Norton AntiSpam 2005 Not recommended

I have been using Norton Antivirus products for many years now, and they are usually pretty good. But I have had a major issues with when trying to install Norton AntiSpam 2005. Especially with windows 98.

Because of this, I would recommend not using Norton AntiSpam. It seems this is a widespread issue. Normally resulting in the users computer freezing up. I will blog any fixes when I find any. However, the worrying part is not even a mention or aknowledgement by Norton on their website or knowledge base. Yet thousands of moaning customers throughout the internet community.

Windows symphony

This is great. An excellent use of flash and windows sounds.

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/noises.php

What is going on Cisco?

What is going on Cisco? I am now day 12 after reporting a faulty firewall on a support package, and still a replacement is not organised.

Am I wrong in thinking that a faulty firewall is a grade 1 network emergency? System down. Security barriers off. Open source access. Remind me what Cisco specialises in? Oh yes, security.

Its at times like these I have fond thoughts of the great experiences we have with Sonicwall. Once we found a fault on a sonicwall firewall. We lodged the complaint at 5pm. 9am the following morning, UPS delivered a replacement. Later we called to arrange collection of the faulty unit. 20 minutes later, the man in brown was buzzing our door. HOORAY! That is everything you want from the manufacturer of the most important piece of network kit.
Wise up Cisco. Customers need to be looked after.

MailBasketMD installation failed.

Exchange 2003 does not come with a mehod of creating catch-all mailboxes. Unbelievable I know. However, for some reason, Microsoft have overlooked this functionality. There are various free scripts available online to do this. However we came accross a great tool called MailbasketMD which has a GUI, thus enabling a more userfriendly was of controlling catch-all mailboxes for Exchange 200/2003: http://www.turbogeeks.com/products/mailbasketmd.asp
We tried to install and ran into problems.

MailBasketMD is an ActiveX DLL that runs as a COM+ application. It therefore relies on the service Distributed Transaction Coordinator in order to run. We basically needed to start this service in order to get it working.

Startng this service was a seperate troubleshooting issue, details can be found here.

Distributed Transaction Coordinator failed to start ....

We ran into an issue with the Distributed Transaction Coordinator. We needed to install a COM+ application which was failing to install. After chekcing the event logs, we noticed various errors stating that the Distributed Transaction Coordinator could not start and we narrowed this down to the MSDTC log file missing.

The MSDTC log file is located in the %windir%\System32\DTCLog directory. When we checked for this directory, it did not exist. So we created the directory, then created the log file within the directory "MSDTC.log". We then ran "msdtc -resetlog" from the command promt. This indeed solved the problem as we were then able to start the DTC service.

The Link between keys Absconding and facial hair

Never mind the keys, look to the facial hair. Thanks to James Governor for the idea that to make a key work you need a beard. This is something my partner and I have been practicing for some time. It looks like Jim Bob needs to grow a longer beard or at least fill in the blanks. Personally, I recommend a piece of string running inside the arms of your jacket - instead of preventing the loss of gloves, this would be a handy way of keeping track of the aforementioned keys.

Lose the beards guys.

Back up headache

We encountered a problem recently while using the Windows Backup Utility (NTBackup.exe). We scheduled the backup of a server to happen overnight to a network share on a different server attached to the network.

After checking the logs, we realised that the backup hadn't happened. This was really strange - the back up worked while logged in, but when trying to run the scheduled backup, the backup failed with various Event ID errors relating to DCOM problems.

It is sometimes the simpleist of mistakes that cause the most amount of head scratching. The problem turned out to be that the backup was scheduled to Append the data to the media rather than Replace. This doesn't sound like a huge problem on the face of it. But the fact that there was no backup job to append to caused the error.