Slow Relaying with Microsoft Exchange 2010

If you've got an application that sends messages via your Exchange 2010 server, using SMTP, you might've noticed that things have slowed down a bit. The reason for this is because the Exchange 2010 receive connectors have a "MaxAcknowledgementDelay" setting, that will inform you if the delivery is successful, within a certain time frame. If the timelimit is hit, it then acks the submission.

To disable this you can set your receive connector not to use this feature: Set-ReceiveConnector "Connector Name" -MaxAcknowledgementDelay 0

Further details are available on technet.

MAPI communication with Exchange 2010

If you're having fun with a pre-2007 version of Outlook, or any non-Microsoft product trying to talk MAPI to an Exchange 2010 server you might be interested in knowing that the defaults have now changed in the new version, and it expects traffic to be encrypted. This caught us out today as we'd only tested Outlook 2007 before rolling one of our boxes over to 2010 over the weekend.

Two options;

  1. Disable the encryption requirement, although this isn't recommended Set-RpcClientAccess –identity SERVERNAME –EncryptionRequired $false
  2. Enable encryption for the MAPI connection (for Outlook 2003 this is under the More Settings, Security tab)

Jonathan Coulton, Paul and Storm at Bristol

Sunday night, thanks to the magic of the Ents24 iPhone application, I had the privilege of seeing Paul and Storm followed by Jonathan Coulton at Bristol's newest venue, The Tunnels. Holy crap was it awesome, and I'm glad I went.

The venue was great, although a little small, I would happily recommend that you go there if someone interesting is playing. Just watch out for the 430-ish super bright, sound activated, LED array behind the stage.

Unfortunately the iPhone sucks so much as a camera, and I have no useful shots of anything other than darkness and aforementioned blinding light. It's the first time I genuinely wish that I still had a proper digital camera.

I'm also a little hoarse today after singing along. Although it might equally be some sort of nasty cold..

Top of the rack redundancy models

I was flicking through todays NANOG mails, and came across a thread on layer 2 vs layer 3 to the top of the rack. Linked in one of the messages was Dani Roisman's presentation on redundancy models, from June of this year.

It's got some pretty interesting topologies that I wouldn't have considered and comes with a fairly comprehensive run down of pros and cons for each, so it might be worth a read. If you're into that sort of thing.

Dear Bloglines

I'm sorry that I couldn't do this to your face, but I'm writing to tell you that it's over. You might not have seen it, but I've tried to be loyal, but the temptations were just too much in the face of your problems, which I'll admit seem quite small and petty to begin with - but they build and they build.

I loved using your beta interface, but it's been in beta for quite sometime, and getting less reliable; the SSL issues that happened during June/July/August and the endless "Server Communication Error"s. Switching back to the normal interface just made me sad. Then I met Google Reader. I'd heard about her a few times in the past, but just brushed her off as some supermodel that I'd hear all about, but never meet. After the breaking of Google's services several times fairly recently I certainly didn't want to meet her - I wasn't sure that I could cope with breakage when I most needed it.

But whilst out this week I couldn't load your mobile interface, and I had no choice. Like some sort of rabid, sickly WoW user needing his daily heroic dungeon grinding fix (I'm over that now, honestly. I only think about it sometimes), I needed my precious news. Thats when Google Reader came around the corner and I bumped into her. She picked me up, casually imported my OPML file and everything just worked. The organisation stayed the same, the mark-as-read-on-scroll, all those things that I loved about your beta interface were there. Then I realised what you were and what you had become.

You might be thinking, "but what about all that stuff you've got pinned with me?". I realise that it's a shame, but at the end of the day I'll just have to treat it like I've forgotten to do a recent back up prior to migrating hardware. I could go back and grab the pinned stuff as and when I need it, or maybe transfer it to a wiki or bookmarks but that would be too much.

I wish you a good life Bloglines, and I hope that you can understand. Maybe we'll see each other again soon at the shopping counter and make a little awkward conversation.