Silicon Shecky

Going from Blackberry Enterprise 4.1 to Blackberry Enterprise Express 5.0.2 looks like a daunting task, but really it is not that tough.

So there I was, ready to find the stash of nukes I hid somewhere. In anticipation of the migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 coming up real soon, I had to upgrade our BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) to the most recent version. the prior guy who had gone through 2 weeks of Blackberry training kept putting it off, coming up with excuses, and now is no longer with the company. I had done what anyone should do. I read up on the product and learned how to do the upgrade. Then the worst thing happened. Upon running Windows Update and Rebooting, the Blackberry Server came up but only enough to be pingable. I couldn’t remote into it, which meant so much for doing everything after hours.

First thing in the morning I went to our server room at the office where the BES is located, forced a hard reboot and the server came up normally. then came the task at hand. Few small things about going from BES 4.1 to BES Express 5.0.2. First you have to completely uninstall 4.1. Second, 5.0.2 is extremely slick. Once installed, and I got the users added into it, the majority of phones were found and automatically connected, as if they had always been on the 5.0.2 version of the BES. There were a couple of problem phones, but for the most part, all the planning on having to reactivate 50 Blackberrys went to the trash.

Sometimes, when things get done right, good surprises happen. Just never let it stop you from planning for the worst case scenario. Next step will be the final Exchange Migration.

Exchange doesn’t like drive error, or bad blocks. Never has, never will, and while there are things that can temporarily correct the problem, new hardware is the ultimate solution.

I’ve been slowly prepping to do a migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 at the company I work for. I’ve done my reading, come up with all sorts of bad scenarios, and basically anything else I could think of to prepare for it. Mind you, I’m not the only high end internal IT guy (Engineer, support, sales, etc…), but I’m also the only outbound tech. I had things planned out to finish the actual prep the day before a long weekend a few weeks ago, just in case I ran into any problems.

Smart thing I did that, because I ran into a major problem. I had to go to a client site, due to a printer issues. the client is a major one for the company and the directive came at 10pm in the evening from by boss to be out there the next day. This of course caused me to cancel the planned migration.

The day of the cancellation was going to be installing Exchange 2010 on the newly purchased server, and installing the latest version of Blackberry Enterprise server so that we could keep using our Blackberries. Needless to say, a few days after the cancelled migration date, our current Exchange 2007 server starts running really slow. Disk errors, bad blocks, a chkdsk cleared the errors, and I was put on the hot seat.

I explained why the migration had not happened, how I was ordered to be down at a client for a printer problem. How the amount of e-mail data will take 2-3 days to migrate, and that I wanted to do it over a long weekend. I was asked for a hard date for the migration, something soon, since slow or non-working e-mail near the end of the month was not acceptable. So I gave a date of this upcoming weekend, and went to work on getting the domain all prepped.

So here I am trying to run the Schema and AD prep on a domain where the Exchange server is in a separate site (Not domain, just physical site) from the Schema Master. Not only that but the Schema Master is a 2003 server. Yes, following Microsoft’s information of just running the Schema Prep through a 2008 server that is in the site where the schema master is located, has not worked so far.

I know I’ll get it, I dealt with this went tossing SP2 on the Exchange 2007 server, I’m just frustrated that Microsoft doesn’t even know how its own stuff works.

Firefox 4 is out. For a browser that re-sparked the browser wars, Firefox had been falling behind lately. Can 4 bring back Firefox?

I have a tendency not to download betas of web browsers. I’m not much of a bug hunter, haven’t been able to establish myself in those communities, don’t have a ton of time for actual hard core testing, and I’m not a developer. I just like having things work, especially where web browsing is concerned. So when I heard that Firefox 4′s final release was going to be the exact same as the last Release Candidate, I decided to actually jump the gun and start using it. I figured it couldn’t be any worse than using 3.6.

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser since version 2, and overall have liked it. There have always been some issues with it, such as the memory hole it has, but they were things I could mostly live with. As  Firefox 3 kept getting updated though, it was all getting worse and worse. To open my iGoogle home page, which is set up with a bunch of news widgets, would take 5 minutes. Not only that, but the whole browser would be slow and unresponsive until it fully opened.

So I finished downloading Firefox 4 and installing it, expecting the same sluggishness. Surprisingly to me, my iGoogle paged opened in under a minute, and I was all set to go to other websites in other tabs, even while the iGoogle page was loading up. This is starting to look promising.

I continued on my browsing way, going to sites I frequent such as Tech Republic, ZDNet, Krebs on Security, and many more. All rendered faster than in Firefox 3.6. I did run into an occasional site which just wouldn’t open in Firefox 4 (Buffalo Wild Wings being one), but considering that there have been a lot of changes in Firefox 4, this doesn’t surprise me.

Everything isn’t all roses though. Java rendering (I enjoy playing Text Twist) and some Flash rendering is slow and painful. The Java being the worst of them all, as it slows to a crawl with a java game on Yahoo’s website. Once loaded, it works ok, but still a bunch of issues. Also, Firefox still uses a lot of memory, and doesn’t have the best memory management in the world. I have also heard reports of people who have had issues with it upon install, although the percentage seems to be small.

Is Firefox 4 an improvement? Definitely. Is it a game changer? No. Can it fend off Google Chrome? Maybe. Personally, I’m not going to Chrome unless I have to (Google has enough info on me from Android, Gmail etc, they don’t get any more if I can help it), and I don’t care of IE, Safari, or Opera. In the end, its really about what you are comfortable with and what works. On that, Firefox 4 is a solid, fast browser.