Thanks Astricon 2011! Here's my gift to you:
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Friday, October 14, 2011
Exchange Server 2010 Management Console Can't Connect
After replacing our Exchange Server 2010's Client Access Server (CAS) the Exchange Management Console on our Terminal Server continued to try and connect to the old CAS even though it was cleanly removed from the domain. Because we used a different name for the new CAS server the tools that had cached the old name could never connect and apparently weren't smart enough to go find the new server. This is the error I got:
"The attempt to connect to http://server.domain.com/PowerShell using "Kerberos" authentication failed: connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client acnnot complete the operation within the time specified. Check if the machine name is valid and is reachable over the network and firewall exception for Windows Remote Management service is enabled. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic."
I never found a key or setting file I could remove to fix it and posted on the technet forums, eventually getting a working solution. Simply remove the following registry key and your EMC will automatically detect a new CAS and reconnect:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\AdminTools\NodeStructureSettings
"The attempt to connect to http://server.domain.com/PowerShell using "Kerberos" authentication failed: connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client acnnot complete the operation within the time specified. Check if the machine name is valid and is reachable over the network and firewall exception for Windows Remote Management service is enabled. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic."
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\AdminTools\NodeStructureSettings
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Email Bounce Processing with SaaSbouncer
One of my projects was sending a newsletter to its 270,000 member database for the first time, and we decided to use Amazon's Simple Email Service (the basics of that are in this blog post here). Due to the age of some of the addresses in our membership database we were generating a large number of bounce backs and non delivery reports and we needed a tool to filter our bounces and remove them from our database. We did some research and found bouncely which seemed like it might work, but I figured I could write a similar tool on my own. And SaaSbouncer was born.
SaaSbouncer was designed to accept all of your bounces and NDR's, process them, and give you access to the data via the API's
Step 1
First, you need to sign up for the service which is quite simple, simply go to www.saasbouncer.com and register. You will receive a 30 day free trial (or 500 bounces) by default. Once you are signed in you will be provided with an email address along the lines of bounceXXXXXXXX@bounces.saasbouncer.com which will be specific to your account.
Step 2
Next, if you are using Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES) you need to verify your saasbouncer bounce address or you will not be able to send emails with this return-path; if you are not using SES you do not need to worry about this. As per the saasbouncer instructions you can do this with the following command, replacing the address with your custom address:
ses-verify-address.pl -k aws-credentials -v bounceXXXXXXXX@bounces.saasbouncer.com
The verification email will show up in your non bounced messages where you can open it and approve it, or alternatively saasbouncer will generally approve it within a couple hours.
Step 3
The next step is to send your email. If you are sending via Amazon's SDK for PHP you would do the following to set the returnpath to your saasbouncer account:
$m->setReturnPath('bounceXXXXXXXX@bounces.saasbouncer.com')
If you are using Amazon's SES you have one more advantage: the messageId. The result of the sendEmail command returns an array, one of which is the messageId. If you store this messageId in your database along with the email address you sent the message you will get near 100% accuracy with SaaSbouncer. When saasbouncer receives a message we do our best to try and find the original email address the message was sent to but sometimes this is not possible due to email forwarding or masquerading. However, the messageId will be available so in the API along with the email address the bounce was received for. If you match based on messageId you will have near perfect accuracy.
If you are sending directly from PHP your message send function could look something like this, the important part is you set the return-path header:
<?PHP
$headers = "From: " . $from_name . "<" . $from_address . ">\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: <" . $from_address . ">\n";
$headers .= "X-Sender: " . $from_name . "<" . $from_address . ">\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP/". phpversion() . "\n"; //mailer
$headers .= "Return-Path: <bounceXXXXXXXX@bounces.saasbouncer.com>\n";
mail($email, $subject, $message, $headers);
?>
Unfortunately we do not have a unique messageId available to us when an email is sent in this format so we will not be able to track bounces based on messageId, only based on email address.
Step 4
Finally, there is an API which allows you to download a CSV programatically, you use your account id and your apikey in the following URL and specify the day you want data for.
A good way to use this is to have a scheduled task that grabs this URL once a day (just after midnight), parses the CSV, and then marks the members as having invalid email addresses.
