Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

We’ve found that a recent Microsoft Security Bulletin which affects quite a few operating systems, can, in some cases, wipe IIS SMTP Server settings. In our case this caused problems for the server faxing software, which needed the correct settings applying once again after this update.

The bulletin is MS10-024, follow the link to be taken to the Microsoft site with full details. If you are affected by the problem and need a hand to resolve please don’t hesitate to contact us here at Glo Networks

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Posted by James in Desktops and Laptops, Operating Systems, Servers | No Comments »

A few weeks ago Dilip from VMUtil replied to one of our blog entries about backing up Hyper-V. He was saying that VHDCopy would speed things up and so we thought we’d give it a try.

We use the scripts in the blog post for all the Hyper-V data we manage. One customer has a fixed size disk of 272GB so we thought we’d give it a try. We changed one line in the backup script from

xcopy %srcb% %bkf% /Y

to

C:\Data\Scripts\VHDCopy.exe /fast %srcb% E:\DRIVE.vhd

and let it run as usual. It used to finish at around 4:09:01.47am every day but now it finishes at approximately 1:15:21.86am !

In the piped log file we found -
Avoided reading      150252 MB     146 GB
Also avoided writing 150252 MB     146 GB

Now that is handy ! The written file is still it’s full size and of course it still works perfectly.

Note that this software only helps FIXED SIZE VHDs. It will still copy dynamic sized VHDs but only makes a speed difference to FIXED SIZE ones. Also you can’t specifiy a directory to copy like you do in xcopy, here it has to be the full distinct name of the VHD in the destination and source.

So should we (where disk space is not an issue) convert all the VHDs to fixed size ? We didn’t use to because it was just soo slow to back them up … not an issue any more !

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Posted by Chris in Applications, Servers | No Comments »

In the next few months SP1 (Service Pack 1) will be released for Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7. It will contain the usual plethora of hotfixes and some new functions. One of the great new functions that we’ve been waiting on for months is the Dynamic Memory availability in Hyper-V.

We’ve not got our hands on it for testing yet but from reading this TechNet Blog article it looks like it should do exactly what we want / need.

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Posted by Chris in Applications, Operating Systems, Servers | No Comments »

There are many ways to receive email to your devices with POP3 being about the most basic one. It’s also one of the oldest internet protocols and is perfect for just getting emails off a server to your PC.

Its problems come from the fact that its about all you can do with it. So when you use your email client to receive you emails they pull them off the server onto your desktop or laptop. That’s then their only location, inside your chosen email client. So how many people bother to backup that local email store ? How many people know where it is ? How many people have even thought about that ? Even when you do think about backups and carry them out it’s a laborious task that gets more complex the more users you have.

Another thought is that all of POP3 is done in plain text. What that means is that if someone (say a college) wants to, they can load a simple network tool to gather information from the network. Not only will they see the content of your emails they’ll also see the username and password you use to connect to it ! (Yes there’s an SSL’ed version of POP3 but it’s very rarely used).

Now consider that you can now get fully hosted Exchange services from £3.36 per month per mailbox. So for your 5 user business you can get arguably the industry standard email platform with 25GB of hosted storage for only £201.60 per year ! That’s fully managed servers with no need to buy a server, no need to worry about backups, no need to think about DR (Disaster Recovery). And of course you get all the benefits of the an Exchange server like shared calenders, Outlook Web Access (Outlook Anywhere), Exchange Active Sync (for iPhone and mobile devices) and many more.

Or there’s the likes of a gmail service for your business. When we last put it in for a customer it was about £33 per user per year for the Google Apps Premier Edition. Of course there’s also the free gmail account that you could use !

Surely knowing all that you’d say that there’s no place in business for POP3. If you’re still using POP3 for your business emails we’ll happily help you change to something that’s more suited. Ask nicely we may even do it for free !

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Posted by Chris in Applications, Desktops and Laptops, Servers, Software | No Comments »

Well it’s no supprise at all to read that Microsoft have withdrawn the Windows Essential Business Server from their product line.

We were part of the closed beta back in late 2007 and even then I remember wondering why a customer would want this. Where as SBS is perfect for small businesses most companies want the extra control of the individual applications. Interestingly though we’ve started moving customers away from even SBS an onto Microsoft Online (first one goes live this week) !

Glad we never recommended it for sale to any of our customers.

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Posted by Chris in Operating Systems, Servers | No Comments »