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With the death of Steve Jobs and the release of his biography there is much discussion of his legacy in the tech world and beyond.  Anyone who knows me will know that I have never been a fan of the Macintosh operating system or the Apple hardware that runs it.  However as I have documented here as well as my now lost purchase of a 5th gen iPod nano last fall I have given money to Apple for four iPods.  I have also been party to Kelly getting an iPhone 3 and 4, even pretty much paying for the 4.

I wanted to write up some thoughts on Steve Jobs and the more recent products he had a large part in releasing.  This wasn’t meant to be as long as it turned out but I just kept writing.  Hopefully it is worth the read for those who find it.

Many people will argue that Steve Jobs legacy is the Macintosh and its related computing devices or possibly Pixar.  I think his iDevices have had and will have much larger and longer lasting impact on the technology world and beyond.

iPod

The iPod was first introduced almost exactly ten years ago on October 23, 2001.  When the iPod was released it was not the first MP3 player that honor goes to the Diamond Rio which was followed by the Creative NOMAD . It  wasn’t the best by most accounts either.  It didn’t even really take off in sales until 2003 when the 3rd Generation iPod (now known as Classic) came out.  Not surprisingly sales seemed to increase when iTunes 4.1 was released and introduced Windows support for iPod removing the need to use MusicMatch Jukebox to sync the iPod and opening the iPod up to the vast majority of the computing world using Windows instead of Macintosh computers.

The iPod did nothing truly new or unique other than potentially the click wheel which Apple didn’t even create (Synaptics who is known for laptop touchpads primarily created it) and has since been all but killed by the iPhone and iPod Touch.  Over the first few generations Apple rapidly refined the iPod and iTunes to support it.  As the iPod sales and popularity grew it basically killed off the rest of the MP3 player market.  The iPod is also arguably responsible for the near death of the CD and growth of digital audio sales via the Internet. 

There have been many sizes and shapes of the iPod including the now named Classic, the Mini, the Nano, the Shuffle and lastly the Touch which is really an iPhone without a phone.  The storage sizes grew with the growth of miniature hard drives and then shrank again when the iPod switched to solid state memory instead.

At this point it appears Apple is ready to kill off the iPod except for the iPod Touch which has more in common with the iPhone than its iPod ancestors.  The iPod was the first of the iDevices and started a string of changes throughout the world.

iTunes and iTunes Store

iTunes is a piece of software as opposed to hardware like the other three but it is intrinsically linked to them and they wouldn’t have worked as well up to this point without it.  iTunes was initially released on Mac OS 9 and then shipped with all versions of OS X.  As mentioned above in October 2003 iTunes 4.1 was released bringing with it Windows (2000 / XP) support.  iTunes wasn’t the first CD ripping / MP3 playing / music organizing software and initially it definitely wasn’t the best.  The Windows version still to this day is a little bloated and slow but it is your only option if you have an iDevice, at least for now.  Just as with the iPod iTunes has succeeded in killing of most competitors (like its initial partner MusicMatch JukeBox) or at least keeping them niche players like WinAmp.

During its development Apple added podcast support and even tried to control the name podcast saying it was related or similar to iPod.  Again iTunes became known as the defacto standard podcast aggregator mainly due to the index of podcasts available in the iTunes store.  I personally use iTunes and iPods for podcasts about 90% of the time with audiobooks and music making up the remaining 10%.

In the spring of 2003 Apple released the iTunes store that is now one of the largest (if not the largest) digital media stores on the Internet.  The iTunes store started with music only; bringing with it some of the biggest changes in the music industry in decades.  iTunes brought legality to the realm of MP3 (or AAC) music; something that had been sorely missing in the time of Napster and other P2P sharing services.  Second, in most cases songs were available individually rather than in a total album grouping.  This allowed consumers to purchase only the '”good” songs and skip the filler that many albums had.  Over time there have been several competitors in the digital music sales arena that have come and gone even from big companies like Wal-Mart and Best Buy.  Currently the only real competitor to the iTunes store is Amazon, which is good since it is keeping Apple honest at this point.

The iTunes store started offering other products over the years as well.  First was Audiobooks via a partnership with Audible.  Next Apple added video in the form of music videos and TV shows in October 2005 with the release of the first video capable iPod.  Later in March 2009 Apple added movies to its video library.  The last major addition to iTunes was the App Store as part of the iPhone 3G release.  The App Store now has hundreds of thousands of apps available.  My biggest problem with the App Store is that it doesn’t have a requirement of having demo versions.  In many cases the only way to test an app is to purchase it and hope it is worth the money.

