Alex Scoble's IT Notes - An Information Technology Blog

Note About Using Mailive

Just by looking at their interface, you wouldn't know about one feature that Mailive has. When you go to set up a server, it looks like you can only enter in the IP (internet protocol) Address or Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) for one server.

Well, let's say you don't want to put in the IP Address or FQDN of a server, but would rather they go by your MX (Mail Exchange) DNS (domain name services) record instead. Then instead of putting in a server's IP or FQDN, you simply enter MX in that field.

Then Mailive sends to whatever server is at the top of your domain's MX list.

Mailive - Better Web Based Email System Monitoring Tool

Last week I think I mentioned that I was going to try out Mailive to see how it compares to Siterecon.

Let me tell you, there's a world of difference between the two services. Mailive hasn't bothered me with a single false positive since I've set it up. I got an email, unprompted, from one of the support people at Knowledge Front (the people who run Mailive) asking if I had any questions or needed any help. He also explained exactly what the price structure was ($360 per server per year).

Plus they have a contact phone number listed on their web page.

Anyhow, so far, the service I've gotten out of Mailive far exceeds that of Siterecon. Mailive is definitely a service that I can recommend. 

Biggest Complaint Of Blackberries So Far - Interface Lock Up

For most of the attorneys, the Blackberries are pretty good devices for keeping caught up with emails. There are a few attorneys, however, who really require a robust platform for emails as well as Personal Information Management (PIM) and phone use.

The Blackberry is usable as a phone, but I think that a lot of the attorneys feel that the 7730 is a little big to hold as a phone and the lack of Bluetooth limits their headphone choices.

The Blackberry's biggest weakness, however, especially in OS 4.0 seems to be in the PIM arena and specifically contacts. Actually, OS 4 presents a few problems even for users who have no contacts. The fact is that OS 4 takes up a lot more headroom than OS 3.7 did. Blackberries run slower on OS 4 and often freeze up with the hourglass while it's processing something or other. This is kind of annoying when you are typing a password and you get the hourglass and have no idea what characters of your password were grabbed properly.

It is, however, a major annoyance when you have a good sized address book (lets say over 1000 contacts). When you have that many contacts, the Blackberry often locks up for VERY LONG periods of time while it does whatever operations it does to sort through the contacts, especially if you have content protection turned on.

Whereas a Palm, or Palm Treo chugs through contacts very quickly thanks to it's much faster processor.

Ahh, the things I wish I knew before we got all set up with Blackberries...Would have been nice to know that the Treo processor is 10 (TEN!) times faster than the Blackberry's.

Anyhow, if anyone from Research in Motion (RIM) is listening...it would be REALLY REALLY helpful, if you either came out with a much faster Blackberry very soon, or changed the OS so that it would always reserve some processing power for the user interface.

It SERIOUSLY degrades the user experience when you have to wait and wait for the @#&$ing thing to finish doing whatever it is that it's doing.

Goodbye Siterecon, Hello Mailive

Today, I finally got tired enough of all the false positive error messages that I was receiving from Siterecon, that I turned off monitoring from that site.

Was still getting A LOT of false positives even with their new false positive protection feature. I don't know what the deal is with mail flow between here and there, but it's obviously problematic.

Anyhow, our first free month of mailive email scanning is up and going. Will report more as the month gets further along.

All I can say, is if you are looking for an end to end web based email test and alert system, Siterecon IS NOT it. Unless you want to receive multiple false positives every day.

Whats Up With the &*#! Quad Band Blackberries?

Like I reported last week, we got one of the new Blackberry 7290s in from T-Mobile. Well, just like the 7100s that we got before it, which were also quad-band, the damn thing won't find the T-Mobile network in our building.

I don't know what is up with the T-Mobile quad band phones, but they seem to have reception issues.

What I don't understand is that one of our Canon techs had a 7100T from T-Mobile and it worked just fine in our building. It's enough to drive this IT person batty!

*Update* OK, I just walked a bit down the street and manually selected the proper network. Looks like for some reason the automatic network scanning procedure wasn't working. When I did manual scan in good signal area got two T-mobile networks.

So now the 7290 works fine in our building. Go figure. Still don't know what it is about the quad-band T-Mobile BBs that make them not work correctly in our building.

XP SP2 Bad for Old LCD Screens (black screen at startup of Win XP SP2)

Looks like XP SP2 screws with the video drivers of older systems, particularly LCD screens that have a limited range of resolutions and refresh rates they can handle.

Working on an old Dell Inspiron with 14" LCD screen and Intel 815 family graphics adapter.

Whenever the laptop boots up into windows, the screen goes black and can only be recovered by hooking an external monitor to it and hitting Fn+F8 until Windows properly displays on the LCD, or alternatively, I can boot up in VGA mode.

So now, I'm doing a "repair" install using SP1 and won't be installing SP2 on this laptop anytime soon.

Couldn't do a rollback since XP was installed using a CD that had SP2 rolled into the base install.

New Blackberry Same As The Old

We got the BB 7290 in today. Even with the extra memory, it is slow, slow, slow. RIM needs to do a completely new redesign because the current models are just about worthless as a PIM for someone who has a lot of contacts.

I mean, the whole point of these devices is to be the end-all be-all device for a user. If it chokes on 6000 contacts, what's the point?

I think that processor speed is the main area where the BBs fall short compared to the Treos.

I just wish that Palm would get off their butts and deploy Treos with the Blackberry Enterprise connector already.

Problems With Backup Exec

Was going to have Backup Exec generate new Intelligent Disaster Recovery ISO images today for each server, but BE kept telling me that the files had been generated, but nothing was done. Should take 40 minutes or so for each bootable CD ISO image to be created, but it was indicating that it was done immediately.

I first wanted to check to see that IDR was still installed, so I tried to go to Serial Numbers and Installation in Tools menu in BE. Nothing was happening there either.

Found this article at Veritas that fixed that problem.

Then I found out that Veritas had released SP2 for BE 9.1 on March 1st, which is odd because the Veritas Update Service didn't detect it.

Anyhow, I downloaded that and tried to install it, but I keep getting an Error 1606: Could Not Access Network Location Ÿ    . I've tried googling this error and looking for solutions on Microsoft.com as well as Veritas's support site, but haven't found anything yet. Also tried searching the registry for that odd Y character with the umlaut.

Found some items that suggest fixing some registry settings which I'm trying now, but I don't have much confidence that it will solve the problem.

I guess if you don't like solving problems, you shouldn't be in this business.

Blackberry 7290 Now Available from T-Mobile

I should have mentioned this when I found out from our sales rep last week, but T-Mobile is now selling the Blackberry 7290.

This is a newer version of the old 7230 with Bluetooth built in, quad-band support (850mhz, 900mhz, 1800mhz and 1900mhz) and 32MB of memory (twice what the old version or the 7730 has).

We just ordered one so I'll blog my experiences with it.

By the way, their website still lists it as coming soon, so I'm not sure if they are only offering it to corporate customers at the moment or what. I'll post any news I get when I get it.

Quick Thought On Exchange

Some people will take the preceeding comments to mean that I'm not happy with Exchange. Anyone that knows me knows that I like that product pretty much above any other from Microsoft.

Having said that though, it's hard to be exuberant about a product that you've spent the last 8 hours fixing.

There's always tomorrow, however. :)