<?PHP
$file = fopen("http://www.saasbouncer.com/reports/csv.php?acctid=XXXXXXXX&apikey=XXXXXXXX&reportdate=2011-10-05");
while($csvvalues = fgetcsv($file)){
//$csvvalues[0] = email
//$csvvalues[1] = messageid
//$csvvalues[2] = email subject
//$csvvalues[3] = email the bounce was received from
//$csvvalues[4] = date/time the bounce was received and processed
$email = mysql_escape_string($csvvalues[0]);
mysql_query("update member set invalidEmail = 1 where email = '$email'");
}
?>
SaaSbouncer was designed to accept all of your bounces and NDR's, process them, and give you access to the data via the API's
Step 1
First, you need to sign up for the service which is quite simple, simply go to www.saasbouncer.com and register. You will receive a 30 day free trial (or 500 bounces) by default. Once you are signed in you will be provided with an email address along the lines of bounceXXXXXXXX@bounces.saasbouncer.com which will be specific to your account.
Step 2
Next, if you are using Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES) you need to verify your saasbouncer bounce address or you will not be able to send emails with this return-path; if you are not using SES you do not need to worry about this. As per the saasbouncer instructions you can do this with the following command, replacing the address with your custom address:
ses-verify-address.pl -k aws-credentials -v bounceXXXXXXXX@bounces.saasbouncer.com
The verification email will show up in your non bounced messages where you can open it and approve it, or alternatively saasbouncer will generally approve it within a couple hours.
Step 3
The next step is to send your email. If you are sending via Amazon's SDK for PHP you would do the following to set the returnpath to your saasbouncer account:
$m->setReturnPath('bounceXXXXXXXX@bounces.saasbouncer.com')
If you are using Amazon's SES you have one more advantage: the messageId. The result of the sendEmail command returns an array, one of which is the messageId. If you store this messageId in your database along with the email address you sent the message you will get near 100% accuracy with SaaSbouncer. When saasbouncer receives a message we do our best to try and find the original email address the message was sent to but sometimes this is not possible due to email forwarding or masquerading. However, the messageId will be available so in the API along with the email address the bounce was received for. If you match based on messageId you will have near perfect accuracy.
If you are sending directly from PHP your message send function could look something like this, the important part is you set the return-path header:
<?PHP
$headers = "From: " . $from_name . "<" . $from_address . ">\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: <" . $from_address . ">\n";
$headers .= "X-Sender: " . $from_name . "<" . $from_address . ">\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP/". phpversion() . "\n"; //mailer
$headers .= "Return-Path: <bounceXXXXXXXX@bounces.saasbouncer.com>\n";
mail($email, $subject, $message, $headers);
?>
Unfortunately we do not have a unique messageId available to us when an email is sent in this format so we will not be able to track bounces based on messageId, only based on email address.
Step 4
Once you have sent your email you will want to retrieve the information about bounces. It can take several days for all of the bounces and complaints to come in, but 90% of the bounces will come in within minutes of sending your outbound emails. There are a couple ways you can get access to the bounce data.
The most interesting option is the push notification API which sends an HTTP GET request to the URL of your choice. You can configure and enable this option under account settings, and then the GET request would look something like this: http://yourdomain.com/saasbouncerendpoint.php?email=user@domain.com&messageid=0912512-12512-sadf-124as-12&maileremail=daemon@domain.com&datereceived=2011-12-15%2012:15:00&smtpstatuscode=5.0.0&emailstatus=failed&subject=delivery%20failure
Alternatively from the website you can generate a report using an interface that looks something like this. You can select what data you would like in your CSV and do whatever you want with it.
Finally, there is an API which allows you to download a CSV programatically, you use your account id and your apikey in the following URL and specify the day you want data for.
http://www.saasbouncer.com/reports/csv.php?acctid=XXXXXXXX&apikey=XXXXXXXX&reportdate=2011-10-05
A good way to use this is to have a scheduled task that grabs this URL once a day (just after midnight), parses the CSV, and then marks the members as having invalid email addresses.
<?PHP
$file = fopen("http://www.saasbouncer.com/reports/csv.php?acctid=XXXXXXXX&apikey=XXXXXXXX&reportdate=2011-10-05");
while($csvvalues = fgetcsv($file)){
//$csvvalues[0] = email
//$csvvalues[1] = messageid
//$csvvalues[2] = email subject
//$csvvalues[3] = email the bounce was received from
//$csvvalues[4] = date/time the bounce was received and processed
$email = mysql_escape_string($csvvalues[0]);
mysql_query("update member set invalidEmail = 1 where email = '$email'");
}
?>
Friday, September 30, 2011
Sending email with Amazon SES Email Service from PHP
We recently started using Amazon's Simple Email Service, a feature of Amazon Web Services to deliver messaging to our CIMLS Commercial Real Estate user database of 270,000 members. We haven't done any form of newsletter or update and now that we've spent the last 8 months redesigning the site and giving it a major face lift we decided it would be a good opportunity for us to say hey, we're back, we're working on the site and provide examples of the many new features we have added.
