I have just returned from San Francisco and my first Ironport c-series CAB meeting. We have been using Ironport for over 2 years now. We first used it to fix our spam issue and that it did. It was the easiest sign off in Proximity London history. Through that we moved to the s-series for web security and joined the beta testing team. That has been one of the most enjoyable programmes it has been my pleasure to take part in. They are professionally run, bugs ironed normally by the next build and if not, you certainly know that engineering is working on them. You get full feedback on every conference call.

From our close involvement in this programme and others, we were invited to come out to the head office and take part in the Customer Advisory Board (CAB). We didn't need inviting twice. Having not been on a CAB before I wasn't sure what to expect. Their was the usual wining and dining, but the business days were kept very busy and the wining and dining was as much to do with work as anything else.

I thought our feedback would be taken down and fed back to the managers and engineers after we had left. I should have known better from this company. As the introductions were made more and more people joined the back of the room. One by one these people asked questions, voices I recognised from the weekly conference calls that you must have during beta cycles. These weren't just note takers, they were Project Managers, Engineers and User Experience Managers. We were talking straight to the people who make the decisions.

They loved to hear the good news about how well the products work, but really they were more interested in the negative, and how they could improve. Normally everyone says that, but from my experience Ironport will act on it. You might not see it tomorrow, or the next release, but on the road map it will appear.

If you ever get a chance to use one of their products, do so. If you ever get a chance to beta for them, do so. I like to say, "I don't care how many bugs may be in the product, mine won't be there." We are a cross platform environment and that is important to us. We can't wait for the next release because Safari might not work, or Messenger.

Tags: Anti Spam, Ironport, Security, wsa (s-series), esa (c-series)

Last weekend I had to work. We were upgrading to a SAN. At the same time we installed our upgrade of Extremez-ip v5 by GroupLogic. As ever, it was a very simple install. It went straight over the top of v4 and left all shares in place. I typed in the licence code and all was well. For some reason I decided to click on the license button. You can imagine my shock when I saw I had 10 licences. It was meant to be 100.

I was now in a panic. I really didn't want to go back to v4. I tried to call support, but no answer. I wasn't surprised, but I was desperate. I decided to email on the off chance someone would read it. I was shocked. I got an email back within 30 minutes saying they had looked up our account and the codes were indeed incorrect. New ones were in the same email and I was up and running. I even got a call from one of their customer service people. I will have to call them back tomorrow. I missed the call.

I know it was their error, but the service I got to fix this issue was superb. It was late Saturday in the States and I still got a reply and a fix. Well done GroupLogic.

Tags: GroupLogic

I upgrade my Mac to Leopard yesterday and I couldn't logon on to my Windows 2003 server that was running SFM. I could log on to the server running Extremez-ip. I had a feeling it was due to the way Leopard was sending the password, and indeed it was.

I went to Computer Management, right clicked on Shared Folders, and chose, Configure Service for Macintosh.

Set the Enable authentication box to, Apple Encrypted or Microsoft and it will work fine.

Tags: Leopard, 10.5

I installed the EFI CUPS update and my Canon NX3000 still prints multiple pages if I try and print more than 1 copy of a job. The Canon Q1 rip works fine, but that was fixed by a new PPD from Canon weeks ago. I tested this with Quark 7.1. I hope to test it again next week with 7.2, but as Quark tell me it is a CUPS issue on Intel machines then I don't hold out much hope.

It might be helpful if EFI actually said what this update installed and how it is fixing this issue.

Every since we got the universal binary version of Quark (v7.01) we have had trouble printing to our EFI/Canon rips. After speaking to Quark it wasn't actually a Quark issue, but a CUPS problem within 10.4. Today, EFI have released a CUPS update. You can download it here.

I haven't had time to try it out. Hopefully tomorrow. Will blog the answer as soon as I have tested it.

For weeks now I have had a machine that every time you opened Acrobat v8 would ask for the administrator password. This would only happen under a non admin account. It was getting very annoying.

After speaking to my contact at Adobe he got me through to 3rd line support. Below is the answer he gave me. It is worth noting that once you have this error the fix below will only work if you uninstall Acrobat and then re-install it. The uninstaller is in the Acrobat folder.

There are three files that are installed on the second launch of Acrobat. If the second launch is from a non-admin user then he will get an authentication dialog. If the second launch is from an admin user then there is no prompt and from this point on any non-admin user can launch without the need to authenticate.

