Will the madness stop?

I haven't blogged for a while, mostly because it's just been utter chaos here : all the fun associated with the start of a new academic year and some fairly major moves and changes. I'm still having fun with my accounting application via citrix, and I'm now just about ready to give up on it and install a VPN solution instead for the affected users, rather than carrying on with NFuse. This of course, means more digging around the uncharted depths of our ancient PIX firewall, where hundreds of obsolete, uncommented entries do their level best to confuse me into tears every time I look at it.

I've started looking seriously now at the problems, threats and opportunities that implementing Exchange 2007 is going to pose, and I'm quietly confident. It looks like there's some good bolt-on functionality with Outlook Anywhere and Sharepoint, and that could - I repeat could - let me get the goal of some kind of Portal off the ground without as much pain as I was thinking it might be.

Our mail scanning server then, has chosen something of an inopportune time to start pissing me off. We're running a standalone server in the DMZ which runs IMSS 7, and today it's decided it doesn't want to do anything much unless I restart the IMSS SMTP service every five minutes and bugger around with hold queues. I'll bounce it again tonight, and hope the fairies fix it, because I haven't got a clue.

Fun with Exchange mailboxes, part 2...

I'm in the middle of upgrading our organization to Exchange 2007 from 2003, and I'm currently "enjoying" the effects that adding a 2007 server to our Exchange organization's having. Not only does it screw our existing global address list, but helpfully, it's also "updated" it so that I can no longer administer it from the Exchange 2003 box. Marvellous.

I've also discovered that I've got a few shared mailboxes out there that have dissappeared, altogether, from any address list. So now, I can't even get my users to see them - which is lovely for our internal marketing, as we're rolling out a new desktop image. It's an issue I can really do without. Tonight I'm going to rebuild the Recipient Update Services on the 2003 box and hope like hell something shows up tomorrow.

On the image rollout, we've been ordered to put Office 2007 on the new image, which as you probably know, is more different to previous versions of Office than any release ever. One would expect some staff training - for our users - to be in order, then. But no. The person who's supposed to be doing THAT, had Office 2007 installed nearly a year before everyone else for precisely that reason, and who was one of the main drivers for putting Office on seems to have rinsed their hands of it. No guessing which department everyone's looking at to blame. IT and short memories seem to be natural bedfellows around here.

Fun with Outlook Address books; Cisco looking for a fight.

I'm having fun with Outlook Address Books this morning. A couple of weeks ago I built and introduced an Exchange 2007 server, looking towards migrating our accounts over from Exchange 2003. I created connectors between the two servers, and they're seeing each other fine. I pulled over a test mailbox, which seemed to go smoothly although I haven't been able to fully check that out yet because I need to update the ACL's on our PIX firewalls to include the new server.

So far, so good, until it was pointed out to me that somehow, mysteriously, the behaviour of my users address books in Outlook has changed. One set of users defaulted to one address list, another to another - both stored below the Global Address list. Now, those lists aren't visible from outlook, even though they both still work as email distribution lists. Confused yet? I am.

So I've populated two address lists above the GAL and they work fine, only problem being I haven't yet sussed if I can push our users to these via Group Policy, which would be ideal. So for now, the helpdesk are going to have to sort it - if someone complains, which as yet, they haven't. I know they will though, and probably before I fix it.

On another note, it looks as though Cisco are wading into the Blade-Server market. Coming hot on the heels of news that they're planning on wading into the virtualization market too, and in the face of HP's switch/routing challenge in the shape of Procurve, it's beginning to look more than a little like the day when KFC peddled their first burger and Ronald McDonald deep-fried his first chicken bollock. Hopefully, like that happy day, this ends up as good news for the customer, but with no sickly aftertaste, clogged arteries, or lingering sense of guilt attached.