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.

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.

Against better judgement

I've been playing around with CouchDB for a few nights, inspired by the work of Stuart Langridge and others at Ubuntu, and also J Chris Anderson.

To break myself into the CouchDB world I started poking around at the capabilities, and mostly trying to not think of SQL-isms. Understanding map/reduce and getting your brain out of the SQL world is worth it, if for no other reason than to get a different perspective on data storage.

Unfortunately I decided, rather than write what I really thought would be interesting (a Thunderbird provider for couchdb, so that I can replicate my lightning calendar and contacts to my server, laptop and desktop, without using SyncKolab[1]), that it would be best if I started simple.

I chose to develop a pure CouchDB application, using the rather nice couchapp. I write web apps and this should be a gentle introduction, and fairly quick (which is what I wanted primarily). Really, How hard could it be? So I pulled down couchapp, did a bit of reading and built a VM to run couchdb 0.9, as several newer features are required than the current version in Debian stable. What I'd failed to realise at this point was that the "API" for pure couch applications are a bit in flux. After a few hours, over the course of a few evenings I've become somewhat frustrated, until I noticed a page entitled Formatting with Show and List on the CouchDB wiki tonight. A lot of the available code out there uses the new API, which explained why a hell of a lot made bugger all sense and why I'd almost started pulling down the couchdb 0.9 to have a butchers.

Now this isn't a slur on anyone except me. I was so blinkered after the joy of understanding why non-SQL databases do have a place in the universe that I failed to search the wiki correctly.

To give the whole post a sysadmin-style slant, during this I'd started noticing the CouchDB growing quickly. Now granted I was doing a lot of pushing of attachments, shows and lists, but the growth seemed rather unproportioned. After doing some tests of my own I hit the web and found that Joan Touzet has some interesting thoughts on the subject as well, which you should go and read now. Naturally without putting my tests into the real world don't take it as gospel, but if you're using couchdb you might want to ensure that you're doing things the right way, lest your sysadmin smite you with the +2 damage hammer of server resources.

I'm trying very hard not to paint a bad picture of CouchDB here. Genuinely I think it's a good project, and although it certainly has a lot of competition, it does seem to have a lot of mindshare. There are also good points to, for one, backups are easy.

[1] Not that I have a problem with SyncKolab, it's serving me well, and probably will continue to do so.

My 4 hours of netbook fun, and Sysprep under Safe Mode

I use my work Macbook Pro for personal stuff as well, and quite frankly if you don't want kids in the future, it's the laptop to use on your lap. And deity forbid that you want to use a demanding program; you might as well forget about using your legs for a week afterwards. To combat this I've been toying with getting a netbook for over a year now, and since last week was my birthday, I got myself a Compaq 702EA as a present.

Sadly I wasn't impressed with the 702EA. I knew going into it that it would be low powered. That was what I wanted. Sadly I wasn't prepared for just how poor the performance was of the unit. At minimum I expect a laptop of the current generation, to be able to cope with a "standard" flash banner and scrolling the webpage. Sadly this wasn't the case under XP or any flavour of Linux (current versions of fedora, ubuntu and ubuntu netbook remix) or Solaris (nexenta and opensolaris) that I tried. Having used MBPs for the best part of 2 or so years, I fear that I've become somewhat spoilt.

Having decided to return the device I was faced with the prospect of returning it to factory defaults. Fairly simple with a normal laptop, but as this was a netbook, not so much. In the end I ended up cheating, resizing the partition back, using the XP Home safe mode to remove the users and data I'd added and using sysprep on the provided disk to reseal the Windows installation. Interestingly until now I wasn't aware that sysprep needs to run in Safe Mode with Networking in order to function. If you run without networking it states that the version of sysprep doesn't match the version of Windows.

So will I be joining the netbook revolution again? Given the cost of netbooks, no. The only reason I'd gone for the 702EA was because it was available for £200 from ebuyer. All other netbooks are too near the cost of a regular laptop and I can't jusify it, quite frankly.

The crunchpad still looks interesting though.

Decommissioning users

Until a few weeks ago my personal server was with a "little" company called UK2.net. After the monthly prices got hiked again for a 3 year old Pentium D box, I decided that it was time to move on.

The move went fine, and all was good; no further billing from UK2. Yet I still have access to the box. Now I'm not sure if I should be telling them how to do their job, but it does seem a bit insecure allowing access to something not being paid for. If I was a less honest person it could be quite a fun machine (answers on a postcard).

Naturally I had wiped all of my content, accounts, and effectively removed all additional packages that I'd installed, so perhaps they could've confused it with a clean system. However, this just isn't the case as the root and other account details were reset to something produced by pwgen.

I would like to say that I'm being unreasonable, but knowing the procedures that we take care of for even our smallest clients at work, I know that I'm not. As a generalisation people are not trustworthy and you cannot guarantee that once they leave they will not attempt to regain access, and potentially damage, a system.

If you've not got a working procedure for departing staff, customers, or equipment then I suggest you make one and stick to it religiously, ensuring that all departments are aware of what they need to communicate and when.