Alex Scoble's IT Notes - An Information Technology Blog

Wrong Name Update Update (not a typo)

Adam Gaffin, the person who made the original post actually checks his comments. He saw my comment and fixed my name. Thanks. :)

Wrong Name Update

Heh, did a search for Scott Mace and found that he has 3 blogs also on TypePad.

Here's the link to one.

Still wondering how Network Fusion confused him with me, especially since he makes no mention of my issue on his blog.

They Linked To Me But Got The Wrong Name

Just saw that Network Fusion is linking to me here, but what's funny is that they say that someone named Scott Mace is dealing with the issue and not me.

Hopefully someone sees that and comes up with an answer.

SiteRecon Problems Update

Update to my previous post on SiteRecon:

I actually got a response from the person listed as the contact for their domain using WHOIS.

His name is Lew Newlin. Have no idea what he does there, but it's cool that he responded. So at least I know that the company is not out of business and they seem to be working on my issue.

Still not particularly happy with the service or the fact that I signed us up for a year of it.

The service is still not working for me, but I will post if/when it is back.

Positive Dell Support Experience

I think that a lot of times I blog about negative stuff that's happened here. Mostly because that's the sort of thing that gets me energized to write, whereas the good things that happen get me energized to do more work.

Here's a more positive experience that I had with Dell's tech support (you can use this as a counterbalance to a previous bad experience with Dell's tech support on a similar issue).

One of the attorneys has a Dell Latitude D600. Sometime last week she called me up to complain that her hard drive was making a lot of noise. I looked at it and sure enough it was making very loud spiking noises as it was reading and writing. Similar to normal drive noise, but amplified. I couldn't see anything else wrong with it, so I told her that we'd monitor it and see if it got worse. Yesterday she called me up and said that she just had a bad crash and the the laptop was running real slow. So I looked at it again and sure enough the event viewer was now full of bad block errors.

Called Dell, got connected to a tech right away, told her the problem, she had me try to run the built in diagnostic (Ctrl-Alt-D) but that didn't work at all for some reason, so she said no problem and wrote up a problem ticket, connected me to dispatch and had them send a hard drive. Dispatch reported that the drive would be here on Thursday, to which I thought "no problem, the drive isn't completely dead yet".

After that, I used Ghost to take a backup of the drive, which took a long time due to the condition of the drive.

Was surprised when the receptionist called me and told me I had a small package from Dell today. Inserted it into the laptop, ghosted down the image I had recorded yesterday and the system is working fine.

So unlike the previous experience where the hard drive died completely in another D600, I was able to avoid that and the user only lost a couple of hours of worktime on the PC as opposed to a whole day or more if the hard drive had failed completely. Luckily these things tend to fail "gracefully" instead of all at once.

So that's my positive blog on Dell's tech support for the week.

Outlook Hanging Because of Telephony Service?

My boss has been having this annoying problem for a while now. She will be typing in an Outlook email and the system will hang for a while and then process what she typed.

Seems to be related to the Telephony service starting and stopping on a regular basis. I set the service to start Automatically, which you would intuitively think makes the service start at system startup and stay up until the system is shut down, but no. It starts and stops as Windows thinks it should.

Based on her use of Outlook and how the hangs happen (she typically goes into Contacts to look up a phone number then a few minutes later goes to write an email and the system hangs) as well as on the event log (the Telephony service keeps starting and shutting down), the Telephony service is the only thing that I can put my finger on as contributing to the problem.

As someone who's been doing Desktop Support for a while now, the old "my PC is running slow" complaint is one of the more dreaded things that a user can say since a lot of things can cause this and it may just be unreasonableness on the part of the user (some things take a long time to do even on a fast PC), so troubleshooting that sort of issue can be a real pain.

I just hope that I find a fix for my boss's issue soon.

SiteRecon Problems

If you read this site regularly, you might remember that back in June I elected to try out a web based email monitoring service from a website called SiteRecon.

It has been working OK up till now, although not as well as I had hoped.

Got a lot of false positives. One about every other day, which is annoying in and of itself. Also, the last mail system outage that we had due to a power outage in the middle of the night, I received alerts from our ISP (The Diamond Lane - tdl.com which are very good) and from Postini, our email security provider, but not from SiteRecon.

So the accuracy of their system in providing me with email system outage reports has a lot to be desired.

But that's not why I'm posting this.

Today, I come into work and do my normal email cleanup routine and notice that there have been no new messages in the SiteRecon email box since the afternoon of the 29th. So I go to the website, login and check the data and yep, it stopped sending out test emails altogether. What's worse is that it still shows the status of the site as OK. So basically SiteRecon's email monitoring service to our domain is broken at this point.

I've emailed SiteRecon so we shall see what happens, but at this point I'm wondering if they are still in business or what.