The Network Manager at Westminster School presents solutions to sticky problems...

Monday 16 March 2009

IPv6 Bites...

Since my talk on IPv6, it has since come to my attention that IPv6 is in the top 5 urgent agenda list for President Obama's incoming Commerce Secretary. The details are all over the internet even if you do not search very hard. One such article can be found on http://tiny.cc/FINMg It seems the ongoing concern is that someone out there will be issued the last remaining IPv4 address sometime in the next 3 years...

Despite all this, our latest internet link is about to be implemented with good old IPv4. I made the enquiry on whether we can get IPv6 details for this connection. The response?

"We're also in the process of moving to IPv6 ourselves, sorry for any inconvenience."

Nice to know we are not alone...

Wednesday 4 March 2009

IT Managers' Meeting at Westminster


In the spirit of Ian Yorston's talk on micro-blogging and social networking, all the resources for this event are going to be hosted "in the cloud." I thought to announce this move straight away on Twitter. I was therefore rather amused when I discovered that for a second day in a row the micro-blogging site had fallen off it's branch. Despite this knockback we shall soldier on.

As not everyone is on Twitter, and not following my particular Tweet, I hope that Ian will forgive me for using that conventional method of distribution; the Corporate Email.

The PowerPoint presentations will be hosted on my SkyDrive, that remarkable 5Gb of storage space provided to individuals for free as part of the Live package. The SkyDrive allows for both private and public documents. You can now take your presentation to your next meeting without a single piece of hardware on you. If they have internet, you can present it.

Of course, the SkyDrive is also a great place to share documents. You do this by adding documents to the Public Folder in your SkyDrive. It is then possible to use an amazingly long and complex link to share your files. Which leads me to the fourth and final piece of public air estate... http://www.tinyurl.cc/

A single SkyDrive link will overflow the 140 character limit of Blogger. (The links below were 144 characters in length.) It also looks horrendous. Go to Tinyurl and enter this complex link address and you are provided with a tiny url to replace the massively complex one. Not only can I now include these links in my Tweet, but my post here looks much neater. The URLs are practically permanent provided they are used. Unused URLs are deleted after a year of inactivity. If you have ever received an email with the URL cut in half, you will also appreciate the usefulness of Tinyurl.
The other sites mentioned in Ian's talk were:
  • Hootsuite
  • Facebook
And so to the other presentations:

http://tiny.cc/GbsMD VMWare - Server Virtualisation presented by Richard Hindley. This details Westminster School's implementation of and resoning behind using VMware to virtualise Servers and keep data safe.

http://tiny.cc/P7EsV App-v - Application Virtualisation presented by me. A lively discussion on Microsoft's idea of Virtual Applications and possibly the future of application delivery?

http://tiny.cc/vAOVx To VLE or not - On VLEs and MLEs presented by Ian Phillips. There is much more in this document than time allowed Ian to present.

http://tiny.cc/3Y7Ua Pupil Connectivity - This presentation was not shown in the end. Instead we had a discussion on the subject. This presentation details the thinking behind Westminster's implementation of a Cafe style wireless.

http://tiny.cc/bjApH IPv6 - A technical look at why we should keep an eye on IPv6. Presented briefly by me.

Enjoy...

Tuesday 3 March 2009

Exchange 2007, the GAL and Custom Address Lists

Exchange 2007 has new ways of approaching Address Lists. As a consequence, you may have address lists created in previous versions of Exchange that now seem imutable and not upgradeable. The Console returns with a most helpfull message advising you to use the -ForceUpgrade option. Rather than the LDAP filters used by previous implementation, Exchange 2007 now uses the OPath format.

As with many of the more complex tasks we must ditch the moderately functional Exchange Management Console and use the Exchange Management Shell. As a tip when working with any shell, I recomend that you use Notepad to create your command strings (which can get very long) and then cut and paste them into your shell window.

To create a new Address List you need to use the add-addresslist cmdlet. An exaple of this is:

new-addresslist -Identity Name -Container "\Parent Container Name" -RecipientFilter { ( ( property -eq 'value' ) -and ( property -like 'value' ) ) }

If you are looking at the list of address lists in Exchange Management Console, you will understand the properties above. To amend the filter afterwards use the set-addresslist cmdlet:

set-addresslist -Identity Name -RecipientFilter { ( ( property -eq 'value' ) -or ( property -like 'value' ) ) }

These property values are not the LDAP or AD equivalents, so you need to check http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738157.aspx for the appropriate property you are filtering against (for sp1.) If you are amending an existing pre-2007 address list, then here is where we use the -ForceUpgrade option:

set-addresslist -Identity Name -RecipientFilter { ( ( property -eq 'value' ) ) } -ForceUpgrade

If you do not include a new filter, but just the -ForceUpgrade switch, nothing happens and the filter remains in the old format.

You can create an Address List in the Console and then edit it using the Shell, but there is a gotcha: The address list must not use any of the standard filters. If they do, adding a Recipient Filter in the Shell will fail. So when you create the Address List, select the 'None' radio button in the "include these recipient types." Better still, skip the Console altogether. Typing into a shell is becoming a lost art. Be part of the revival...

Finally, Exchange 2007 sp1 still appears to have issues with the Default Global Address List. In our CCR implementation, updates to the GAL still do not occur at the scheduled times. Consequently we have to manually update the GAL every time we make an amendment. This is simply:

update-addresslist -Identity "Default Global Address List"

Job done!