Customize Blackberry Activation Email

The default way for the BES Server 5.0 to send activation emails is just with the password along and no instructions to the user on how to activate. There is a way to customize this on the email that automatically goes to users. Log into the Blackberry Enterprise Servers administration page and then follow the steps below:

1. Under the Devices Section expand Wireless Activations by clicking the plus sign
2. Click Device activation settings
3. Click Edit activation settings
4. Fill in the custom activation message you would like to go to your users. Here is a sample message:

To activate your Blackberry follow these steps:

1. Click on the Options Icon
2. Click Advanced Options
3. Click Enterprise Activation
4. Enter your Company Email address
5. Enter the password shown at the bottom of this email
6. Press the Trackball and choose Activate Now

In 30 minutes your activation should be complete. If you have any questions please send an email to helpdesk@company.com or call our helpdesk at 555-555-5555.

iTunes Can't Authorize Computer Maximum 5 of 5 Reached

So, here is the scenario. You have multiple computers, or you have reloaded a computer multiple times, or your family all shares one iTunes account name and somewhere down the line when you are installing iTunes and going to authorize the computer you get a message stating you have used 5 out of 5 activations. The problem, the other computers no longer have iTunes, or have been reloaded and you can't deauthorize them if iTunes isn't on the computer any longer. There is a way to deauthorize all computers at once. The steps are below:

1. Open iTunes and Click iTunes store on the left



2. Sign into the iTunes Store with your user account



3. In the top right hand corner you should see your iTunes account name (your email address). Put your mouse over the email address and click the little arrow that shows up next to it. Click Account.



4. Next to computer authorizations it will give you the total amount of computers activated under this account. You can click Deauthorize All.

Clean up, Speed up, Tune up Your Computer

Dirty Computer - Come inside
Originally uploaded by punkwalrus

The picture is kind of a joke. If you need to clean up a computer like this use a can of compressed air and then re-evaluate your living conditions. I wanted to share a few of my favorite utilities I use for this and some manual things I do in addition to using the utilities. At the bottom of this post you can find the links and steps I do.

Spyware is abundant these days, and it slows down your system like crazy. It seems that there are a ton of utilities out there, but for the last six months the one that has been doing the best for me is Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. The free version works great, just follow all of the defaults and this should make a great improvement.

Another cool utility is CCleaner. It will delete your temporary files and other things. Basically CCleaner saves you from manually going to all the temp folders and clearing them out.

Here is what I recommend for cleaning up your computer:

1. Download Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and run it to remove spyware

2. Download CCleaner and run it to clean up temp files

3. Reset Internet Explorer to defaults
a. Open IE
b. Click Tools, Internet Options
c. Click the Advanced tab
d. Under Reset Internet Explorer settings, click Reset, Click Reset again
e. Close Internet Explorer and open

4. Remove excess startup items
a. Click Start, Run
b. Type msconfig, press enter
c. Click the Startup Tab
d. Uncheck any programs that do not need to start when your
computer does (be sure to leave checked antivirus/spyware protection)
e. Click Apply, OK, Reboot, on Reboot check box to not show message again

Exchange Database Won't Mount Log Drive Full

I hate it when this happens. You get an alert that Exchange is down. You go look and find the Store is not mounted and then you realize it is because your log drive is full. I've ran into this a few times, but mostly when I've been in process of migrating mailboxes to a new server and forgot to turn on circular logging before the move. The easiest way I have found to get around this is as follows:

1. Leave the Store dismounted

2. Go to your log drive and compress the log files only (select the files, right click, and go into Advanced and choose compress)

3. Wait until this process completes (you don't have to do them all just a few)

4. Mount your store

5. Immediately run a full backup

***If this happened because you are migrating mailboxes you might try turning on circular logging at least until the mailbox move operations are complete***

LeftHand SAN, VSS, and Backup Exec

IMG_1101
Originally uploaded by madferrett

Recently I ran into issues getting Backup Exec to backup data that was stored on the LeftHand SAN. I was getting VSS errors, specifically HP VSS errors when attempting to backup the data across the network.

Here's was the setup. I had a new LeftHand SAN, an Exchange 2007 cluster that had two mailbox servers with their mailbox stores on the SAN. I had a separate backup server. The SAN's network traffic was completely segregated from the main network, and the backup server was not connected to the SAN network.

What I found the issue to be is that the HP VSS tools had been installed on the Exchange Servers and it was not needed. I had to uninstall the HP VSS and after a reboot everything worked fine for over the network install. In this time I did find that doing an offhost backup would be the best solution, but part of the issue with that for this setup was that all Operating Systems, including the Backup server were not on the same edition of Windows, so it would not work correctly. For now, simply uninstalling HP VSS on the servers that host the data did the trick.

