Platform Team

Greetings from PDC

Tim Robichaux — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:59:01 GMT

I'm out in Los Angeles, supporting some of the demos for PDC and I have to say that tons of cool things are going on. Since I've been busy actually working, I don't have the time to actually summarize all of the things that have been presented on the stage, but I'll be posting several follow-up articles on some of the new things that are coming out. I'll also make sure to include some neat stuff about how demos are set up, run, and torn down, while the attendees are all going crazy over all the new products. Just to keep the pot warm:

Software as a service is big. Azure Platform.
Windows 7 is the R0X0R.
Live Mesh is full of Silverlight goodness.
.Net 4 is neat. I'm not sure I understand WHY, but it is.
Office 14 is going to blow the socks off the people who actually have to use it!

Triage of e-mail and how to get your e-mail read.

Tim Robichaux — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:07:48 GMT

I just was forwarded a great blog post about how one CIO manages the 600 e-mail messages he gets every day. I don't go through nearly as many e-mail in a day, but I think that these rules can apply to almost anyone.

The first rule he pointed out was:

1. E-mail marked with a “high importance” exclamation point must pass the “cry wolf” test. Is the sender a habitual “high importance” e-mailer? Are these e-mails actually important? If not, the sender's emails lose points.

I seem to rarely get messages with raised importance, and almost every time, it is about something that isn't important or time sensitive at all. It seems like most people don't think about what they are doing when it comes to e-mail. Most of the people I work with are very clear in their e-mail construction and I think one of the things I value most is that I've almost never received a "High Importance" e-mail from them. Most of the time, when an e-mail is tagged, it's because someone was sending out a joke or picture and added a "[HUMOR]" tag to the subject line.

It's the little things that will get your e-mail read by other people, so here are a couple of e-mail etiquette rules that I would like to post of my own.

If you are sending me a forward, clean it up. I understand that there are only six degrees of separation, but I don't need to see the entire history of the e-mail thread. Sometimes this means that some significant work would have to be done, and if that's the case, I'd rather you NOT send it to me. If I think a forwarded message is that wonderful, I'll take the time to correct the formatting and remove all the junk. I could go on, but I think we all get the point.
Use at least SOME punctuation. I know that most people think that typing (e-mail, text messages, IM, and blog posts) is a lesser form of communication and by that same logic, not in need of things like capital letters, periods and commas. This is not really the case, however. The more that an e-mail looks like it was typed by a cat walking on a keyboard, the more likely I am to just delete it without reading it.
Know your target audience. I don't want to get too mired in spouting what I believe in, but I just have to say that I don't need any e-mail that an action of mine will cause more angles to do anything. I don't particularly want to have a "blessed" day, and I don't need any kind of inspirational messages. Those people who know me, should know that I am not interested in those things, and should, by expansion, know that I don't want to get e-mail about it.
Make sure you include some context in a reply. I know that I said that I liked to clean up forwards, and I do like to clean up replies as well, but there still needs to be SOME context or continuity. It is very hard to respond to a request for information when you have no idea what the context of that request is in. The whole thread doesn't have to be preserved, but something will help!
Think before you send. Yes, I'll repeat that; think before you send. Just because it is so important, I'll say it another way; don't send an e-mail until you've actually thought about it. Some people think about the e-mail while they are writing it, but I know from looking at my inbox, this is not the norm. It doesn't take much. Just look it over quickly, read it out loud, do SOMETHING to ensure that you aren't sending a raunchy link to the CEO or a ribald joke to your grandmother.

All that ranting and raving aside, e-mail is a communication tool. As a tool, I have the option of using it, or choosing something to use instead. You don't even have to make the e-mail interesting or new, just make it something that shows you've done more than reacted out of reflex. It doesn't take much!

