July 2007 - Posts
Today Microsoft held the Ground Breaking Ceremony for their new $500,000,000 (yes, that's 1/2 BILLION DOLLAR) data center here in sleepy little ole San Antonio. It's going to be a huge center! San Antonio was picked from a list of contenders as the best spot to house such Microsoft web sites as HotMail, Search, and more. Microsoft had a 30 point criteria for their selection and did not make their choice lightly. High on the advantages of San Antonio were our low electric rates. The new Microsoft data center is expected to use more power than the recently finished Toyota Tundra plant! It will also be an economic generator for this, the 7th largest city in the country. It will spawn much technology growth in South Texas.
Today I delivered that workstation that Acronis saved my bacon on. It works great! But the client noted that he was unable to launch MS CRM from his web browser, IE 7. Well thinks I, that's not a big deal. Likely we just need to turn off the IE 7 popup blocker. So, turn it off I did. Same result! Hmmm. I flop around for a bit trying various settings and then notice that he has a Google toolbar loaded. The Google toolbar ALSO has a popup blocker!!! I turn that off and now MS CRM behaves itself.
The workstation of a client of mine recently started reporting that the hard drive was about to fail. I found these notices in the Event Viewer. Unfortunately it was right after I had just flattened the box and rebuilt it to resolve a number of problems that had accumulated over time. Wish I had known the drive was failing before I flattened it. Next time I'll take a gander at the logs before I do something like this.
I tried a couple of products which unfortunately were unable to do the job because the drive was throwing off errors and a good image could not be created. Bummer! As a last resort, I decided to give Acronis a try. I have always heard good things about the product so this was my chance to give it a whirl. One of the perks of being an MVP is that many software publishers offer us free NFR (Not For Resale) licenses for their software. Acronis was very accommodating and helpful. They sent me download links and NFR keys for not only the workstation version but the Enterprise Server as well, along with the appropriate Universal Restore keys which let you restore onto different hardware. This will let me try out their stuff in a number of scenarios.
It took me a while to figure out how to do what I wanted to do with Acronis. I downloaded and printed out the documentation for the Workstation version. Very good docs but what I wanted was in Chapter 13! Once I found it, it told me exactly how to Clone a hard drive. Basically you install the Acronis workstation local version on the computer and then select Clone the hard drive. This assumes that the target hard drive is already installed in the box. It also assumes that you are still able to boot from the source hard drive. There is a way to build a bootable media version but I was focused on my specific issue so didn't dwell on it. I installed Acronis on the workstation and then had to reboot. When I did, it booted into Acronis and after asking a couple of questions, like do you want to proceed, it proceeded with the cloning. It took an amazingly short period of time to do its work! I held my breath as I shut down the computer, removed the original (source) drive and restarted the machine. IT BOOTED! It booted right into XP with nary a problem. When I went to shut down the machine, it even gave me the option to Install Updates and Shutdown (which I had skipped with the original drive).
All in all, I am very impressed with Acronis and very pleased with the way I was treated by their representatives. Give it a try, but maybe don't wait until you have a problem.
My wife and I celebrate our 35th anniversary this Sunday. So, we are taking a long weekend and doing a WOW tour, Way Out Wineries. This is a group of Texas wineries that are pretty much off the beaten path, especially for those of us in South Texas. Today was our first day. We visited the Sand Stone Winery in Mason, Texas. I've never been to Mason though my good friend, fraternity brother, and former US Congressman Tom Loeffler is from there. Pretty, little town with a gorgeous City Hall. The winery was small and they only produce two wines there, a Syrah and a red blend. They are kind of proud on their wines but we bought a bottle of their blend. Nice puppy dog there. True Texas wineries have puppy dogs! Then back on the road.
We had lunch in LLano, Texas. There is a great BBQ place there called Coopers. We had been there a couple of years ago and ordered way too much food. This time we ordered way too little.
Then back on the road to our second winery of the day, Alamosa in Bend, Texas. We had to go through Cherokee, Texas to get there. We had a nice visit with the owner's wife and sampled their many wines. They had two very friendly dogs.
Our third winery, Brennan's, was in Comanche, Texas. Lot of Indian named towns up here. My wife fell in love with their Viognier and I liked their Cab. Of course we bought some more wine. No dog :-(
Our final winery was outside Rising Star, Texas, rightly named Rising Star Winery. We both enjoyed their Rustler's Red so we bought a bottle. Also another cab I believe. No puppies here either.
We ended up in Brownwood, Texas for the night from where I am writing this post. The nice thing about visiting wineries, especially those that are 'Way Out', is that it gives us an excuse to take a drive in the country side and see parts of this great and large state that we would never have seen otherwise. I've lived in Texas all of my long life and never been in this area. I was surprised at how pretty it was. It was a gorgeous drive. Tomorrow it's off to visit 4 more wineries and then spend the night at our daughter's in Dallas.
So what has this got to do with computers? Well, we did use our MapPoint 2006 with GPS locator to guide us around. Also, it's nice to get away from the day to day grind of the computer business, even if it is only for a long weekend. And we were even out of cell phone range for most of the day!
P.S. Well, I had trouble trying to post this to my blog on Friday so now it's Monday night and I'm back at home. Great trip. Saw 4 more wineries Saturday and our daughter met up with our daughter outside of Dallas. Sunday it was one more winery on the way down to Houston and today home. Great trip! All too short.
I've had a problem with a VPN tunnel I set up for a client. It connects the main office with a branch. And it worked very well... until it stopped. I troubleshot (is that a proper word??) it and found that one of the routers could not ping its gateway. So, figures I, the router must be defective. So I replace the router. Still can't ping the gateway from the router. But I can ping the gateway from an external point. I can also ping the router IP address from an external point (my network). I scratched my head over it for awhile. I wondered if the 5 port switch that was between the broadband modem and the router was defective but it works for the server OK and I moved the router to another port. So, that's not it. What was also interesting is that when I tried to ping the remote subnet, it would occasionally work. But not a lot, but some! I couldn't help but keep thinking that since nothing I did made a difference and everything seemed to be in order, there must be something on the ISP side of things.
I started a continuous ping of the router IP address from my network and then went in and changed the IP address of the router. The ping continued to reply! How could that be when the router was no longer on that IP address. Answer, there must be something else on that IP address. What, I have yet to determine. I suspect our ISP is involved. I configured the other end of the VPN tunnel to look for the new IP address and up it came and works great.
So, when something breaks that was working, it's not necessarily your fault. Think outside the box, or even within the subnet, for your answer.