How Not to Screw up a SharePoint Install

Here's the scenario. Your boss comes to you and says, "Hey, do you know Sharepoint?". You say, "No, not at all. I've used it, but never supported it or installed it." He turns around to a group of people outside of your office and says, "O.K., we will have a Sharepoint server up and running for you in 1 1/2 weeks. Then he walks off to his office and your fellow coworkers start saying, "Hey, I hear you are supposed to have a Sharepoint server done in 1 1/2 weeks." You track down your boss and say, "Hey, what's this about Sharepoint." He says, "Oh yeah, I need you to build them a Sharepoint server and have it ready in 1 1/2 weeks." Your fellow coworkers back you up and try to convince people that it shouldn't be done this way, to no avail. So, now you are stuck building a Sharepoint server with little time to plan and A LOT to learn. This has bad process written all over it, but it happens.

The point of this post is to point out the gotchas I ran into. I am by no means a Sharepoint expert, but after I installed it six times in that 1 1/2 weeks I understand a lot more about it than I started out knowing. My setup included a three servers, the Sharepoint server that hosted the websites and search indexes, the database server, and the email server that just handled email functions. First, go to this site and read up, be sure to download the Visio flow chart, it is great. Here are the things that took me a lot longer to figure out than I wanted them to.

1. You will need to plan, even just if a little bit. If you have limited time to plan I suggest planning your Sharepoint Service accounts and at least the servers you are going to use. Be sure to document this information somewhere. You will need multiple Sharepoint AD accounts created, DO NOT JUST USE YOUR CREDENTIALS. Follow this link for a guide on what accounts to create.

2. If you are using Windows 2008 64bit edition you need to download Sharepoint Services 3.0, MOSS 2007 with the SP slip streamed into it, and Project 2007 if you are going to integrate Project server. These three installs will be ran in the order of Sharepoint 3.0, MOSS 2007, and then Project 2007.

3. If you are using a database server that you have other databases on then anytime Sharepoint says it needs to create a new database, rename new databases as they are created to Sharepoint_xxx, the xxx's being whatever Sharepoint says should be the default name. This makes it much easier to keep track of which databases belong to Sharepoint.

4. When you are creating new Web Applications, name them based on the public URL you plan to use, such as: https://sharepoint.companyname.com, https://mysites.companyname.com, and https://spss.companyname.com. If you do this right and make all users go to the public URL then you will not have to mess with alternate address mappings.

5. Make sure that you do not point Mysites or the Shared Services to your main Sharepoint URL. As in point #4 above, create three separate URLs. If you don't, you will get strange stuff, like your user profiles will be the default landing page. It seems like the right thing to do if you don't know better, I mean it asks for a URL and you just want to tell it the Sharepoint URL. Big mistake here.

6. If you are going to use SSL, and want to redirect http request, visit this link.

7. Just make one site collection for your Sharepoint site to start with. At first I wasn't sure if every department needed a new site collection, so I made them each one. This didn't make sense for my setup, so if you aren't sure, I would say just start with one site collection and then you can have each department have different sites under that collection.

8. Backups: if you want Sharepoint Granular restore functions, which I would totally recommend you are going to probably have to license that feature with whichever backup software you are using. We use Backup Exec and the Sharepoint license was around $1,000

Those were just some of the areas that stumped me. I hope this can help someone down the road. I would appreciate anyone who knows Sharepoint a little better than me commenting and adding your thoughts or corrections to this.

iPhone 3GS Won't Play YouTube Videos on WiFi

I got an iPhone 3GS shortly after it came out and found that my 1st generation iPhone had better YouTube video quality than my new iPhone 3GS. I did some research and found it was because I had wifi turned off on the 3GS. I turned wifi on and found I couldn't play YouTube videos at all with wifi on on the 3GS and neither could my husband with his 3GS. Both of our first generation iPhones worked fine. At first I thought this was something Apple would fix soon as I saw other people complaining about it, but it doesn't look like that has happened yet. Fortunately, I found a fix that you can read about below.

I had a newer router that is a Netgear Wireless-N router. The wifi speed listed in the setup menu was set to "up to 270Mbps" I changed this setting to "up to 54Mbps" and after rebooting my iPhone 3GS the issue was resolved. If you have a router that doesn't give you an option to change the speed look for an option to change from the N band to the G band. That should do the trick.