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The Electric Wand

Random thoughts of a technologist and business strategist.

The biggest file I've ever seen - 3Tb PUB.EDBApril 25

Well I haven't seen this for myself, but I was sent a screenshot of it. Actually, it was 3 different Exchange public folder servers, each of which had ~3Tb of public folder data...

That's scary and impressive in equal measure.

Reminds me of some of the stories people posted in response to my How does your Exchange garden grow? post nearly 3 years ago, on the Exchange Team blog...

Tips for optimizing Vista on new hardwareApril 23

Ed Bott over at ZDNet posted a really interesting article yesterday, detailing the journey he had of making his friend's brand new Sony Viao laptop work properly with Windows Vista Business. In short, his friend upgraded a trusty old XP Vaio to a new machine which came with Vista, but had a terrible experience of crashes, slow start up, bogging performance etc.

In a nutshell, the advice is pretty straightforward, at least for technically minded folk and backs up the experience of some of us who've been using Vista all through the beta program:

• Start with Vista-capable hardware. It's almost a waste of money trying to upgrade old PCs to run Vista. New machines which (supposedly) have been designed to run Vista with modern architectures, devices which have a good chance of having decent Vista drivers and enough horsepower to do it justice, are so cheap now, it's hardly worth trying to tweak anything older than a couple of years old to get Vista working well on it.
  
• Use the latest, best quality drivers you can. It still amazes me how many manufacturers ship machines pre-loaded with years-old device drivers, or (conversely), how many update drivers & BIOSes frequently but with poor attention to quality (the device driver certification program is there for a reason; if you have a piece of hardware that comes with a non-certified driver, you have to ask: if the manufacturer

Tip for finding when an appointment was createdApril 21

Here's a tip for when you suspect someone has magicked up an appointment to coincidentally collide with an Outlook meeting request you sent them...

In your own calendar (and other people's), you can see when a meeting was scheduled (ie request was sent or created), as well as other facts (like when you accepted it) - eg:

If a blocked out time in the calendar is just an appointment (ie something that was just put there by the owner of the calendar), you don't see the date it was added...

Remember, they're all just forms in the end 

Way back when Exchange was young (it started at 4.0), the design was that

Imperialism, Metric-centricity and Live SearchApril 17

I'm a child of a mixed up time when it comes to measures and the likes. I am feet and inches tall, stones and pounds heavy, when it's cold outside, it's below zero degrees, but when it's hot, it's in the 80s.

I learned small measurement in mms and cms, so have no real idea of how big an inch is, but long distances are thought of in miles (and petrol is bought in litres to go into a car which reports how many miles per gallon it's getting).

Now and again, I'll need to try & recall how many chains there are in a fathom, or ounces per metric tonne, and typically call on the services of a search engine. That used to be searching for something like:

... where we'd normally get taken to a site in the results, which has a wizard of its own to do the calculation. Often times, the reason I want to convert something is because I'm already doing a calculation and I just need to know the ratios involved...

Which is why I love the little innovation that Live Search introduced:

Exchange 2007 clustering adviceApril 15

I appreciate it's been a while since I blogged last - a combination of "not much to talk about, really" with even more "no time to talk about it"... :(

Anyway, a few questions came in the other day from a reader:

-SCR and CCR seems to work with SAN and DAS. When DAS (direct attached or local storage) is used, and it most probably it’s attached to the Active node, how does the Passive node function if it hasn’t got connection to the DAS/Local storage of the Active node?

In CCR, it's important to realise that the passive node has its *own* set of disks, which contain its *own* copy of the data - doesn't really matter if they are DAS or SAN disks (at least not conceptually). So, in a CCR failover scenario, the (as was) passive node switches to being the active node and uses its own copy of the database (which by now becomes the main one). SCR is different in the way failover happens, but in principle it's similar - the secondary copy of the data is brought online and takes over servicing the clients, but using its own copy of their database.

-Some clients are indicating that having CCR or SCR one wouldn’t have a need for Backup of mailbox servers. Do you have any comments?

Absolutely not. That's like saying, because my car has an airbag, I don't need to wear a seatbelt. Check out the High Availabil