We decided to use the AWS SES platform to send emails to our users in bulk because it provides statistics on bounce rates, complaints, abuse reports, and a trusted stable bulk mail platform. Some of our members have been gone for 3 or 4 years and we've found some of them simply file a complaint about the email even though they signed up for us and we include the unsubscribe link in the message. As we've received each complaint we simply go through and unsubscribe them from future communication from us, no harm no foul.
I downloaded the AWS SDK for PHP and looked at the implementation. It includes classes for many of the AWS services but I'm only interested in the Simple Email Service, so I went and found the ses.php class and chose to use just that.
The ses class provides many functions and digging through the class helped unravel what all could be done with it, this is a simplified version of the function I wrote to deliver email.
I made one modification to the ses class, if there were an error I wanted it to be returned to me so I could handle it. On line 335 of ses.php I changed the line from "return false" to "return $rest->error"
Our true code takes a CSV of emailaddress,fullname and will send the email to every user in the CSV. This is a stripped down example of that so you can use it however you please, but that's why we do the %%USERNAME%% replace and handle errors the way we do.
CODE:
require_once("ses.php");
$ses = new SimpleEmailService("ACCESSKEY","SECRETKEY");
$m = new SimpleEmailServiceMessage();
$m->addTo($to);
$m->setFrom($fromaddress);
$m->setSubject($subject);
$m->setReturnPath('bounces@domain.com'); //the return path defines where any complaints or abuse messages will go -- this is important to have configured so you can clean out your mailing list of members that do not want to receive messages
$usermsg = str_replace("%%USERNAME%%",$username,$msg); //we use a token to replace with the users name to make the message more personalized
/*********************/
//setMessageFromString takes the first parameter for a TEXT message, and an
//optional second for an HTML message. If you would like to provide both
// formats at the same time that is possible, however it isn't something we have
// been doing so I wrote this little code to handle our use case.
/*********************/
if($_REQUEST['content'] == "HTML")
$m->setMessageFromString(null,$usermsg);
else
$m->setMessageFromString($usermsg);
$result = $ses->sendEmail($m);
/*********************/
//check and see if there is an error, print it to the console. In most cases
// you probably want to reattempt delivery to any address that errors out,
//but the throttling error is the only one i've encountered so far.
/*********************/
if(isset($result['Error']['Code']))
{
print("Message not sent to {$name[0]}, {$result['Error']['Code']} - {$result['Error']['Message']}<br />\r\n");
if($result['Error']['Code'] == "Throttling")
$failedemails .= "$to,$username<br>\r\n";
}
else print("Email sent to {$name[0]}<br>\r\n");
print $failedemails; //i do all of this in a for loop, and spit out a list of emails,names that need to be re-sent due to quota limitations
We decided to use the AWS SES platform to send emails to our users in bulk because it provides statistics on bounce rates, complaints, abuse reports, and a trusted stable bulk mail platform. Some of our members have been gone for 3 or 4 years and we've found some of them simply file a complaint about the email even though they signed up for us and we include the unsubscribe link in the message. As we've received each complaint we simply go through and unsubscribe them from future communication from us, no harm no foul.
I downloaded the AWS SDK for PHP and looked at the implementation. It includes classes for many of the AWS services but I'm only interested in the Simple Email Service, so I went and found the ses.php class and chose to use just that.
The ses class provides many functions and digging through the class helped unravel what all could be done with it, this is a simplified version of the function I wrote to deliver email.
I made one modification to the ses class, if there were an error I wanted it to be returned to me so I could handle it. On line 335 of ses.php I changed the line from "return false" to "return $rest->error"
Our true code takes a CSV of emailaddress,fullname and will send the email to every user in the CSV. This is a stripped down example of that so you can use it however you please, but that's why we do the %%USERNAME%% replace and handle errors the way we do.
CODE:
require_once("ses.php");
$ses = new SimpleEmailService("ACCESSKEY","SECRETKEY");
$m = new SimpleEmailServiceMessage();
$m->addTo($to);
$m->setFrom($fromaddress);
$m->setSubject($subject);
$m->setReturnPath('bounces@domain.com'); //the return path defines where any complaints or abuse messages will go -- this is important to have configured so you can clean out your mailing list of members that do not want to receive messages
$usermsg = str_replace("%%USERNAME%%",$username,$msg); //we use a token to replace with the users name to make the message more personalized
/*********************/
//setMessageFromString takes the first parameter for a TEXT message, and an
//optional second for an HTML message. If you would like to provide both
// formats at the same time that is possible, however it isn't something we have
// been doing so I wrote this little code to handle our use case.
