Alex Scoble's IT Notes - An Information Technology Blog

Why Are PCs Slow During Heavy Disk Access?

Here's a question for all of the Computer Engineers out there. Why do PCs become slow almost to the point of unusable when the PC's drive buses are in heavy use?

What am I talking about? Copy a CD to a CD or perform a disk intensive process like copying a lot of data from one PC to another and see what happens to your nice 3.2Ghz P4 with 512MB of DDR RAM. It slows to a crawl! At least it does in Windows.

Why is that? You'd think that with all of the myriad of changes that Intel has made to it's motherboard designs that they would have found a way to separate the drive bus from the memory bus. It's like we have all of these nice highways leading to a two lane residential street, under construction. Oops sorry, we are only letting brown cars through right now. You're car is blue, so you'll have to wait.

Servers (also built on Intel's architecture) do not have this same problem. You can be totally hammering a RAID array on a server and still log in to the console and everything works just fine.

What's my point? That it's virtually meaningless to have CPUs, memory, graphics cards and hard drives that are as fast as they are if you can't effectively perform multiple dissimilar tasks on your PC...at the SAME time. I'd say that if Intel or AMD want to make improvements for workplace PCs, that bus systems are the place to look at. CPUs are well above the speed that they need to be to effectively use most desktop applications. Memory is the same.

You want to really increase the effectiveness of new computers to the point that IT Managers like me can make a good case for upgrading every three years, well then you had better show me something. Show me that a user can be working on a Word document while burning a CD while listening to an MP3 while printing a PDF while browsing the web while talking on MSN, Yahoo IM, AOL IM, while their RSS reader is culling feeds in the background, while their administrator is connected to their PC remotely showing them how to do something.

Yeah, that might be an extreme example, but you get my point. Making the PC work faster is no longer going to help the average worker. Making the PC do more things at once will. And no they aren't the same thing. Speed does not equal efficiency. Efficiency is getting the most out of all parts of a system. Synergy. Maximizing throughput, etc.

Besides, since both Intel and AMD seem to be hitting a big brickwall on speed, going sideways and increasing what a PC can do with all of it's parts seems to be the most logical place to make improvements.

Upgrading Symantec Corporate Edition Antivirus Servers

Let me just start out by saying "Do not, I repeat, do not upgrade a Symantec CE AV Server with version 9.01". That is the latest public version visible on the website, but it has a bug that may cause the server to create a duplicate server group. So if you have a server group named SYMCE, you will see a duplicate group named SYMCE (2).

If you have a current subscription (which you better have if you are using Sym CE AV anyhow) call up their support and get the location and passwords to download 9.0.2.

And it's best if you uninstall everything from the server (AMS, SSC, AV, LiveUpdate) and then reinstall from the new version. Of course if you do that and don't have a backup server, you will lose all of your configuration settings, so make sure you have a backup server before you uninstall from one of your Sym CE AV servers.

Ghosting To SATA Drives With Ghost 7.5

I'm trying to load an image onto a newer PC using Ghost 7.5. This PC has a 120GB SATA drive.

When I started the image load, it was going very slow. 8mb per minute vs 300+. Also, the drive light was almost constant on. Checked on Symantec's website and found out that if you have 7.5 and a mixture of IDA and SATA devices to run ghost with the -FNI command switch (you can also set it in the GUI if you wish).

Tried it and it solved the issue. The system is blasting down at 300+ mb/sec now.

SiteRecon Service Not Working Again

The SiteRecon service that we use to monitor our email system from the web is not working again.

There's just no way that I can recommend this service now. It just has way too many problems.

Trying to get a refund on the portion of our 1 year plan left. Don't have much hopes in getting it back though.

Looking For A Good Legal Accounting Software Services Firm? Try Versys

It's always refreshing when you work with a vendor that provides good service. Today's example of this is Versys Corp. Versys makes legal specific products for accounting (Legal Insight), time and billing (AboutTime) and enterprise contact management (Intellipad) as well as some other software. They are a smaller firm based in San Francisco, but with offices in the East Coast as well.

