I’ve been in IT 8 years and don’t think I’ve seen this request before:

Mr. Potato Head - DLL file is in use and cannot be installed
Muppets Sorting and Ordering has no picture
Micky Mouse has script runtime error

Obviously, this is for our preschool area and is certainly a legitimate request for them. I thought it was funny though.

As much as I am not a huge fan of new release from Microsoft, I must say Windows Server 2008 is a release I’ve been looking forward to.  Specifically, the new terminal services features are really nice.  RemoteApp allows you to stream individual apps over the RDP protocol - similar to what can be done with Citrix, but without the hassles.

We currently use a Windows 2003 terminal server for remote users to access Shelby and EMS.  The goal is to replace that setup with the Windows 2008 RemoteApp functionality.  I was able to make some big progress on that today.  I got a Windows 2008 virtual machine built (Virtualization is pretty standard for any new servers we deploy).

After several headaches, I was able to get Shelby installed and an RDP file generated.  I must say I’m impressed.  After installing the app, you simply publish it as a RemoteAPP and generate an RDP file (and optionally, an MSI for group policy deployment).  Once that’s done, the RDP file gets placed on the users machine and it appears just like the app is running natively - Awsome!

Next steps are to get EMS working (requires an update to run on Windows 2008/Vista) and Ultimately run Outlook as a RemoteApp for Mac users (Mac RDP client doesn’t yet support RemoteApp).

The alert emails as well as emailing activation passwords to users has never quite worked right on our BES server. I’d see something like this in the event log every time BES tried to send an email: DoSMTPCommand: Command was: MAIL FROM: <BESAdmin> followed by DoSMTPCommand: Response was: 501 5.1.7 Invalid address. Notice the from address? There’s no domain listed. Weird. I know I entered the correct fully qualified address.

I’ve Googled, searched the docs, read forums, and everything in between and never could find the issue. I don’t have a need to email passwords to users and the alerts weren’t real important, so fixing it has been on the back burner. Fast forward to today - I came across a forum post suggesting to add a new DWORD value - MxDisabled=1 in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\BESAlert.

I tried it and low and behold it fixed the SMTP issues. I can’t imagine what disabling MX lookups would have to do with the FROM address being improperly formatted. I wonder if it’s a bug in BES? Anyone else seen this issue?

I’ve read blogs for years, especially since joining the IT team at JFBC.  There are lots of unique and challenging situations in the church IT world, and it’s great to be able to learn from others.   It seems like even though we are geographically dispersed and have unique ministries, we’re all faced with a similar set of challenges.  Hopefully through this blog, I’ll be able to give back to the community by sharing my experiences.

Anyway, I’ve been tossing around the idea of starting a blog for quite a while and just never made the time to get it all setup.  Turns out it’s easier than I expected.  Had everything up and running in a couple of hours.  Just need to develop a theme for the site and find some readers now!