One interesting note about iTunes is that even in its latest version of 10.5 it still supports Windows XP which means machines dating back to at least 2001 if not earlier can still run it.  On the flip side iTunes 10.5 only works on Mac OS X 10.5.8 which can’t be run on anything before 2003.  It is required to have iTunes 10.5 to support the latest iPhone which means some will be forced to upgrade their computer to support their phone.

iPhone

The second major iDevice released was the iPhone which was announced in January 2007 and released in June 2007.  Just like the iPod the iPhone wasn’t the first smart phone by far, the Palm Treo (2003), Windows Mobile (2003) and BlackBerry 8000 (2006) all proceeded it in the US alone.  It also wasn’t the first Apple branded phone either, that honor went to the doomed from the start Motorola ROKR.  The iPhone brought with it a new touch screen based interface not needing (or really working with) a stylus and form factor eschewing almost all buttons.  It also had a web browser that worked more like a desktop one than a mobile phone one allowing access to more of the web.  It did however ship without Adobe Flash and still to this day lacks it and by all indications will never have it.  With the increased functionality of HTML5 the need for Flash keeps shrinking.

The original iPhone lacked 3G which meant its Internet connection was quite slow, even in its latest version it doesn’t yet have LTE/4G opting to wait for the chips that provide it to shrink and lower power demand.  It also had an initial price of $599, which was soon dropped to $399 and left many early adopters a little unhappy.  The first versions of the iPhone came in 4 GB and 8 GB models which was less storage space than almost all iPods which meant the iPhone wasn’t even a very good iPod initially.  Now more than 4 years later the iPhone is on its 5th version with an almost yearly release schedule.  The latest generation is thinner and lighter but for the most part is similar to how it started.

The iPhone started with a still only 2 megapixel camera and now has an 8 megapixel still camera that can also record 1080p video as well as a secondary camera that is front facing for video conferencing.  Its storage has also grown up to a maximum of 64 GB on the current high end models.  The screen also doubled in resolution giving it one the highest pixel density displays on the market (it is less than 4” in size though).

The iPhone has sold millions of units worldwide now over its five versions.  Those sales have brought thousands of developers trying to cash in on all the users of iPhones via the iTunes App Store.  Also as the iPhone has matured its performance and capabilities have improved allowing for larger, more complex and a wider variety of apps.  All apps must go through the Apple approval process which sometimes seems overly rigorous and at other times amazingly lacking.  If Apple doesn’t like an App, like Google Voice, it will just not allow it but then turn around and allow over a hundred fart sound apps.

The iPhone made a large dent in the fledgling smartphone market.  It pretty much sealed the fate of Windows Mobile 6.x but Microsoft is attempting to make a come pack with Windows Phone 7.  The iPhone began the decline of BlackBerry which has since accelerated and now it is questionable how long BlackBerry will survive.  About a year after the iPhone came out in September 2008 Google released the first Smartphone running the Android operating system.

At this point there are close to a hundred different smartphones worldwide running the Android operating system from almost a dozen manufacturers as opposed to the 3-4 models of the iPhone from only Apple.  The Android operating system is still pretty rough around the edges and Google has to rely upon phone makers and cell phone service providers to release updates as opposed to Apple being able to totally control the process.  However due to the sheer number of options the Android based phones are now outselling the iPhone.  Apple still has mindshare due to marketing and the app store but who knows for how long.

There is no denying the iPhone revolutionized and jump started the smartphone market just like the iPod did to the MP3 player market.  It remains to be seen how the iPhone will fare in the long run since it actually will have to compete instead of simply being a monopoly owner of the market.

iPad

The final iDevice and potentially the one that Steve Jobs will be remembered most for is the iPad.  The iPad was announced in January 2010 and released in April 2010 and then was quickly followed by a second version in March 2011.  After the initial announcement I wrote up my thoughts on the iPad based on the information released at the announcement.  I still agree with much of what I said then but I have changed my opinion in some areas.

This will sound like a broken record but the iPad was definitely not the first device of its type, there have been tablet / slate devices since the late 90’s at least.  Many if not most of those previous devices were not commercial successes.  One of the more successful previous attempts was Microsoft’s Tablet PC as part of Windows XP and later Windows 7.  Even Microsoft couldn’t break out beyond a couple of vertical markets like healthcare and education.  Microsoft was just not a wide ranging success.