/*********************/
if($_REQUEST['content'] == "HTML")
$m->setMessageFromString(null,$usermsg);
else
$m->setMessageFromString($usermsg);
$result = $ses->sendEmail($m);
/*********************/
//check and see if there is an error, print it to the console. In most cases
// you probably want to reattempt delivery to any address that errors out,
//but the throttling error is the only one i've encountered so far.
/*********************/
if(isset($result['Error']['Code']))
{
print("Message not sent to {$name[0]}, {$result['Error']['Code']} - {$result['Error']['Message']}<br />\r\n");
if($result['Error']['Code'] == "Throttling")
$failedemails .= "$to,$username<br>\r\n";
}
else print("Email sent to {$name[0]}<br>\r\n");
print $failedemails; //i do all of this in a for loop, and spit out a list of emails,names that need to be re-sent due to quota limitations
What I've Learned:
After five days of sending 1,000 emails a day our Max24HourSend quota is now 1360, and our MaxSendRate is no 5. The documentation suggests that it should take 3 days to get to 10,000 but our rate may be increasing more slowly due to higher bounce rates (10 to 17%). Last night I sent out a large batch of emails to members that haven't been around from 2006-2008 so our bounce rates are pretty high, as are the complaint rates. I expect that to tail off as we start emailing members that are more current.
Here's the example output of the ses-get-stats.pl command:
Timestamp DeliveryAttempts Rejects Bounces Complaints
2011-09-30T05:33:00Z 414 0 97 2
2011-09-30T06:33:00Z 67 0 8 0
2011-09-30T06:48:00Z 631 0 110 3
2011-09-30T07:18:00Z 93 0 14 0
Going Forward
I would like to build a daemon to monitor the Amazon SES send quota and then as quota becomes available automatically deliver the appropriate number of emails. This could help efficiently distribute the email load and make sure that we keep running up the Amazon SES quota. In order to effectively implement this I want to create an email table that stores all of the outbound emails that are queued up and then let the daemon work through the list automatically, simplifying delivery of email newsletters.
The documentation I've found has said that it takes several days of maxing out your 1,000 message per day quota before your quota will be raised. We've been hammering ours for 2 days and haven't seen an increase, even though we've been lightly using our account for the last several months (under 50 per day).
Complaints and Abuse Messages
We have received a few complaints and a few abuse messages for which we have removed those users from our email campaigns. Even though there is an unsubscribe link in the email people don't use it, probably because they've been trained to never use an unsubscribe link in an email you think is spam. My guess is they forgot they registered for us and are now treating email from us as unsolicited spam. It is important to set the returnpath in the email to an account that can receive the complaints and abuse messages, although the email address used must by verified by Amazon SES before it can be used. Using a tool like saasbouncer to filter your bounces and spam complaints can definitely simplify your life if you are sending out thousands of emails or more.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
MozyPro Isn't So CozyTho (Feature Review)
I help small businesses with their IT needs and this last June I found myself replacing a very costly backup solution for a small law firm. At work I use Microsoft Data Protection Manager and sometimes Symantec Backup Exec, but both of those are overkill and not natively offsite, which was a requirement. They have a Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 Premium server, and we needed a backup solution to handle the following things:
This is where we hit our first bump in the road. If you select the VSS backup for exchange (which is the way to back it up), and you accidentally select the EDB itself for backup, then the backup will inexplicably fail over and over. After a few hundred GB of failed attempts at uploading the database I called Mozy and they pointed this out. Problem solved. One would think if this were a problem they knew about they would fix the software to prevent this from happening. Apparently that would be too easy.
Fast forward to today where I'm finally getting around to testing the ability to restore all of that data to a different server in the event of disaster recovery. Mozy provides 3 seperate methods to restore your data, direct download, archive, and by media restore. The final recovery method is in the Mozy client on the protected server, but that's not the focus of this review.
"Direct Download" as they call it allows you to select your files, click direct download, and you install the mozy restore manager which will do the downloading starting within a couple minutes of clicking restore. We restored 85GB in about 48 hours, although the restore manager client has a bug in it and will stop transferring files saying: "Stopped: need private key"
Mozy support provided me with a beta version of the restore manager that picked up where the previous version had left off. The restore speed is quite abysmal, the test was performed in a datacenter with a 100megabit connection. Watching the progress bar it seemed to move around 200-300K/s much of the time.