Activity tracking using a gadget

Tim Robichaux — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 22:22:11 GMT

One of the things that we are constantly working on here is better time management. I work on a number of different projects every day and I like having the option to multitask and split up my day between several different interest groups. While it is fun and it keeps me busy, it can be a pain when trying to track time and account for what I did all day long. In the past I've tried keeping Word or Notepad++ open all day, writing in the tasks as well as when I start on them. I've also tried to update my time sheet in real-time, filling the bits in 15 minute increments. Both of these methods failed miserably, not because they are bad ideas, but rather the swift nature of my changes in focus mean that I might only spend 2-4 minutes on any one given task at a time. When installing operating systems or software packages, or working on system maintenance and IT tasks, I normally will have 4-5 RDP sessions open. With all of those open, it's a quick flip to sort through all of them and then find the one that's complete and click "next" or reboot.

Because my focus changes so much, I've started looking at tools that will allow me to keep pretty accurate track of all the things I'm working on. Even when I've found something, I generally lose interest in it, especially if it isn't cross-platform.

Eariler today, I came across a tool that looks like it might be a good fit for me. This is my first day using it (first hour, actully), so it is mostly hope at this point (:

Right now, I've only popped a few items in it, but one of the things I liked about it was that it works both on the Windows Vista Sidebar and iGoogle. This means that even if it doesn't sync across versions, I can still use the same interface from any number of machines. I think I might look and see if I can actually code some improvements into it. I'm not an expert hacker but I would like to see:

Categories or Parents (For example, under "IT Schtuff", I would like to have one item called "Patch Management" where when I punch in, it ticks the IT clock as well)
List synchronization (I don't know how it works yet, but I would like to be able to keep the list synchronized through a website [read: SHAREPOINT] or txt/xml file that I can export across machines)
A little bit of UI clean up (when I first started using it, I thought that the green "IN" button meant that I was in that task and tracking time)

If anyone else out there has any tools that they use to track time like I need, I welcome the feedback!

P.S. In the writing of this blog, I switched to three tasks (blogging, logging in to the Exchange server to change the name on an Equipment Mailbox, and replied to a project e-mail) and punched in for each of them!

Cisco buying Postpath?

Tim Robichaux — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:15:52 GMT

I know that the rumors had been floating around for a while, but now the news is out. Cisco is purchasing the privately held Postpath for $215 million dollars. This is really interesting to me in that I've been working with Postpath for a short while and I'm really wondering about the value that Cisco is going to pull out of this deal. For starters, in this article, it's mentioned that Postpath:

"...provides a browser-independent AJAX Web client."

The reason I have a problem with that line is that the Postpath client is actually Zimbra's client.

I'm sure technical blogs are popping up all over the place talking about the things that Postpath can and can't do, but having installed it a couple of times and poked around inside, it seems like there is going to be a battle over some of the features. For example:

ActiveSync - Postpath reverse-engineered ActiveSync rather than licensing it (say, like Apple), and I'm not sure how Microsoft will react to a large company like Cisco selling reverse-engineered technology.
Exchange compatibility - I know that Postpath advertises that it integrates well with Exchange 2003 (and can exist in that environment), but how does it work with Exchange 2007, where there are significant changes to the architecture.
Price comparison - When I looked at Postpath the cost comparison felt a little bit shady, but I don't want to sink into a full teardown. The main point is that they make some pretty grand claims about the savings that they can provide a company.

I really don't want to turn this into a Postpath bashing blog post, but I really don't see why so many people think that this will allow Cisco to become a major player in the messaging marketplace. If they were purchasing something like Zimbra, then I would give credence to the idea that they were looking to field a product that would really be commercially viable.

Having installed and used at least 5 messaging platforms in the past year, I kind of have to wonder about Cisco's choice. At least it wasn't Lotus...

A new e-mail idea...

Tim Robichaux — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 22:36:46 GMT

Last night a co-worker and I were having a discussion about some of the things that we'd really like our e-mail clients to be able to do. One of the things that I was lamenting was the fact that there is no really easy way to have Microsoft Outlook tag e-mail so that you could build views that were built around tags rather than folders. This got us thinking and I think that I came up with a nifty way to do some e-mail-fu using metadata in a file system for some neat things.