Apple took what it had learned and succeeded with in the iPhone and iPod Touch and just expanded it to a larger screen.  The iPad doesn’t have the phone functionality of the iPhone but does have the option of cellular or can be Wi-Fi only like the iPod touch.  The software is literally identical between the three devices which have further helped expand the market for the iTunes store and especially the app portion.  It seems Apple just took the iPhone and stuck a 10” screen on it.

The iPad had the luxury of coming out at a time where miniaturization, screen technology and battery efficiency intersected in such a way to make the device possible.  Previous devices were missing at least one of the above which prevented the device from succeeding.  For Windows the two common drawbacks were weight and battery life.  Other devices lacked functionality or performance to get the battery life needed for a portable device.  I honestly don’t think the iPad could have existed as little as six and for sure twelve months before it came out.

The iPad has been an even bigger success in a shorter time than the iPhone; it has sold 40 million units in only 18 months.  It took the iPod over 4 years and the iPhone almost 3 years to sell that many units.  As a result of its massive sales the iPad has become synonymous with the term tablet so much that when talking about a Windows tablet PC I have to be careful to be more specific since if I just say tablet everyone thinks I mean iPad.  The iPad has also helped accelerate digital books (but not nearly as much as Amazon Kindle) and digital magazines along with digital on demand of other types of content.

Just like with the iPhone the competitors (after getting over the initial shock) are fighting back.  Google followed almost the exact same game plan by taking its existing Android operating system and polishing it a bit and putting it on 10” tablet slate devices.  Also just like with phones Google has partnered with even more hardware providers with devices ranging from 5-11” trying to compete with Apple.  Google’s attempts thus far have had not had much success with the sales of its device being measured in the tens of thousands instead of tens of millions.  Although Samsung with its Galaxy Tab 10 has gotten such a good device out that Apple has sued to prevent its sale based on patents.  As with  phones, I have a feeling that given time Google will get more devices refined and will have a broader range of devices and pricing and as a result may start selling more competitively with Apple.  Microsoft is also preparing a response with Windows 8 which will be geared more toward touch based computing with an emphasis on slates.  Windows 8 is most likely 6-18 months away though so Apple will have an opportunity to have 1-2 more revisions and get an even larger sales lead in this space.

Legacy

I think one of or all three of these devices will be Steve Jobs lasting legacy or at least the changes they brought about in technology and society.  Apple and Jobs didn’t invent most of these ideas, what they did was refined and polished them and marketed them amazingly.  That is another important part of Jobs legacy is being this generation’s P.T. Barnum and knowing how to make people desire what he is pushing.  Most competitors could only wish they had a pitchman like Jobs and the mystique of Apple.  It remains to be seen how Apple will do in the post Jobs era, but it will take 12-18 months to really get an answer.

Saw these and thought they were interesting / funny.

Google Graveyard

Microsoft Graveyard

After almost 2 years of problems with various bits of my blog software I think I have it pretty much totally working.  Due to perl and some coding that give pretty much no error messages I have had lingering problems since June 2009.  Today as I was upgrading I stumbled across not so much a fix (since I am still not sure of exact source of problem) but a workaround.  I still have one other quirk, but luckily it isn’t preventing me from posting / updating the site.  Unfortunately it seems the Movable Type platform has been slowly dying as other platforms like wordpress improve around it.  Mostly I am too lazy / worried about switching platforms to make a jump.  Maybe the next server build I do I will switch.

For those that are curious about my issue check out this thread on a forum going back to the beginning of the problem.

Apple had their annual iPod announcement and it is quite a head scratcher this year for me.  I will leave the iPod touch, which is even more an iPhone minus the phone, for later.  I want to concentrate on the shuffle and nano for now.  Oh and the classic, well it seems forgotten at this point.

It appears Apple has pretty much admitted failure with the 3rd gen shuffle by rolling back the design to the model introduced originally in 4 years ago almost to the day.  The new 4th gen shuffle is almost identical to the 2nd gen other than shrinking a bit.  The 2nd gen was 1.62 x 1.07 x 0.41 inches versus the 4th gen at 1.24 x 1.14 x 0.34 inches,  basically a half inch narrower.  For weight it has slimmed down from 0.55 ounces to 0.44 ounces, if you can tell this difference good for you.  The final revision of the 2nd gen had 2 GB of memory just the same as the 4th gen.  Meet the new shuffle same as the old shuffle from 4 years ago, except maybe a bit cheaper?