Here is the graph of the connection, the restore started sunday night and finished tuesday night:
Archive is where it compresses all of your files and provides links to download them. When restoring 85gb it took 22.5 hours for it to archive everything, and provided 89 seperate links to download the files. There is no hierarchy so you need to know where each file goes. All 128,000 of them. Good luck! Archive is better suited for downloading a single file, or a directory. Archiving 1GB of data in 3 files takes around 30 minutes, although according to the timestamps it took 71 minutes, it only took about 30.
Media Restore is the final option. In my case restoring 85GB of data it would cost $112.45, and apparently take 2-5 days for processing and then they overnight it to you on DVD's. If you're in a hurry this isn't a very good option unless you have dialup. Otherwise you should hopefully be able to download 85GB quicker than that.
The Bad (Why I Wouldn't Recommend Mozy)
The next day I bugged Mozy and said I was going to cancel service if I didn't get a response ASAP, 30 minutes later I had a new archive download to try, which actually worked!
As it turns out, the Mozy software does not always take a snapshot of the LDF (Transaction Log) and the MDF (Core Database) at the same time, and if the files aren't a matching set they are useless.
Here is a screenshot they provided showing the timestamps for each file. I've highlighted each of the rows that resulted in a successful backup by taking a snapshot of both files at the same time. The rest of the backups are useless. Good job MozyPro!
Awesome. I guess I won't be planning to use the Mozy backup software for SQL server anymore as it only works half of the time. From now on I plan to use the built in SQL Backup, which will create a .bak file on the server, and then let Mozy upload the 1GB file every night. It's not very efficient because it can't be a differential backup, but it's better safe than lose your data.
Conclusion
Mozy works well for file backups, and exchange backups, but I definitely wouldn't recommend them if you need to do any SQL backups. As always, you should test your backup system, but given the questionable reliability of the Mozy backups I would recommend testing it several times over the course of a couple days or weeks. Additionally, Mozy support is very slow to respond taking several hours to respond to any emails even after the Tier 2 tech has finally contacted you.
Test your backups. DO NOT use Mozy if quick and easy access to your data is important to you.
- SQL Server Database
- Exchange Server Database
- Files
- Offsite Backup
After some research and testing I ended up selecting MozyPro to replace the old backup solution because it's very cost effective at $7 per server and 50 cents per gigabyte per month, and it filled all of our requirements. With approximately 85GB of data the total cost comes out to under $50/mo which is very manageable for the security of an offsite backup. We started out backing up the majority of our data with it, using VSS for SQL and Exchange and file backups for the rest.
This is where we hit our first bump in the road. If you select the VSS backup for exchange (which is the way to back it up), and you accidentally select the EDB itself for backup, then the backup will inexplicably fail over and over. After a few hundred GB of failed attempts at uploading the database I called Mozy and they pointed this out. Problem solved. One would think if this were a problem they knew about they would fix the software to prevent this from happening. Apparently that would be too easy.
Fast forward to today where I'm finally getting around to testing the ability to restore all of that data to a different server in the event of disaster recovery. Mozy provides 3 seperate methods to restore your data, direct download, archive, and by media restore. The final recovery method is in the Mozy client on the protected server, but that's not the focus of this review.
"Direct Download" as they call it allows you to select your files, click direct download, and you install the mozy restore manager which will do the downloading starting within a couple minutes of clicking restore. We restored 85GB in about 48 hours, although the restore manager client has a bug in it and will stop transferring files saying: "Stopped: need private key"
Archive is where it compresses all of your files and provides links to download them. When restoring 85gb it took 22.5 hours for it to archive everything, and provided 89 seperate links to download the files. There is no hierarchy so you need to know where each file goes. All 128,000 of them. Good luck! Archive is better suited for downloading a single file, or a directory. Archiving 1GB of data in 3 files takes around 30 minutes, although according to the timestamps it took 71 minutes, it only took about 30.
Media Restore is the final option. In my case restoring 85GB of data it would cost $112.45, and apparently take 2-5 days for processing and then they overnight it to you on DVD's. If you're in a hurry this isn't a very good option unless you have dialup. Otherwise you should hopefully be able to download 85GB quicker than that.
The Good
The restore process using the restore manager put most of the files back where they were on the original file system. The exchange backup worked as I expected it would.
