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Enterprise Computing / Featured / Operating Systems / Small Business / Small Business Server (SBS) / Software Patches / Windows

How To Fix Error 80072EFD On Small Business Server 2008

For several months, I had a client with a Small Business Server 2008 that just would not update. It worked for a while and just suddenly quit after a round of updates through automatic update. No matter what I tried from confirming network connectivity, checking firewall settings, adding and re-adding the update sites to firewall exceptions, disabling anti-virus applications and software accelerators to spending long hours reading Technet articles and suggested fixes from Microsoft, and a thorough step-by-step  here, the problem would not go away and kept giving “Windows can’t connect to update…”  error 80072efd. (more…)

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July 19, 2010
Ethics / Gadgets / Hardware / Linux / Open Source / Operating Systems / Small Business Server (SBS) / Storage / Windows

Device Manufacturers and the fleecing of consumers

I’ve recently had cause to wonder if device manufacturers purposely make sure their devices are of limited use to people who buy their products. A few examples:

I recently bought a couple of NAS devices and each one of them failed woefully to do what was advertised.

First is what I actually started calling the Great White Turd. It is the Netgear sc101T. I have come across ridiculous devices before, but this one takes the cake for its total uselessness as a NAS device. What is the point of hard coding a “NAS” to use DHCP and no option of setting a static IP address. What part of “network” was missing during the development of the product? The SC101T forces you to install a client software on all computers that may need access to the device. The software cannot be installed on a server class Operating System like Windows Server 2003 or 2008. You have to mount the drive and share it to be accessible but since it is assigned a DHCP IP address, anytime you restart the computer, the drive mappings are shot to hell and you have to do it all over. For a product that retails for $180, I am almost tempted to start a class action lawsuit so we can recover some lost revenue due to emotional distress caused by this piece of crap. (more…)

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June 13, 2009
Email and Spam / Managed Services / Small Business Server (SBS)

Outlook 2007 and Gateways

I recently got a call from a client who was having a hard time connecting to their Exchange 2003 server. They kept getting a "disconnected" error. I told them to ping the exchange server and other computers on the network to see if they would get a response, they did and everything looked fine. I then asked if they had done anything different lately. It turned out that this particular computer had static IP settings and they had removed the gateway IP address because it was interfering with a specific…

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June 8, 2009
Cloud Computing / Data Recovery / Disaster Recovery / Managed Services / Operating Systems / Small Business Server (SBS) / Storage / Windows

Windows Backup 2008: Another Royal Mess

I am always baffled by the constant ability of Microsoft to take something that was working very well and turn it upside down all in the name of trying to improve the product. The list is long so we won’t even bother. The latest in this list is the supposedly new and improved Windows Server Backup 2008. In my opinion, this is one of the most frustrating thing the company has done to small business owners in terms of backing up files. Don’t get me wrong, the concept behind the product makes sense – for those who can afford it. It has:

  • Faster backup technology.
  • Simplified restoration.
  • Simplified recovery of your operating system.
  • Ability to recover applications.
  • Improved scheduling.
  • Offsite removal of backups for disaster protection.
  • Remote administration.
  • Automatic disk usage management.
  • Extensive command-line support.
  • Support for optical media drives and removable media. (more…)
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May 6, 2009
Linux / Network Monitoring / Operating Systems / Remote Connectivity / Security / Servers / Small Business Server (SBS) / VPN

What Can Astaro Linux Do For You?

I had a client who was just getting killed by spammers. Every morning their inbox was loaded with junk mail and they had as much as five thousand (5,000) emails in their spam filter box when they came in. I decided to help them out with the free version of Astaro Security Gateway. We threw the software version (v7) on an old AMD box they had lying around – 2GHz processor, 20GB IDE drive, 512 RAM, two NICS. What a difference spam filtering at the perimeter of the network makes! The first week was like “wow”. Astaro actually generates a daily report and for email filtering we had 36,930 processed. Get this, out of that number, 36,832 was categorized as “Spam emails blocked”. And the live log was right there for us to see. Emails the system was not sure about were placed in quarantine and you have the option of having an admin view, release or delete those emails, or have a report sent to the affected user. The report even had a “Top 10 Spam Sender” entry with the IP addresses and countries of origin (little flags) of the bad guys. There was also a “Top 5 Spam Countries” entry on the report. (more…)

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May 5, 2009
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