If the shuffle lineage is confusing the nano is jut mind blowing for me.  The nano has been a steady improvement of features and design from its first release in September, 2005 following the basic size and shape of the Mini before it (other than the case misstep with 1st gen and the fatty 3rd gen shape).  Each of the previous generations have added nice features and refinements with 5th gen adding audio / video recording, improved video playback, game support, pedometer and radio reception.  The 5th gen was simply an amazing amount of tech jammed into a tiny little device.  For me it seemed like a Flip camera and a iPod squished into a smaller, cheaper and generally better device.  One might assume the 6th gen would further refine this by adding maybe a HD video recording upgrade or increasing storage space options to include 32 GB, however you would be totally wrong.

Instead of refining the nano Apple with the 6th gen threw it out completely and started over from scratch with a device that is basically a mini iPod touch that is crippled.  Gone is the clickwheel (did Apple learn nothing from the 3rd gen Shuffle?) and replaced with a tiny touch screen.  Also dropped are audio / video recording and video playback.  The screen is smaller (2.2-inch vs. 1.54-inch) and lower resolution (240x376 vs. 240x240), although slightly higher pixel density (204 vs. 220).  It is definitely smaller in some dimensions now at 1.48 x 1.61 x 0.35 inches versus 3.6 x 1.5 x 0.24 inches and weighs less at 0.74 ounces versus 1.28 ounces.  There is no increase in storage space however nor has playback time increased.  There is a possibility I suppose for nano apps on the new touch screen but Apple has not indicated as such so I am not sure that will ever happen.  I am seriously considering now getting a cost reduced 5th gen before they are out of stock since I have no desire for a 6th gen whatsoever.

The other interesting comparison now is the 4th gen shuffle versus the 6th gen nano.  The most obvious is size 1.24 x 1.14 x 0.34 inches versus 1.48 x 1.61 x 0.35 inches, the nano is between a quater inch and a half inch bigger in height and width respectively.  It does weigh almost twice as much but that difference is 0.3 ounces.  The three big differences between the two devices are now clickwheel versus touch screen, 2 GB vs 8 /16 GB and $50 versus $150/180.

I am left wondering if next year at this time will we see the 6th gen nano replaced and quietly forgotten by a 7th gen more like the 5th just like what happened with the shuffle.  I for one hope so, if I want a touch screen I will get an iPod touch.

I originally created my ADMX cache in the summer of 2007 using Vista and Windows Server 2003 after learning about it at Tech Ed that year. Today I just realized that the ADMX cache doesn't automatically get updated. To update it follow these instructions.

To populate (or update) the central store
1. Open a command window: click Start, click Run, then type cmd.
2. To copy all the language-neutral ADMX files from your Windows 7 administrative workstation to the central store on your domain controller using the xcopy command, type:
xcopy %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\* %logonserver%\sysvol\%userdnsdomain%\policies\PolicyDefinitions\
3. To copy all ADMX language resource files from your Windows 7 administrative workstation to the central store on your domain controller using the xcopy command, type:
xcopy %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\EN-US\* %logonserver%\sysvol\%userdnsdomain%\policies\PolicyDefinitions\EN-US\

These instructions were grabbed from here.

You can also throw in the Office 2007 / 2010 files if you want to help with that.

Lastly, if you want to see a list of all the GPO settings from 2003-2008 R2 you can grab the excel file here.

Update: Newer ADMX files were just released and can be found at this link.

With this weeks announcement of the iPhone 4 I thought I would update a previous post about screen sizes and resolutions of the various generations of iPod's and iPhones.  The iPhone 4 does have a pretty impressive pixel density, almost 3 times that of an iPad.  If you want to see some other device pixel densities check out this article at Tested.

iPhone
iPhone - 3.5" - 480-by-320-pixel - 163 pixels per inch
3G - 3.5" - 480-by-320-pixel - 163 pixels per inch
3GS - 3.5" - 480-by-320-pixel - 163 pixels per inch
4 – 3.5” – 960-by-640 pixel – 326 pixels per inch
It appears the screen on iPhone (and Touch) didn’t change from introduction until the 4.

iPad
iPad – 9.7” – 1024x768 pixel – 132 pixels per inch

Nano
1st Gen - 1.5" - 176 x 132 pixel - .168-mm dot pitch
2nd Gen - 1.5" - 176 x 132 pixel - .168-mm dot pitch
3rd Gen - 2" - 320-by-240 pixel - 204 pixels per inch
4th Gen - 2" - 320-by-240 pixel - 204 pixels per inch
5th Gen – 2.2” – 240-by-376 pixel – 204 pixels per inch
The 5th Gen has a slightly larger screen but maintains the same pixel density.  I don’t see a lot of changes coming to this model anytime soon.