I can't say whether their software products are better than their competitors (although our controller says that their software stacks up quite well in price, features and performance to the other legal specific accounting packages out there), but I can say that their people provide excellent service on a timely basis.

For example, we recently upgraded from the older 16 bit version of AboutTime to the newer 32 bit version. Planning for the upgrade was started about a month and a half ago. Installation on the server of the new software was done about 3 weeks before cutover. About a week before cutover, it was discovered that the user & accounts data did not get imported properly, so we had to work to get the vendor the data so they could import it properly, which they were able to do promptly. Also, our controller made clear that she wanted to test how the new software connects to the Accounting system, so the testing systems had to be put in place at the 11th hour.

The conversion went off well, the controller got everyone trained and we are now on the new software. During this whole thing, the support person at Versys (her name is Debbie) was calm and courteous and did everything that she could to make sure that the transition was smooth.

I should note that the upgrade was tried by the previous IT person about 20 months ago, unsuccessfully. Although most of those problems were caused by lack of testing on the part of that person along with some bugs with the software that needed to be remedied and were. Took us this long to redo the conversion because of all the other things that I have been involved in and we wanted to make absolutely sure that none of the problems at the first go-around happened this time, which they didn't. As far as I can tell, the problems with the first attempt, lay mostly with the IT person that the firm had at the time. She didn't like the software (for some reason she wanted to use Great Plains...in a law firm) and was pretty uncooperative with the people at Versys and pretty much wanted the whole thing to fail (she wasn't really in the loop in choosing the software and from what I understand, did not like this fact).

Anyhow, we are also having them help us streamline our records management systems as well as our conflict checking (Legal Insight does both of these things pretty well, which will allow us to have single point of entry and storage for Client/Matter info) which should help us out a lot in how we manage our data. The current hodgepodge of systems is a pretty big mess that require changes to be made in something like 7 different places, most of which can be automated through the Legal Insight system.

Every time we have had an issue, the people at Versys have worked dilligently to get it fixed and in most cases have resolved the issues promptly. The one time when they couldn't it was an issue with how Windows XP shares printers and wasn't really their issue. That was resolved by putting the printer on a print server box.

At any rate, the point of this posting was that the people at Versys provide viable products for law firms and have excellent staff to support you in fully implementing their software, tools and services.

Windows Mystery For The Ages: Why Can Users Remove A System From A Domain When They Can't Add It To A Domain

One of our attorneys is out of the country and visited a client's site. In order to get on their network, they mistakenly told him to exit our domain. Big time oops.

Of course, now the user can't log in to the system properly or access his offline email.

I don't blame the user in these circumstances because they are usually just listening to an incompetent admin at the site they are visiting. But you really have to wonder, why does Windows let a user remove a system from the domain when it doesn't let them add it? It shouldn't matter if the user has administrative rights on the PC, it should be an action that is only allowed if you can authorize yourself as a domain administrator at the time you want to perform the removal.

I'm sure that Microsoft has some well rationalized reason for not doing this, but I'm not buying it. I've seen this happen too often at the worst possible times and it is a behavior that should not be allowed by the OS.

SMTP Virtual Server Misconfiguration Issue

This is another example of how different Exchange 2003 is to set up versus 5.5.

As I have written before, I have two Exchange 2003 servers, one back-end server, where all the mailboxes and public folders are primarily stored and one front-end server that handles SMTP traffic, bridgehead and routing functions, OWA, replication with the 5.5 server and a few other things. The front-end server has the default SMTP virtual server and the Internet Mail SMTP Connector (Exchange 2003 version of the 5.5 IMS or Internet Mail Service). All outgoing mail from our organization goes through the Internet Mail Connector to our ISP's email relay, which is usually done to hide the internal server, but since our ISP's gateway doesn't strip off the header information of relayed SMTP emails, it's just there to offload some work from the front-end I suppose.

The problem that I ran into was that replication and other traffic going from the front-end to the back-end was getting stuck in a queue on the front-end. Everything seemed to be working OK, so I put the problem on the backburner after poking around initially.