The first idea that I had was that if you just were able to keep each e-mail item as a separate file, you could then use the built-in metadata features of some file systems to tag each item. If you did it this way, you could have a really light-weight e-mail client that would just build a view based on what tags you gave the e-mail. It would also be really simple to have the system (either server-side or client-side) tag e-mail as it came in. Then once it is looked at, it would get tagged as something else.

For example, one of the things that we talked about, was the idea that you could give your client the logic to thread and tag e-mail based on things like:

If it is a reply to someone in particular, it gets tagged for one view
If it is a reply in a thread, it gets tagged for that conversation
If it contains keywords that you have designated as important, a special tag gets added
On and on, in the same vein

The real beauty of this system is that all three cases could be applied to one e-mail that came in and all you would have to do is select a view or type of view to quickly sort through all your incoming and existing e-mail, based on those tags.

Another really cool idea that was brought up (I think he brought it up, but I can't remember at this point), is that you would be able to do some visualization that is not possible in a standard e-mail client. You could create views and viewers that would group your e-mail and messages and all that jazz as a tagged cloud. Then it would be really easy to analyze and comprehend things about your e-mail that it's not always easy to find. I know, personally, that I have a better time understanding complex relationships if I can draw them out or put them into a visual paradigm.

Another area that I think that this would make for some really neat features is in security, backups and speed. Instead of keeping all your data in databases, all of your information is in files. This way, you wouldn't need to have a client that was able to read or access a proprietary data format to access all those messages. Most of the file systems in use today support strong encryption and file-level security, so the integrity of the data is less at risk as well.

I think that this is a fun mental exercise and I would really like to see some changes to the way we look at messages, but I also know that this would require a lot of work and know-how that most people wouldn't want to sink into such a fringe concept. I think that with the changes we've seen in how messaging is approached (as in, the unification of multiple messaging formats and the convergence of information access devices like computers and cell phones), we'll see a lot more expansion into areas that are different in concept than we're used to. I would like to believe that changing the way we look at information was a quick process, but I know that there are many people who think that, "this is the way it's always been done and it's the way it'll always BE done."

This is getting to be a long post, so I'll wrap this up by saying that I really like the way that messaging of all types seems to be converging. I love the way that I can have a central place for all my communications. I like the fact, most of all, that I'm at a place where I can have these kind of discussions and really feel like I've come away with an idea that really fits who I am.

Microsoft ISA 2006

Tim Robichaux — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:01:57 GMT

Recently we picked up a big project in the Platform team. We were all excited about it, and pretty soon we were all working hard at making it a success. One of the things that was a little bit broken was that were trying to come up with a good way to make files available to customers and team members who were not local. Sure, the team members could VPN in, but the customers couldn't. We looked at a couple of solutions like Microsoft Groove and publishing a Sharepoint site, but everything seemed to have a problem or issue that we really didn't like. What we ended up deciding on as a solution was using our existing TeamPlain Web Access for Team System. We had used that solution before to give access to another client to access the bug tracking list for a code project and everyone seemed to be happy with how it turned out.

Projects were created, permissions assigned, and then the fun started.

It seemed that people were able to log into the system and navigate with no problem, but they couldn't download any of the files. I looked into TFS and TeamPlain and I couldn't find anything that would prevent this issue. Looking at the error that was coming up on the client, I thought that it looked a lot like an error tossed out by ISA 2006.

Error Code: 500 Internal Server Error. The request was rejected by the HTTP Security filter. Contact your ISA Server administrator. (12217)

After some googleing, I found that this error is often seen in OWA implementations behind ISA 2006 and there is an option in the HTTP configuration on the publishing rule in ISA that you can set to prevent this error. I whipped open the ISA Server Management tool and started right-clicking. The only problem was that the "Configure HTTP" option that should have been there on that rule was missing. When I opened up the rule, on the "Traffic" tab, I should have been able to click the "Filtering" button and get to the same setting (which the fix is, for the impatient, turning OFF the "Verify normalization" and "Block high bit characters"). This was something of a big problem since without that switch, I wouldn't be able to share these files in the way that we had decided.