Touch
1st Gen - 3.5" - 480-by-320 pixel - 163 pixels per inch
2nd Gen - 3.5" - 480-by-320 pixel - 163 pixels per inch
3rd Gen- 3.5" - 480-by-320 pixel - 163 pixels per inch
One has to wonder if there will be a 3rd Gen Touch based on the form of iPhone 4?

The classic has gone through many revisions, however I am only going to talk about those that had color screens.
Color - 2" - 220-by-176 pixel - 0.18-mm dot pitch
Photo - 2" - 220-by-176 pixel - 0.18-mm dot pitch
5th Gen - 2.5" - 320 x 240 pixel - .156-mm dot pitch
5th Gen V2 - 2.5" - 320 x 240 pixel - .156-mm dot pitch
Classic - 2.5" - 320-by-240 pixel - 163 pixels per inch
Classic 2nd Gen - 2.5" - 320-by-240 pixel - 163 pixels per inch
Classic 3rd Gen - 2.5" - 320-by-240 pixel - 163 pixels per inch
One has to wonder how much longer the Classic will exist for, you can get 64 GB Touch and the Classic is only 160 GB.  Who needs 160 GB of music in their pocket?

One interesting note is the pixel density is the same on Touch and Classic just different size screens but the Nano has much denser pixels.  Now the iPhone 4 ups the ante on pixel density by almost double.

How fast, VERY fast!

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NewSpeed

I am getting pretty consistent 35.9 downloads with speedtest.net, my uploads are all over the place however.  I think this is more due to the testing servers being able to test this speed rather than my connection.  I have tested to other sites and am very impressed.    77.7% of a full T3 for an amazingly low price.  I am paying less now for 35/35 than I paid for 1.1/1.1 SDSL not too many years ago.  The question now is how to harness this speed for good?

Another site gave me this:
** Starting test 1 of 1 **
Connected to: jlab4.jlab.org  --  Using IPv4 address
Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Done
checking for firewalls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Done
running 10s outbound test (client-to-server [C2S]) . . . . . 36.22Mb/s
running 10s inbound test (server-to-client [S2C]) . . . . . . 35.44Mb/s
The slowest link in the end-to-end path is a 45 Mbps T3/DS3 subnet
[S2C]: Packet queuing detected

The last test is available here.  It said 32/28.

This is going to be a fairly technical post I will warn the reader.  However if you enjoy reading about me causing myself great pain and having to dig out of a hole you might want to skim it.  I am writing this mostly to help others who might get stuck in the same situation I was and also to document it for myself.

On Tuesday November 10, 2009 I was doing some prep work for deploying Exchange 2010 at my work.  As part of this I ran some reports and exports looking for mailboxes (and AD accounts) that I could delete rather than dragging along as dead weight to the new server.  I found that there were roughly 120 users who have left and we no longer really needed their mailboxes.  I also found that those mailboxes accounted for over 40 GB of space which is 15-20% of entire mail data we had.  I talked to my boss around noon to double check which accounts could be safely removed.

At about 2:30 PM I was working in the Exchange Management Console to remove these mailboxes.  I (thought) I had sorted the list based on the Organizational Unit.  I selected what I believed to be only the mailboxes in the Possible Delete Emp OU and then selected remove mailboxes (and AD accounts).  The number removed seemed higher than I expected but I didn’t really think anything of it.  Then I started having prompts asking for my user name over and over.  This was then rapidly followed by several faculty members saying they couldn’t log in.  It was at this point I checked the OU for the faculty.

IT WAS EMPTY!  YES TOTALLY EMPTY!  (This is bad in case you are wondering.)  Oh and my account and my boss’s account was also gone.  To really top things off so were all the accounts for our admin council (the bosses).

At this point I will stop and get really technical for a bit.  I want to describe our infrastructure so that the next steps make the most sense to those who are reading this looking for pointers.

Our Infrastructure:

One Forest / One Domain (as simple as it gets)

Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory servers running at a 2008R2 Forest / Domain functional level – 2 Virtual and 1 Physical DC

Exchanger Server 2007 SP2 running on Windows Server 2003 SP2 – Physical

Things that were in place that are good:

Daily full backups of Exchange Database

Deleted Mailbox retention of 30 days on all mailbox databases

Things that would have been great to have in place:

Active Directory Recycle Bin – This is a feature that is new in 2008 R2 but for some unknown reason is not enabled by default (I am sure there is a security / replication reason)

Active Directory Backup – Although doing an authoritative restore is not fun at all

Once I realized what I had done I first briefed my boss so she could brief our head of school (especially since remember I deleted that mailbox too).  Then I started trying to figure out how to fix what I had done.  Luckily my department helped fend off the entire school while I tried to fix the issue.

