

This is excellent news and good news for anyone running Windows XP on an ASUS P4 motherboard that has onboard SoundMax AC97 codecs. Uninstall/disable the XP drivers before you attempt an upgrade or else you will be met with a very unpleasant instant blue screen upon loading of the kernel drivers.

Also, if you attempt an upgrade of XP to Vista and it fails, expect WGA to complain that your copy of XP is not legit, even though it really is. I also had trouble with it thinking that the hardware changed drastically and wanted me to reactivate. After many failed Vista updates, it turned into a WGA nightmare.

I've just started to dig into the website but I like what I see so far. Learning PowerShell/MSH is going to be useful for anyone adopting Exchange 2007.

http://www.exchangeninjas.com/

It looks as though it uses some pretty standard XML-RPC calls but I can't figure it out yet.
You can read more about the Live Writer, which is basically a blogging application, here:

http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

I'd like to give it a whirl but I'm not about to change blogging backends anytime soon.

If you are seeing any of these issues, you might want to consider installing this post-SP1 "rollup" for SQL 2005. It looks like mostly memory leak and deadlock fixes.

More info here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918222

Don't waste the half hour I just did looking for this hotfix.

This hotfix is required for using the Virtual Disk Service with HP's MSA 1500 (KB 912944), but all the links on Microsoft's site are missing. The revision of Storport.sys mentioned in 912944 is 5.2.3790.2630 whereas the revision of Storport.sys mentioned in KB 916048 is 5.2.3790.2723.

912944's revision is from January 2006 and 916048's revision is from June 2006.

So, in other words, if you are going to cluster Windows boxes with SANs, install KB 916048.