BrokenImage Tech Blog

Comcast CG814WG - PPTP VPN Stopped Working

I had a few customers who had the comcast "home networking" package. This package included a Netgear CG814WG modem/router combo. As of late July 2009, a new firmware was pushed to these units that has disabled the VPN/pptp passthrough functionality.

After approximately 6 calls to Comcast and 3 tech visits, they replaced this unit with 2 different units; a cable modem and a seperate netgear router. PPTP VPN's started working immediately.

If you are having this issue, call Comcast and be persistant. STILL most of the techs don't know that this is an issue. I guess this shows you the lack of communication between support centers at this big company.

SATA Raid - TLER - Error recovery

I've had customers running SATA raid arrays for years. I've always noticed a slightly higher rate of failure with SATA drives, then SCSI drives in a standard setup. Recently, I've had a few customers where their original SATA configurations start losing disks at a very high rate. When SATA raid first came about, there wasn't much information regarding what SATA disks to use in a raid configuration. Now, everywhere you look manufacturers are offering enterprise level disks.

There is a very important difference between these disks and standard desktop drives. The error recovery feature. You see, standard desktop disks use error recovery, to the extent that a drive can be unavailable to the OS for many seconds. This is ok in a standard single disk setup, as the OS will just wait for the disk to become available. But in a RAID configuration, the controller thinks that a disk that is not responsive is failed, and will mark the drive as dead. In a system in a higher load the problem becomes more prevalent.

For any SATA raid controller, be sure to purchase disks that have the error recovery feature disabled. For Western Digital, that would mean disks employing their TLER technology, which currently is their RE line of drives. Who would guess it; RE stands for RAID Edition.

Better yet, find documentation, or ask the manufacturer of your controller what drives, and firmware levels have been tested for compatibility.

Outsourcing

What happened to the good old days, when you would call up Dell, or whomever, you would go through about 15 voice prompts, and then get a technician with a very strong indian accent who said "Hello, this is Chad, how can I help you today?". Immediately, you would call BS, knowing that this guys name was not Chad.

Well, it seems that HP is going honest. I opened a chat window today on a broken printer, and below is what I got:

Thotreingam Inperiru Shimrei? WTF?

I used to complain that I'd get the indian guy named Steve, but compared to Thotreingam, I think I'd prefer them lying to me.

At least I was respectful, and addressed my awesome HP technician by name.

Exchange Shared Calendar (vacation, group calendar,etc)

Ok, first technical post. I recently had to figure out the best way to do shared calendars in Exchange 2007. I used to do this with public folders and it worked well enough, but the word is, thats a no-no anymore. So we have to go the shared mailbox route. By no means am I an exchange master, but I don't see why public folders aren't the best option for this, instead of creating a whole mailbox, why couldn't they just add some basic extensions to the public folder options to give them more functionality, and leave the mailboxes to what you would think they would be for; a person receiving mail.

Anyway, since Windows and Exchange 2007 seem to be going the command line route, we have to change some settings and permissions through the exchange management shell. Further in this post, I'll go through the commands that I needed to get my install working.

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Volkswagen Sucks

I have a 2004 Passat, and boy does that thing eat cash. Every time ya take it in, they want to do something. Took it in for inspection and they do $600 worth of repairs. (They wanted to do $900 in repairs)..

So here's the letter I wrote to them:

I dropped my passat off the evening of the 12th for an oil change and inspection. I called to check the status at 4:00PM and found that they just started on my car hooked it up to the emissions machine. (next time I'll be more specific that I don't want my vehicle to be the last one of the day) In the next 2 hours, they found, and completed over $500 worth of repairs (over $700 was recommended). It seems that every time we bring this vehicle in, it requires something.
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Versa Technologies

I suppose I have to give a link to my company, Versa Technologies. It is a local IT solution provider, concentration on remote backup solutions for businesses.

Most of the experiences on this blog will come from work being performed from Versa.

www.versatechnologies.net

First

Alright. First Post.

I hope to get this blog rolling with some useful technical information. Expect to see answers to any problems that I have to google for awhile to figure out. SBS 2008 is currently in my test server, I'm also running Win 2008 Server with HyperV on my main production server so there will be some posts about those. I'll also have some Exchnage 2007 tidbits as I run into them. I think my first real technical post will be about Exchange 2007, and either the autodiscover feature, or permission setup for Calendar/Resource mailboxes.

More to come...