I first started by looking at the Disconnected Mailbox container in the Exchange Management Console.  Many but not all the deleted mailboxes were listed there.  The fact that they weren’t all listed really confused me, however knowing that I needed the Active Directory accounts first I decided to come back to this later.

I haven’t had to restore a deleted AD object since the Windows 2000 days so I had to do some quick research to determine the best course of action.  I wanted to determine if I had turned on the AD Recycle Bin since I wasn’t sure if I had or not.  After looking into the issue it appeared it wasn’t active.  I could however verify by using Get-ADObject -SearchBase "CN=Deleted Objects,DC=domain,DC=com" -ldapfilter "(objectclass=User)" -includeDeletedObjects | Format-List Name,ObjectClass,ObjectGUID | Export-CSV Deleted.csv that the objects still existed in tomb stoned form.  I found the ADRestore (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963906.aspx) utility and the associated KB article.  I wasn’t sure if that was the best route to go so I decided to place a call to Microsoft and initiate a PSS case.  I did this mostly because time was very critical, I had to get this fixed by the next morning at the latest.

After digging around for a while to find a phone number on http://support.microsoft.com (which was not easy) I made the first call at 3:40 PM.  I went through the process of paying for an incident, online I could only buy a 5 pack.  During the case creation I made the case severity A since I was in an outage situation and was willing to work 24 hours a day to get it fixed.  At the end of the call I was told the Active Directory Recovery team had a 2 hour call back policy.  At this point the first waiting game began.

At about 5:40 PM I got the call from MS PSS.  The support representative said he had tried to contact me earlier but I am not sure how since I didn’t have a missed call on cell phone, office phone or an email to home email. (I found out later he called my home phone number somehow, no idea where that number came from.) He may have tried to email my work address but as mentioned above it had been deleted so I wouldn’t have gotten that and I told the call routing agent to not use that one.  I started by explaining to Aman what the situation was.  We started by checking to see if the AD Recycle Bin was active, it wasn’t unfortunately.  We then went through using ldp to verify the accounts were available, which I had already done but he wanted to check.  We then manually recovered my account using ldp which is a pretty tedious process.

A quick side note here to explain why I was trying to restore these accounts rather than just recreate them.  An active directory account is at its core a Global Unique Identifier or GUID.  The GUID is what is used to reference the account in permissions primarily and many other aspects of windows networks.  If I were to recreate the accounts essentially every file on the network and every file on each user’s computer would have to be modified to reflect the new account.  If the account is restored however this is not necessary, this is why it was so important to restore the accounts.  Back to the primary story.

The support rep and I had discussed using ADRestore during the call and it was at this point that is was determined that ADRestore was the best way to go.  (One of my heroes Mark Russinovich to the rescue again.)  I then used ADRestore to go through the 300+ deleted objects and recover the 120 or so that I needed to get back.  I got off the phone at about 7:05 PM with this support rep.

Once the accounts were restored the world was not prefect yet.  When recovered from a tombstone the account is disabled, has no password, has no details and loses all group membership.  The first two I could fix fairly easily since we assign passwords to users via a script and I could just rerun that script.  The third was not a big deal since not much info is stored in AD beyond the needed info.  The last part of group membership was a bit more problematic.  My script assigns people to a primary group but not all the extra groups that people are a part of.  My boss went to work on fixing the groups once I had re-activated all the restored accounts.

At this point it was about 7:30 PM.  We had all the Active Directory accounts mostly back in order and now it was time to tackle the deleted mailbox recovery portion.  As I mentioned above this should have been fairly straightforward thanks to deleted mailbox retention.  The problem however was that not all the mailboxes were showing up and I wasn’t sure if I was going to have to do some full database restores to recover or not.  I decided to initiate a second Microsoft Support Incident with the Exchange group to try and figure out how to proceed.  I hadn’t had to recover accidentally deleted mailboxes in quite a while either.