When I went to test the restore of our data I started out restoring 85GB using the Direct Download / Restore Manager. I went to bed and the next morning the download had stopped saying I needed to enter my private key (what private key?). I did a search and found others had this problem as well, http://community.mozy.com/t5/Mozy-for-Mac/Private-encryption-key/td-p/13683, so I contacted support and they gave me a beta version of the client which solved the problem.
Fast forward 36 hours and the restore is complete. I went to restore the exchange database and it's in a dirty shutdown state which is fairly typical for backup software. After I used eseutil to repair the database everything there worked fine, I was able to mount the database in a Recovery Storage group and use the powershell to restore mailboxes to a test account.
Next up I needed to restore the SQL database. Unfortunately the transaction log was in the restore folder, but the main database file, the MDF, isn't there. I found it in the error list in Mozy so I went and selected just the SQL database files using the web interface and redownloaded them. After several attempts the restore manager gave up saying 3 of 3 files complete, but 2 failed:
Okay, no problem. I went back and chose the archive option. Thirty minutes later the web interface showed 1 of 3 files... the other 2 missing, and it says it had recovered 1 of 1 files... I started another chat session (I'm good at this by now), and the guy said odd, did something and half an hour later the archive download works. I downloaded the files (at 300 to 600K/s), extracted them, went in to SQL Server Management Studio and attempted to attach the database.
For some reason the MDF and LDF files do not match, so the database can't be attached.
Having failed so far I decided to do one last thing. Attempt to restore the database on the production server using the VSS restore feature of the full Mozy client from the source server. Yep. You guessed it. That failed too. Why wouldn't it?
I contacted Mozy again and the chat agent escalated this to Tier2 and informed me I should get a response in 24 to 48 hours. When pressed about how long a response typically takes the answer was "it depends how busy they are", no kidding, thanks genius, that's very insightful. It's a good thing I'm simply attempting to test the restore process because at this point I'm not certain that our SQL data is protected by Mozy. If this were a real outage where we needed to restore from backups I would now be 72 hours in to the process, have encountered many errors in the Mozy system, and be expecting a 24 to 48 hour expected response time from a Mozy Tier2 technician.
The next day I bugged Mozy and said I was going to cancel service if I didn't get a response ASAP, 30 minutes later I had a new archive download to try, which actually worked!
As it turns out, the Mozy software does not always take a snapshot of the LDF (Transaction Log) and the MDF (Core Database) at the same time, and if the files aren't a matching set they are useless.
Here is a screenshot they provided showing the timestamps for each file. I've highlighted each of the rows that resulted in a successful backup by taking a snapshot of both files at the same time. The rest of the backups are useless. Good job MozyPro!
Awesome. I guess I won't be planning to use the Mozy backup software for SQL server anymore as it only works half of the time. From now on I plan to use the built in SQL Backup, which will create a .bak file on the server, and then let Mozy upload the 1GB file every night. It's not very efficient because it can't be a differential backup, but it's better safe than lose your data.
Conclusion
Mozy works well for file backups, and exchange backups, but I definitely wouldn't recommend them if you need to do any SQL backups. As always, you should test your backup system, but given the questionable reliability of the Mozy backups I would recommend testing it several times over the course of a couple days or weeks. Additionally, Mozy support is very slow to respond taking several hours to respond to any emails even after the Tier 2 tech has finally contacted you.
Test your backups. DO NOT use Mozy if quick and easy access to your data is important to you.
Update 2/21/2013
I decided it was time to do another test restore to make sure everything was still going okay. Not so surprisingly the website restore functionality still doesn't work. It constantly says it does not detect the restore manager software even though it is installed. Eventually I simply launched the restore manager by hand and logged in, and it started to restore the data. *phew*.
Performance seems to be different, it now manages 0-25megabit (on a 35megabit connection), and uses 3 simultaneous streams. In 3 hours it downloaded 8,714 files for a total of 4.5GB, approximately 4megabit. The tool gets stuck downloading files sometimes, so the download rate is jumpy. The tool says it restored 170gb of 118gb (175,000 files), and then crashed. Checking the size of the restored files reads 78GB, and the Exchange databases were not restored. Ugh. What the heck.
I figured after a year and a half my review would be outdated, but it appears as though Mozy still hasn't worked out all of the kinks. Maybe in mid 2015 they will have gotten all of their stuff together. :)
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
I Was Called an Asshole by a TeleMarketer From Rapid7.
