Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

We’ve recently started selling Microsoft Online Services. A great set of services that allows a business to offer email and file services without the need to worry about storing, backing up and maintanence. Yup that means no worrying out DR (Disaster Recovery) or servers in your building ! We particularly like the look of Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS). You can link it to your existing Active Directory using the Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization, great lets give it a go.

On setup I get a werid error ‘The Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization tool must be installed on a domain joined computer running Windows Server 2003 Serivce Pack 2 or greater.’. Hangon the server’s a Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise server and is a domain controler, so what’s the problem ? On digging around the MS site I find that it’s fine with Windows 2008 server but come accross this -

Installation on 64-bit environments not supported.

No way … surely not. Are we supposed to be using 64bit OSs now or not ? Exchange has been 64bit only for 2 versions or since early 2007 ! Even small hardware vendors are on the 64bit bandwagon.

Obviously now we know it’s not the end of the world but come on guys try to help us out just a little bit !

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

Or should I say new install? At the weekend we upgraded Glo Networks Exchange server from 2007 to 2010, it didnt go with out a hitch and thought we should blog about what we found.

One of the main problems is the upgrade path to 2010 is not an easy one, because there are so many changes do the way the database works, you cannot simply un-install Exchange 2007 (leaving the databases) then install exchange 2010 and mount them again.

Some of the problems we came across -

• No in-place upgrade option
• Public folders replica issue
• Users mailbox permissions when moving a mailbox
• Unable to uninstall due to public folders being left behind

We manged to fix all the problems that we found while doing the upgrade and now have a full functioning Exchange 2010 server.

If you would like more information about Exchange 2010 or about the problems we came across and how to fix them please contact us on +44 845 5210 140. The entire thing was done remotely on Hyper-V Virtual Servers, so we can help out pretty much anyone who may need it.

Posted by Dave in Applications, Servers | No Comments »

Exchange 2010 has just been released. Well it’s on MSDN and the like right now.

As expected there are many benefits to Exchange 2010 over it’s predecessors. Of which the one we at Glo Networks will probably notice right away is the rich OWA (Outlook Web Access) experience out of IE ! There are of course many other benefits which we’ll post about when we are happy with their commercial usefulness.

We’ll be upgrading our Exchange 2007 production server over the coming weekend. It shouldn’t be to much trouble as we have been playing with the test versions.

Posted by Chris in Applications, Servers | No Comments »

As a follow up to our previous post on Exchange 2010 Beta, if you’ve not been using Exchange 2007 (which many haven’t), you might be surprised to know that 2010 is 64 bit only.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and if you’re still using Exchange 2003 or earlier, were you really planning on using the same hardware? We hope not!

Posted by Karl in Applications, General, Servers | No Comments »

So Diskeeper are still around and now launching a tool for Defraging Hyper-V machines (both guest and host).

I wonder how many people remember the days of defraging their Windows 9x boxes and watching the little bars move around, feeling great when everything looked tidy and then knowing the machine felt faster when using it ? So my next question is how many people still defrag and does it really make any serious difference ? The last few times I’ve tried it on various machines over the years I’ve noticed no visable difference at all. Just an hour or so wasted waiting for the machine to finish doing the defrag so I can get back to using it .

Of course the likes of diskeeper will through great stats at you about how much it makes things quicker. But in the real world does defraging have much of a place anymore ?

More importantly am I bothered enough or do I believe it may have a real difference enough to actualy bother installing it again and see if there’s a difference ….. ?

More info from Diskeeper themselves here.

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