At about 8:05 PM I made a second call to the support phone number.  This call routing agent was not nearly as helpful.  Somehow the agent got Exchange Server 2007 and Outlook 2007 confused, they are related but not nearly the same thing.  One is the server and the other is the client.  After waiting on hold and getting connected to Outlook support and then getting bounced back to a second call routing agent who then bounced me to a third call routing agent I finally got a case created with the Exchange group at about 8:25 PM.  I again created a case with severity A since I was in an outage situation and was willing to work 24 hours.

At about 8:35 PM the Exchange support rep called me.  I explained the situation to him as well.  We looked at the list to try and determine why some mailboxes were listed and some weren’t.  We also verified the retention policy was correctly in place.  There didn’t seem to be an obvious reason why some were missing.  The support rep then had me run Clean-MailboxDatabase on each of the databases with deleted mailboxes.  This made it so all the deleted mailboxes showed up.  Once they were listed it was a simple (if time consuming) matter of reconnected each mailbox one by one.  I ended the call with this rep at about 8:45 PM.

Another side note to elaborate on Clean-MailboxDatabase (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124076.aspx).  It is apparently like a tiny subset of ESEUtil to specifically look for deleted mailboxes and cleanup the table listing them.  If I hadn’t been so freaked and pressed for time I probably could have found this myself, but oh well.

I left school at about 9:30 PM to head home and finish the last steps.  From home I went through the process of manually reconnecting all the deleted mailboxes.  I finally finished this about 11:30 PM and went to bed close to midnight.  I headed in early the next morning to be prepared for any further fall-out.

The biggest problems to come out of the whole mess were:

  1. Loss of user access from 2:30 PM until the next morning for all faculty and admin council.
  2. Loss of inbound email from 2:30 PM until at the latest 11:30 PM.
  3. Loss of email due to incorrect group membership.  This was 90-95% correct with 24 hours but the last 5-10% took as much as a month for people to notice that they weren’t on the correct lists.

The one good thing to come out of this was cleaning up some of the above mentioned lists.  Also somewhat verifying recovery procedures is cool too.

Hopefully those of you that have read this far have learned something and maybe won’t make the same mistakes I did.

This post is meant as a warning for anyone out there thinking about upgrading Microsoft Exchange Server and the new hoops you must jump through.  Up to and including Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003 an in place upgrade has been supported for Exchange, however this has changed since that time.  Now just about anytime a new version of Exchange or Windows Server comes out you have to do a migration upgrade which requires at a minimum two servers (at least temporarily) which if you are a small shop with only one exchange server or even one server (hello SBS users) is a bit of a challenge.  I wanted to outline the versions and supported upgrade paths so people can now what the possibilities are and ways to skip some migrations.

Exchange 2000 / Windows Server 2000 32-bit – Fall 2000
In Place Upgrade to
Exchange 2000 / Windows Server 2003 32-bit – Spring 2003
In Place Upgrade to
Exchange 2003 / Windows Server 2003 32-bit – Fall 2003
Migration Upgrade required due to Ex2003->2007 and 32-bit->64 bit
Exchange 2007 / Windows Server 2003 64-bit – Fall 2006
Migration Upgrade required due to IIS6->IIS7 and Powershell
Exchange 2007 / Windows Server 2008 64-bit – Spring 2008
Migration Upgrade required due to Ex2007->Ex2010
Exchange 2010 / Windows Server 2008 64-bit – Fall 2009
Possibly In Place Upgrade to
Exchange 2010 / Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit – Fall 2009

The last two will most likely be merged and I would recommend just waiting for both Exchange 2010 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to do the upgrade.  They are both supposed to be released in the Fall of 2009 and doing them together since another server will be required will be easier than separately.  Gone are the easy old days of Exchange upgrades now it seems you will always need extra servers.