Sidenote:
The problem with the file download, at it's root, seems to be that the title of the file has some extra characters in it. What is supposed to be a %20 in the URL gets converted to %2520 and ISA chokes on this and says, "Not YOURS, no file for YOU." As you can guess, this is a pretty big problem when trying to use the system to deliver documents and foster collaboration.

Back to ISA 2006. It didn't work. Now, I had been unhappy with our ISA server for quite a while. It never got patched right, and all sorts of odd things have happened with it. I couldn't troubleshoot it, since it was a production system, so I did the second best thing, I built a new one. I lovingly patched it, and coddled it and configured it the best I was able. The neat thing was that I created a bunch of test rules, and they DID have the options that I needed to configure. The final step was to import the rules from the old ISA server. Oddly, when I imported them, the RULE WAS BROKEN on the NEW server. After much swearing, I wiped ISA from the box and started over. This time, at the suggestion of our Head of IT, I took an exported set of the rules from the old (BAD) server and imported them into the (NEW) server AFTER making a backup of the rules that worked. This time, when I imported the rules from the old server, everything WORKED.

I've been working with Microsoft products for a number of years, and this kind of behavior is quite common. I remember installing Windows 2000 Professional on the same hardware a couple of different times and getting different configurations each time. I wasn't surprised, but I was just glad that it worked. After some more configuration, I thought that I had everything the same as the existing firewall, and after some convincing of the Head of IT, at 6:00PM we switched over to the new system. The only problem that I was able to find was this morning, VPN was broken and one of the sites (http://getsharp.3sharp.com) was unreachable.

Now, I don't have VPN totally ironed out (I just switched us back to PPTP which is FINE when you are using strong passwords, which we are), but it looks like everything is doing well. Just because I am so happy about these, I will now list the things that used to be broken that now work:

Pandora Internet radio.
Performance Monitor on the ISA machine
Updates and patches on the ISA machine
File transfers using the TeamPlain web access

So, next on my list of things to do is building a new Edge server for our OCS deployment. We have been having some issues with this and it's due to us running out of IP addresses. I just got 13 more, and I'm totally pumped about the stuff we'll be able to publish with them!

Just a short shout out

Tim Robichaux — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:05:50 GMT

I don't want to get into the middle of a huge flame war, but I wanted to say that I think Apple did an awesome job with the split-disk install of Leopard that I'm working with right now. I've had to install operating systems a number of times, and installed software all over the place, and one of the things I've noticed is an inconsistency in checking to make sure you have all the disks. I just got done walking through the wizard for installing a fresh copy of Leopard, and the last thing that I was asked was if I had the Mac OS X Install Disc 2 handy, since I would probably need it. The nice thing about this was that it was done just before the format, so it was the last little check, just to make SURE that you were ready to wipe things out.

Once more, not trying to incite a flame war, but I found this MUCH more comforting than when I tried to install Windows Media Center 2005 back a few years ago and only realized that I was missing a disk when halfway through installing files, I was told to insert Disc 2. It was my own fault for not checking before I started, but we don't reinstall every day, so it is nice to have little reminders, sometimes.

I don't remember when it was that I first saw it in Linux, but I do remember on Red Hat or Fedora, being given a list of the CDs that I would need to install the packages I had chosen. I remember at the time lamenting the fact that I couldn't install a base system off of one CD (which, as far as I know, is still the case if you don't download the DVD). Now, I use Ubuntu for all my Linux-licious needs, so one CD is all that I need and all that I want.

P.S. If you didn't know, you can install a small jailed copy of Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 on an existing NTFS partition. I just installed it on my co-worker's Server 2008 box for him to find in the morning. With getting the OS installed and dual monitors working and ready for a reboot back into Server 2008, I invested about 10 minutes in the prank. That's some nifty software!

