The Grumpy IT Admin

There has been plenty written about Windows 8 and the changes Microsoft have made to the interface and the Metro/Modern UI. Yes it is damn irritating, but Stardock comes to the rescue for a mere $5. Microsoft should have offered this as a freebie on the Desktop OS, it is a small thing, users would then get used to the tile thing and Modern apps at their own pace and not have it imposed upon them, it would not have been a difficult thing to set up, as Stardock have proved, they could even have offered the UI as an overlay in the same way they did with Media Centre to allow people to come to terms with it or use it by default if they so choose to or it worked with their device. However the UI is not the only place where Microsoft seem to have shot themselves in the foot. Removal of start up options (F8, Safe mode, LKG etc) can only be accessed after OS is running. Burning stuff to DVDs seems more difficult than before No support for DVD videos All the old games have gone (replace...

Here's another weird one. Enterprise Vault, we use this for e-mail archiving. It does a reasonable job. Probably no better or worse than any similar product. A couple of days ago I noticed that there was warning that it hadn't archived anything from one of our mailbox servers for a couple of days, not big issue as there is just a couple mailboxes on there as it used for testing at the moment. I had a look at the associated task and it was stopped. Started it and it failed. Error in the event log looked something like below The Task 'Exchange Mailbox Archiving Task for EXCH' failed to log on to Exchange server 'EXCH' using mailbox 'SMTP:EnterpriseVault@symantec.local'. Please ensure the mailbox has not been hidden, that the server is running and that the Vault account has sufficient permissions on the server. I went through every conceivable setting in AD, EV and Exchange trying to work out what had happened and why it wasn't working on thi...

A power outage at the weekend caused unscheduled shutdowns on our servers. All came back OK and were working fine. However our backup of the Exchange 2010 server failed as Backup Exec could not connect to the Database. We have a DAG set up to a DR site, we failover manually if required and for when we need to do maintenance, it all works rather well. DAGs have an IP address assigned to them which is actually related to the Windows Cluster service, which if the servers are in different subnets have be different depending on which server is active. I believe this is controlled by the Cluster service, Exchange then updated DNS to point to the new server when you move to a different active server. Unfortunately despite not having auto failover the cluster service moved the IP address, Exchange, however, did not update DNS as the active DB had not moved. Bringing the server back up didn't change anything. So we now had the cluster IP address in the DR site and the DB on the productio...