So the solution seems to be to launch Acrobat as admin twice before launching as user. Obviously this is not ideal and this issue will be addressed in a future Acrobat update.

Rumours are spreading about the death of Retrospect. As a fan and user of the product for many years, I am not happy it may no longer be around. We use it on 6 pc servers. It is easy to use, smooth and reliable. We haven't seen an upgrade on the PC side for awhile as I mentioned in a previous blog post, Mac users have waited even longer.

EMC took over a great product and haven't known what to do with it. EMC should tell us what is going on now. I have years worth of backups invested in Retrospect.

The Register has more details.

We have been using the wonderful iShowU all week at work, but hit a big problem. All our PAL output looked horrible. I went straight to the forums at shinywhitebox. Neil, the developer, asked me to ichat with him and for 2 hours we worked through it. I have never worked with a company that gives that sort of support. Normally, its try this or that and call me back if it doesn't work. We sent files back and forth and found the answer.

It turned out that the files were fine, but looked poor on screen because of a Quicktime preference that had not been set correctly: Use high-quality video setting when available.



You won't notice if you are just watching PAL video, but as this was a screencast with text, it was not good.

Exchange 2007 looks like a really nice product. We only moved to Exchange 2003 back in June after 7 years on Exchange 5.5. I didn't think we would even think about 2007 for quite awhile, but after seeing the demos, I think we may well implement it this year.

Some of the features I liked we could have used in Exchange 2003, but they have been made much better in 2007 so it is worth the upgrade. Here are the ones that took my eye.

With Outlook 2007, users can set themselves up to an Exchange server. It will look for their login details and will find them on the server. Three clicks and they are setup.

Mobile Devices are handled much better in 2007.

We may move our voicemail system to Exchange. Users will be able to listen to their voicemail messages from within an email. They can even dial in and have the Exchange server read them their mail.

Remote users are able to click on links to documents even if they are inside the network without a VPN.

One application has been taken away and that is Exmerge. I love Exmerge. We use it for brick level backups. With only 300 users it is quick and simple. I will have to see if their is another way of doing this.

We will be installing a test server over Christmas. Hopefully, I will have some comments on how that goes early in 2007. One thing to note. The only version of Exchange 2007 that is supported by Microsoft is the 64 bit version. You can use the 32 bit version for testing, but it is not supported. To run the 64 bit version, you must also run Windows Server 64 bit. If you are in the Software Assurance program, you will be able to get this version free.

Last week, I went to Microsoft's UK head office in Reading for the launch of Office 2007, Exchange 2007 and Vista. I was impressed with what I saw. When I went in I felt that we would eventually roll Vista out to our users, but not any time soon.

After the launch, I had changed my mind. It not only looks good, but it had some features that look like they will be worth moving ahead with faster than I thought. I haven't installed it yet on my machine, that is a Christmas project.

The aspects I liked were:

The new Group Policy options, especially USB device control.

The GUI looked good. In fact, some of the demos were done via XP and it looked so old.

The imaging technology also looked good. It looks like making images to roll out to machines will be much easier and we won't need third party tools anymore.

The help feature looked brilliant and you can even record your own to help your users.

As I say, I haven't tried any of this as yet, but it looked good in the demos. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. I will be blogging more as I try all this out.

Last week, I was given the task of trying to write a batch file to upload and download a folder via SFTP. It wasn't as nearly as hard as I thought. Here is how I did it.

Firstly, I downloaded PuTTY for Windows. I made a folder on the c: drive call sftp.

I copied PuTTY to this folder. The batch files should go into the same folder as PuTTY.

Next I opened PuTTY and logged onto the SFTP server so that the local server knew about the keys. The batch file will fail if this isn't done first. Their are ways to add this part to a batch file, but this seemed easier.

I then made a batch file that was called scheduled_download.bat

In the file I put the following code:

psftp username@sftp server name -v -bc -batch -pw logon_password -b
download_files.bat

You don't seem to be able to put file commands like get and put into this batch file so I had to made a second one. This was called download_files.bat. You can see this in the second line of code. That batch file had the following lines:

lcd c:\patches
get -r test

lcd changes the local direct on the windows machine. This is the folder that the files will be downloaded to. The, get -r test, part will download all the files in the folder test on the sftp server.

If you want to copy files to the sftp server, you can use this code:

lcd c:/patches
cd /test
put -r v3

Again, lcd changes the directory you are using to upload from. cd changed the upload folder on the sftp server to test and put -r v3 uploaded all the files from the folder v3 that is in test.

I hope this helps.