E-Mail Platforms Part One

Tim Robichaux — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:26:20 GMT

Recently, I've gotten to install a bunch of different e-mail platforms. This has been quite an experience, both fun and frustrating. While I'm planning on writing about each platform in detail, later, I wanted to put down some of the problems that I ran into.This is just a short list of things that I noticed when installing some of the platforms. I’ll start off with the ones that weren’t much trouble and then move into the ones that were painful:

Zimbra – This was, by far, the easiest of the non-Exchange installs. With the Ubuntu server taking only about 15 minutes to install, and then another 15 to update and add the extra packages that are required, it was a pretty painless server setup. The install of Zimbra, itself, was quick and painless as well. The only information that you really have to have set up ahead of time is the license file. The one complaint that I had about this package was that I wasn’t able to find an easy way to add multiple users, from a text file or something like that. It may exist, I just didn’t spend too much time looking, since it was only 20 users. Another thing is that I don’t know of an easy way to change the certificate to a non-self-signed one. I know the instructions are out there, but it has just been a low priority.

Blackberry – Because it is built on the Exchange 2007 platform, the e-mail portion of this was very simple. Once it was time to install the Blackberry Enterprise Server software, things got a little more complicated. There were several prerequisites that needed to be installed, but the documentation and instructions was excellent. The instructions were clear and concise and had screen captures of how to do everything. The only thing that happened that I wasn’t happy with was that to register a handheld, you either have to plug it directly in to the server or the user has to be able to get an e-mail with the activation/configuration PIN. Once this info is entered in to the Blackberry device, the sync occurs, but when I first started the setup, I couldn’t provision users because I had not enabled inbound mail. The initial sync took a long time to complete (several hours) but I don’t think that’s because of the setup.

Domino – This has been a difficult product to set up, simply because it is so different from the Exchange way of doing things. There is also very little documentation regarding what I wanted to do, and what there is, often assumes that you are already very familiar with how to do some tasks that are not well described. When installing and setting up the Domino server, the most complicated part was getting SMTP mail working. It wasn’t too difficult, once I knew that I had to create a connection document for SMTP, but it was not something that I was used to doing. Another thing that I haven’t quite gotten is the Sametime integration. I have everything setup on the client machines, but DWA is being obstinate. The main difficulty that I’ve had is that I haven’t been able to find any good books on the product, so it takes me twice as long to figure out how to do something than it does with Exchange (or even Zimbra).

Postpath – Postpath was the most difficult product, hands down. To start off with, just installing the hosting OS was a total pain. Having worked extensively with Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, and Gentoo, I thought that I wouldn’t have any problems with CentOS. That turned out to not be the case and I had to spend several hours wrestling with some of those OS issues. When it came time to install the packages, themselves, I was very unimpressed. The install, configuration and ongoing maintenance is all done from the command line. While I would not normally complain about this, it turned out to be a big problem when I couldn’t use SSH from a remote computer, so I had to do everything logged in to the console. The install was complex and most things were not explained very well. The documentation was also somewhat lacking, often just describing the options, but not what they do or change. My main gripe with the install process is that the license is only good for one install, so when I had to start over, I had to e-mail Postpath tech support to have them send me a new license key. I found several instances of people complaining about Postpath and it seems like for most versions, it is best to have Postpath servers added to an already existing Exchange environment. One of the threads that I was following had users describing using Exchange 2003 management tools to manage the Postpath servers, but I’m not quite brave enough to try, now that I have it working.

Most of my gripes were fairly minor because most of them came about because the software and methodology are very different that what (as an Exchange admin) I am used to. Zimbra seems like a product that a well trained monkey could install, but Domino needs a lot of experience and a good bit of time spent searching for answers.