I work in IT (obviously) and we get LOTS of calls from people trying to sell us stuff. We have told the gatekeeper (our receptionist) that she can tell any and all of them we do not need their services and please stop calling, and that if we do need their services we will seek them out. Frequently a sales person will call multiple times before getting the hint that our gatekeeper is not going to open the door to the IT department. She's very good at that.
Sales calls are a part of life, it's how a lot of business gets done. Good sales people will try a couple times and eventually get the hint that the person they are calling truly isn't interested and will move on to the next record. It's not uncommon to have to deal with rude receptionists (ours isn't) or irritated people on the other end of the line, it's also part of the job, so it's not necessarily a fun job to have. However, it is not part of the job to call people names when they don't give you the opportunity to give your sales pitch. It's your job to move on.
Sales calls are a part of life, it's how a lot of business gets done. Good sales people will try a couple times and eventually get the hint that the person they are calling truly isn't interested and will move on to the next record. It's not uncommon to have to deal with rude receptionists (ours isn't) or irritated people on the other end of the line, it's also part of the job, so it's not necessarily a fun job to have. However, it is not part of the job to call people names when they don't give you the opportunity to give your sales pitch. It's your job to move on.
Unfortunately one pesky agent from Rapid7 apparently doesn't know this, calling for both myself and my boss several times over the course of a week, and would not take no for an answer. Lauren was certain that because our receptionist doesn't know what they do she can't possibly make the decision that we don't need her services. Our very polite receptionist asked that next time she called I PLEASE take the call so I can tell them we don't need their services. I did. This is the story of that call.
8/24/2011, 1:05 PM:
Update:
Here is the reply I received from Rapid7
Hello Andrew,
Thank you very much for taking the time to get in touch with us so that we can investigate this issue. I can assure you it is certainly NOT our practice to call prospects names nor insult them.
I’ll speak with the head of our Sales team right away to look into this.
I can certainly understand the frustration that you’re feeling now but do hope that you’ll give us another chance in the future should you need Vulnerability Management solutions.
| Thanks, Catherine
| |||||||||||||||
Thursday, August 4, 2011
CloudTC Android Based Executive SIP Phone Unveiling/Review
Update: Panasonic has released their KX-UT670 which is a much better option than the CloudTC phone. You can read about it here: http://www.andrewparisio.com/2012/05/panasonic-ut670-review.html
In October 2010 CloudTC was showing off their fancy new Glass 1000 Phone at Astricon. It's a beautiful device with huge potential in the SIP/Asterisk world. We signed up to get a pair of development units which ended up shipping a little later than they had hoped for but it wasn't the end of the world. Check out the picture of this thing, it looks quite impressive.
Phone Features:
Anyway, the device is fairly impressive on paper. Android 2.1, a 1024x600 9?" touch screen (not capacitive), PoE (Power Over Ethernet), Bluetooth connectivity, a quality speakerphone and a fairly well designed case. I quickly plugged it in to my PoE switch and it didn't work. As it turns out, the PoE feature was removed because of issues sourcing parts, I guess they should update their documentation page saying the device has PoE. Oh well, I plugged in the AC adapter and fired the thing up. The first thing I did was install angry birds on it, which as you can imagine is pretty fun on a giant screen like this. Without multitouch support you can't zoom in or out, but that doesn't really matter as this isn't an angry birds phone, it's an executive SIP phone.
I grabbed my bluetooth headset and went to connect it to the phone, but there is no way to pair a bluetooth device unless you've used android before and know how to create a shortcut. I simply tapped and held on the homepage, added a shortcut to bluetooth and managed to pair my device. The unfortunate part is while it may have bluetooth connectivity apparently it doesn't use it for anything.
Using the Phone as a Phone:
As a SIP phone the device needs to work well as an actual phone, not just be a pretty toy. I've had a few more dropped calls than I normally experience, but the speakerphone on the device is pretty good on my end although I haven't been on the other end of one of these I haven't had any complaints. Dialing on the keypad is simple although the dialer tries to format the phone number with parenthesis which is a little bit awkward. If I dial my extension which is 1593 the phone will display "1 (593" expecting me to dial the next 7 digits of an 11 digit US based phone number. Currently there is no way to tell the phone what the allowed dial patterns are, if that were added they would probably be able to better format phone numbers. Hopefully this gets added in the future.
In October 2010 CloudTC was showing off their fancy new Glass 1000 Phone at Astricon. It's a beautiful device with huge potential in the SIP/Asterisk world. We signed up to get a pair of development units which ended up shipping a little later than they had hoped for but it wasn't the end of the world. Check out the picture of this thing, it looks quite impressive.
