Vermyndax vermyndax

I’m guessing from the amount of hits on the Drobo article from 2009 that people are still having problems with Drobos rebuilding the array in a decent amount of time.

Ever since I got a DS4600 using standard RAID-5 I’ve been quite happy. Rebuild times on a 6TB volume are about 2.5 hours. Note: the volume is only about 1/3rd full, but it’s still way more data than what was on the Drobo in 2009.

For some bizarre reason, the thought at the top of my head last night at bedtime was… “I wonder if sometimes… open source developers deliberately code bugs or withhold fixes for financial gain?”

If you don’t follow what I mean, here’s where I was: often times, large corporations or benefactors will offer a code fix bounty or developmental funding for an open source project they have come to rely upon.  What if an open source developer were to deliberately code a bug into an open source project or withhold a fix so they might extract some financial support with this method?

For those of you who follow my adventures here, but not necessarily my adventures over there, you should be aware that we’ve posted NO CARRIER Episode #11.  This episode is very special to my heart because it’s the first show we did in our new studio (Whitey is still over Skype though).  I think the audio quality is MUCH better.  Of course, we’ll be tweaking as things move on, but the new studio and the new processes we’re using to lay down the audio sound damn fine if I do say so myself.

Are you curious about the hard stats of messages running around your organization?

Try this one in powershell on your hub transport server:

get-messagetrackinglog -start “mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss” -end “mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss” -eventid “send” -resultsize 9999999 | measure-object

This will pull stats for messages that were “sent”.  To pull the number of messages received, change the “eventid” parameter to “receive.”

Last week I had to do some serious debugging on storage copy replication.  We discovered that one of our SCC clusters had decided to quit replicating to the SCR node at the other site.  We’re not sure why (we think it’s because the SCR node was rebooted and replication was not cleanly suspended), but the ramifications of failed replication are interesting.

I’m all about negativity today. Sorry.

Anyway, I’ve had something nagging at me for a while now and I think I’ve just figured it out. Powershell is Microsoft‘s answer to having a dumb command line through the Win95 – Win2003 years and it’s quite powerful, as the name implies. Microsoft likes it so much that they makes most of the Exchange 2007 administration efforts in the Exchange Management Shell, a derivative of Powershell that contains Exchange-specific cmdlets.

One item you’ve probably learned by now if you’re an Exchange admin working on a 2007 deployment is that Microsoft has changed the behavior of the recipient update policy.  Most of you won’t care about this and that’s just fine.  You shouldn’t.  I would dare say that if your Exchange environment is engineered well and planned out the way Microsoft probably expects it to be, you should have almost no issues whatsoever.

Continuing my recent tradition of expressing what are likely to be fairly unpopular opinions with my peers, tonight I’m going to rag on Google‘s “Chrome” project and tell you why this is a Bad Idea ™.  I’ll try to keep this short (update: I failed).  This is considered to be a discussion starter, not a final statement.  I’ll probably elaborate on these discussion points on the next NO CARRIER, so be sure and give me some feedback here.

The delegates and the manager must all use Outlook 2007 when you use delegates in Outlook 2007.

Important post out there for you sysadmins dealing with Exchange and delegation scenarios.

This post is focused on those of you who have decided to deploy Exchange in a resource forest.  You’re in for tears.  While the resource forest is technically a supported deployment method for Exchange, I’m going to point out what can go wrong in your Exchange world that will keep your admins up at night.

Let’s start with the definition of a resource forest, just in case you’re not sure.  The resource forest approach means that you have one Active Directory forest where your user accounts live and another Active Directory forest where your application (Exchange, in this case) lives.  You have user accounts in the resource forest that are disabled and then externally associated with the users in the user forest.  This of course, requires a trust between the two forests, which you likely have anyway, right?  Right.