PostPath on CentOS

Tim Robichaux — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:10:09 GMT

One of the products that I've gotten a chance to work with, here at 3Sharp, has been PostPath. Billed as a Microsoft Exchange alternative, it is a set of Open Source packages and management tools that emulate an Exchange server in an Active Directory environment. I am not doing a lot with this product at the moment, but when I was setting it up, I ran into a couple of problems. While I was able to work around them, I thought that I would talk about the two major problems that I ran into.

Installing the host OS

When I started this install, I was using an ISO of the CentOS 4.6 DVD, targeting a VM. While the install seemed to go along fine, I made sure to pick the settings that were going to impact the end result. In particular, I made sure to leave a big chunk of space on the drive to format as XFS for the mail store. The other thing that I was particular about was turning off the firewall, since I have a nice ISA server already, and I didn't want to worry about port conflicts. I ran through the install a couple of times to experiment with the best selection of packages. I did try installing a GUI, but I decided that was a bad idea when it took me a full 10 minutes to get the video to display correctly. In a production Linux server, there should be very little need for a GUI, but I thought it would be a fun experiment.

Once I had the host installed and configured and updated, I thought that it was now time to move into the install of the PostPath product.

Installing PostPath

From the start, I was experiencing problems with the host OS. I was using Putty to SSH into the VM so that I would be able to cut and paste and work is just a more familiar and forgiving environment than the VMRC console. Using wget and the link they provided, I started to download the software. About halfway through, I was disconnected from my SSH session. After trying to reconnect and having no luck, I decided to log in to the console, but nothing seemed to be wrong. Keeping an eye on the file size, I was able to know when the download was done, and it was time to do the install.

The install itself, was pretty simple and there are some good instructions on PostPath's web site and inside the installer itself. I did have to download some RPMs, but one of the steps was to add a PostPath repository, so I wasn't worried about too many incompatibilities.

Once everything was installed, I mail-enabled all the users and attempted to log in.

Not Quite as Advertised

Well, once I had everything installed, and configured (so I thought), I was quite surprised to find that I was unable to get to the web mail site. After looking at the install closely, I couldn't find anything that was incorrect, so then I looked at the OS. Well, imagine my shock when I noticed that IPTables was turned on! No wonder I wasn't able to get to the site. After stopping the service and using chkconfig to ensure that it didn't come back on again, I was able to get to the site. Once on the site, I was getting more errors. For some reason, I kept getting the message that a network error had occurred. Just because I was a bit peeved, I restarted the server and hoped that I could start fresh after waiting a while for it to come back up.

Once the server was back up and running, I noticed that I was getting a bunch of connection failures from Samba. Seems that the box was unable to talk to our Domain Controller. After doing some digging, I noticed that the time was different from that of my desktop. Looking further, I noticed that NTP was turned off! No time sync = no Kerberos ticket = no connectivity for YOU! What was most surprising about finding that problem was that in the configuration stage for the OS, I distinctly set NTP to run and added the DC as the preferred time server. After adding the server back into the /etc/ntpd.conf and using good ole chkconfig again to make sure ntpd was going to run on all init levels, I started the service and then restarted all the PostPath services.

Success was mine, so far, as I was now able to log in to the web mail and see all that glorious mail goodness. While I did manage to get where I was going, it was fraught with frustration and I still haven't figured out why my SSH connections keep disconnecting and then not letting me back in. Some things I will just have to chalk up to "it's just Linux" even though I haven't had any problems with all the Ubuntu servers I've been running.

Wrapped Up With A Bow

Now that I have it up and running, and I'm able to send e-mail, the next step is to build up a rule to allow the inbound SMTP traffic from the firewall to my box (we have to wait for scheduled maintenance for any changes to production systems). Once that is done, I should be able to send and receive mail, push and pull mail from mobile devices, and access the web mail from the Internet. Once this is honking along, we'll see how good of a replacement it really is. I am really unhappy that it has taken so much work to get this running (as opposed to Exchange and Zimbra) but I am really glad to know that it is not the philosophy, but the particular distribution.