Then I had a problem with one of the Public folders that receives email from the internet. It wasn't getting mail that it should have gotten. I finally noticed that the mail was stuck in the aforementioned queue. So I had to resolve the problem right away.

As I was poking around, I noticed that I had set the SMTP virtual server to also forward all email to our ISP's gateway. So the mail was getting stuck in the SMTP virtual server's queue because it was attempting to send to the ISP's SMTP server and that server did not recognize the domain name at all and was basically rejecting the mail. So I set the SMTP virtual server so that it would route emails as necessary instead of forwarding everything to the "smart host" and that resolved the issue.

So at least anyone who cares to search for a similar problem can come here and make sure they haven't made the same mistake. I know I won't be making that one again. :)

Public Folder Permissions In A Mixed Exchange 5.5 and 2003 Site

Here's an interesting tidbit that I ran into recently.

I currently have a mixed mode Exchange site with 1 x 5.5 server and 2 x 2003 servers. All mail boxes are on the 2003 backend server now and the 5.5 server is up and running for SMTP traffic (I was having some issues with 2003 as an SMTP server - more on that later) and is also the PDC for the old NT4 domain.

Since all mailboxes were moved, I had anyone who used OWA to change their password to meet the stricter requirements of "strong" passwords that AD has (must have 3 of the 4 requirements: upper case, lower case, numbers and symbols) and activated the accounts that had their passwords changed in AD.

Some time later, I noticed that I could no longer administer Public Folders from within Outlook when logged in as my NT4 account. If I logged in as my AD account, I could administer them, but couldn't access user mailboxes.

Today, a secretary called to let me know that she couldn't access her attorney's contact folder, which got me looking at permissions again, although her issue ended up being much simpler (was in Mail folders view in Outlook instead of Contacts or Folder List view). I happened across a KB article on Microsoft's support site that had as part of the instructions for giving an NT4 account access to a mailbox on Exchange 2003, the curious step of disabling the AD account for the mailbox in question.

So I disabled my AD account and Voila! I was able to administer the Public folders again after I went back in with Exchange System Manager and readded myself in as Owner of the folders since my mailbox had been replaced with my AD account as owner.

Another Exchange 2003 mystery solved.

Language Keeps Changing in Word

As much as I like Word, it really does cause a lot of headaches for everyone that uses it and through them, me.

Latest issue that's popping up...Word documents with some words or all the words set to a language other than English - US, such as French or Spanish.

This really screws up the spell checker, as you might imagine and it's not exactly intuitive on how to fix it (hint, you can't change the language setting through the spellchecker).

Select the whole document, go to Tools->Language->Set Language->select English (US) and select OK.

Now the question that I have is this, if the normal.dot is set to English (US) why would Word ever change the language of a document based on normal.dot.

I don't know, maybe these sorts of "features" creep into Word and cause problems because the Office team is giving users what they want instead of what they need.

What my users need is a word processing application that always works and that does EXACTLY what the user wants it to do, when they want it to do it, nothing more, nothing less. Word is generally stable, but fails on the second parts. WordPerfect seems to do better on the second parts but fails horribly when it comes to stability (pro viso for this is that I have used WP 8, 9 & 10).

Unfortunately, Microsoft is pretty much now the only game in town when it comes to word processing.

SiteRecon Problems Update X2

Well, they got the email testing service working again late Wednesday night.

Still getting false positives, though and for now they have it only sending test messages every 30 minutes.

I emailed Lew to see if there were any plans to build in protections against false positives like what Mailive! does, but haven't heard back from him yet. If they don't make the service better, I'll be switching to Mailive (thanks to AJ Fried for the info on them) after our year contract with SiteRecon ends.

Chock this one up to another lesson learned. Don't bite on the year contract at first just because it's cheaper. Try the service for a month or two at first and then switch to the year contract if the service is acceptable. Oh well, at least now the blogosphere knows to avoid SiteRecon until they get their act together.