Silicon Shecky

Another Patch Tuesday happened this week, and this time 6 of the patches are for security holes which have exploits out in the wild, including the Office holes that I complained about last month. There are a total of 8 patches out this month and while that is good, you might want to check on the other updates this month due to end of mainstream support for XP, Office 2003, and Exchange 2003. All three will continue to get security updates for a few years, but all of them will no longer get new features, or non-critical updates.

Also, released today was the Beta for Exchange 2010. I know, most of you are just starting to use Exchange 2007, but if you have a test environment for this new version of Exchange, I would suggest using it and report on bugs to Microsoft so we can get a less buggy release of it.

Finally, SP2 for Office 2007 is on the horizon, and it will give Office native ODF file support. This means that if something is saved in Open Office’s normal formats, Office 2007 should be able to just open it.

Sorry that this blog has been a bit spotty this week. Work has been really busy, and I’ve been learning about some new initiatives and offerings that we are doing at the office. Let see if I can get some time to do some more posts, even if its just the evenings.

You know, I love my job. I love being able to work on things and learn new thoughts and ideas as I work. It is so fulfilling to see a project finished and working right. The only problem is they never are really finished.

So after the big file migration, and the corrections to the AD Users/OUs/Groups was down to a tweak here or there, I decided to see if I could figure out why some things with Exchange and DNS seemed to be so damn slow. They say that curiosity killed the cat and satisfaction brought him back, well we shall see how this ends.

Between finding that AD/DNS integration was set to a legacy standard, even though we use Server 2003, to find that we had only 1 Global Catalog, even though we have 5 DCs 4 of them at other sites, only one DC as a Global Catalog. Replication for AD was set to 4 hours, and all other sorts of small errors in the DNS server have been found. Its the sort of stuff that should have been thought through when the original migration from 2000 to 2003 happened.

Well, at least its keeping me busy, and who knows when any of this stuff will come in handy, but I know it will at some point.

So, while reading the other blogs and news sites I check daily, I came across this interesting article. It seems that Microsoft’s .NET 3.5 SP1 has caused yet more problems. This time with Exchange 2007 on SBS 2008.  With this latest issue that has now cropped up with .Net 3.5 Its time to remember a few things…

1) In Microsoft’s defense, they can’t test everything before releasing stuff. That is why hot fixes exist.

2) Never just accept patches. Always find a way of testing them yourself, even if it is on a personal machine, and research the patches also to see what problems other’s have had. The more reports you find, the more prepared you can be about any issues with it.

I know they are simple thoughts, but just watching how Microsoft has screwed up with this latest version of  .Net it just amazes me that people don’t think of these things. Course, I am one to speak.