Phone Construction:
The phone is well built, it has a heavy base so it doesn't tip over when you press on it, however in order to press the home button I've found myself holding the back side of the phone with my fingers while pressing the button with my thumb as it requires quite a bit of pressure and sometimes can cause the phone to slide across my desk. The handset is very light, which some people consider cheap feeling but that doesn't both me. The handset that shipped with the device tends to fall off of the phone because the notch isn't deep enough, CloudTC said they will be shipping new handsets out that solve this problem as well as some call quality problems (which I honestly haven't noticed). For an Executive SIP Phone I think this device is fairly well designed, although a case that is more "sexy" might add more appeal for picky executives.
Phone Configuration:
Configuration of the Glass phone is very simple, the IP address is displayed in the top right hand corner so you simply navigate to that IP in your web browser and configure the SIP settings from there, the default username and password are both admin. I had mine up and running in a couple minutes.Phone Features:
Anyway, the device is fairly impressive on paper. Android 2.1, a 1024x600 9?" touch screen (not capacitive), PoE (Power Over Ethernet), Bluetooth connectivity, a quality speakerphone and a fairly well designed case. I quickly plugged it in to my PoE switch and it didn't work. As it turns out, the PoE feature was removed because of issues sourcing parts, I guess they should update their documentation page saying the device has PoE. Oh well, I plugged in the AC adapter and fired the thing up. The first thing I did was install angry birds on it, which as you can imagine is pretty fun on a giant screen like this. Without multitouch support you can't zoom in or out, but that doesn't really matter as this isn't an angry birds phone, it's an executive SIP phone.
I grabbed my bluetooth headset and went to connect it to the phone, but there is no way to pair a bluetooth device unless you've used android before and know how to create a shortcut. I simply tapped and held on the homepage, added a shortcut to bluetooth and managed to pair my device. The unfortunate part is while it may have bluetooth connectivity apparently it doesn't use it for anything.
Using the Phone as a Phone:
As a SIP phone the device needs to work well as an actual phone, not just be a pretty toy. I've had a few more dropped calls than I normally experience, but the speakerphone on the device is pretty good on my end although I haven't been on the other end of one of these I haven't had any complaints. Dialing on the keypad is simple although the dialer tries to format the phone number with parenthesis which is a little bit awkward. If I dial my extension which is 1593 the phone will display "1 (593" expecting me to dial the next 7 digits of an 11 digit US based phone number. Currently there is no way to tell the phone what the allowed dial patterns are, if that were added they would probably be able to better format phone numbers. Hopefully this gets added in the future.
Bug List
- CallerID does not display the name of the caller, only the number
- If you hold down the back button for more than 2 seconds you get an overlay of the touchpad driver
- Fixed in build 1768 (changed to 5 seconds)
- The phone does not support auto-answer so you can't do intercom calls or callcenter work
- Google Maps runs out of memory if you use it, i only opened it to test but it quickly crashed
- As of build 2009 it works for a minute but with the traffic layer on after scrolling around a couple times it says low on memory and turns off the traffic layer, then the entire phone hard locks
- If you pull down the android notification window you are unable to slide it back up
- Fixed in build 1768
- Inbound calls will be rejected if they come from the same number as the phone. If i call 1593 from another device with the callerid of 1593 it will reject the call
- The phone dialer is clunky, and the formatting of numbers is very awkward
- Formatting is fixed, redial added in build 2009
- The volume controls don't provide a test-tone so you have no idea how loud 10 is until you make a test call
- The PC Connector software which is supposed to sync your contacts from outlook is broken and won't connect -- they said they don't support this, but it's the only way to get contacts in to your phone from exchange
- The phone lacks a DND mode
- Fixed in build 1768
- The phone has dropped several calls or hung up during a call :(
- Bluetooth doesn't work
- There is very little documentation
Final Thoughts:
CloudTC has built a beautiful phone but has left a few things to be desired in the execution. As a new small company I'm hoping they work out the kinks and get this thing moving but they don't seem all that quick to help. I've been an early adopter before and in most cases companies are generally very appreciative of the support they get and provide early adopters with direct access to developers, generally taking feedback and incorporating it while providing users what they need to accomplish their goals in a give and take relationship. In fact I've gotten free devices, free software, and features I needed from companies before while helping them introduce new products to market. I'm not sure who else is developing for this device but I'm not going to continue investing my time or energy until the kinks are worked out.
For a $600 executive SIP phone this device comes up short. For an Executive that just wants to make phone calls the device is sufficient, but much more advanced use and I think the device is not yet ready for prime time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)