Great Dell Support Chat

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I have only edited this to remove phone number and address info, otherwise it is 100% copy and paste. Enjoy.
12:33:23 PM System You are now being connected to an agent. Thank you for using Dell Chat
12:33:23 PM System Connected with LIBs_JohnPaul_193667
12:33:28 PM LIBs_193667 Thank you for contacting Dell! My name is
                        John Paul, How may I help you today?
12:33:50 PM Brian Hoyt  I have a GX620 that will only power on for
                        5-30 seconds and then reboot.
12:34:24 PM Brian Hoyt  I have tried another power supply with no
                        difference. I also tried removing the RAM
                        and it begins the beep code and then
                        reboots over and over just like when the
                        RAM is in.
12:35:13 PM LIBs_193667 Oh I see! I'll do my best to assist you! 
                        But please be patient as I am working with
                        multiple chat sessions.
12:35:22 PM Brian Hoyt  Lucky you.
12:35:28 PM LIBs_193667 Oh I see! I'll do my best to assist you! 
                        But please be patient as I am working with
                        multiple chat sessions.
12:35:58 PM LIBs_193667 May I have your name, phone and email
                        please?
12:36:21 PM Brian Hoyt  Brian Hoyt
12:37:44 PM LIBs_193667 I have tried another power supply with no
                        difference. I also tried removing the RAM
                        and it begins the beep code and then
                        reboots over and over just like when the
                        RAM is in.
12:37:59 PM LIBs_193667 Sorry about that one, I'm checking the
                        issue
12:38:29 PM LIBs_193667 Anyway, what is the light on the power
                        button?
12:38:51 PM LIBs_193667 And also the diagnostics leds, which would
                        be the 1-2-3-4
12:38:59 PM Brian Hoyt  It turns green for 5-30 seconds, turns
                        off, turns on 5-30 second, turns off and
                        will keep doing that forever
12:40:10 PM Brian Hoyt  Light 1 comes on for a few seconds while
                        the machine is on, then goes off. No other
                        lights come on in the 5-30 seconds while
                        it is on.
12:40:39 PM LIBs_193667 I see
12:40:49 PM LIBs_193667 Let me go deeper on the issue.
12:43:09 PM LIBs_193667 Do you see any lights on the 1-2-3-4?
12:43:14 PM LIBs_193667 t's on the tower
12:44:03 PM Brian Hoyt  As I mentioned before light 1 comes on for
                        a few seconds while the machine is on but
                        then the machine turns itself off rapidly
                        and the light goes off, no other lights
                        come on.
12:45:09 PM LIBs_193667 Okay, just to make sure, Is the monitor
                        power button lit up?
12:45:41 PM Brian Hoyt  Yes, sometimes the boot screen shows up
                        for a few seconds before the machine
                        automatically reboots.
12:47:55 PM LIBs_193667 Upon reviewing the issue, I see that we
                        need to replace the motherboard.
12:48:29 PM Brian Hoyt  Thanks
12:49:10 PM LIBs_193667 May I have an updated phone number and
                        alternate number please?
12:49:30 PM Brian Hoyt
12:49:40 PM LIBs_193667 Sorry, just the alternate number
12:49:40 PM LIBs_193667 okay thanks
12:50:10 PM LIBs_193667 We will also send the part with an onsite
                        tech
12:50:17 PM Brian Hoyt  thanks
12:51:05 PM LIBs_193667 Let me ask approval first
12:55:10 PM LIBs_193667 Well, it seems that we need to do another
                        troubleshooting here, just to make sure
                        that the parts are correct.
12:55:55 PM LIBs_193667 I see that you have 2 memory module.
12:56:20 PM LIBs_193667 We need to boot with only one memory
                        module.
12:56:50 PM LIBs_193667 Please test the two memory module, one by
                        one.
12:57:05 PM LIBs_193667 On the system
12:58:29 PM Brian Hoyt  With either memory module it does the same
                        thing, turns on for about 10 seconds and
                        then shuts down and reboots and repeats
12:59:11 PM LIBs_193667 okay thanks
1:00:51 PM LIBs_193667  Upon double checking the issue
1:01:51 PM LIBs_193667  We are determined that the motherboard,
                        memory modules, heatsink and fan
                        replacements will resolve the issue
1:02:00 PM Brian Hoyt   ok
1:02:36 PM LIBs_193667  We will send an onsite tech for the
                        replacements of the parts
1:02:40 PM Brian Hoyt   ok
1:03:26 PM LIBs_193667  Please give me 5-7 minutes in order to
                        process the dispatch
1:07:06 PM LIBs_193667  Dispatch number is 114751335
1:07:46 PM LIBs_193667  We will send the part to the onsite tech,
                        once they receive the part, they will call
                        you and setup an appointment.
1:08:52 PM LIBs_193667  I will also email the transcript of the
                        session to your email address with the
                        case number and dispatch reference, If
                        it's okay with you?
1:09:02 PM Brian Hoyt   Yes thanks.
1:09:22 PM LIBs_193667  Alright
1:09:37 PM LIBs_193667  Is there anything else that I can help you
                        with?
1:09:46 PM Brian Hoyt   Nope, thanks.
1:10:22 PM LIBs_193667  Okay.. And are you satisfied with the
                        service you had with me?
1:10:25 PM Brian Hoyt   Yes
1:10:47 PM LIBs_193667  Thank you! I also appreciate your patience
                        and cooperation.

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