Well it’s finally 2011, and I spent New Years down in Southampton with some friends of mine, Zoe, Jerrie, Emma, George and Mark. Was a really awesome evening. Spent watching films, TV, Drinking and Monopoly. Oh yer!
The journey down by coach was long took about 2 hours but was glad when it was over. Only got the return trip back to Victoria.
Anyway let’s hope 2011 is an awesome year! This is my first post of 2011, and figured might as well bring in the New Year on my blog.
So it seems 2011 is nearly upon us. As its New Years Eve! Let’s bring in 2011 with a bang and celebration. As 2010 has been a cracker of a year, so let’s hope 2011 is better!
I am travelling to the South of the UK to visit my friends and have some drinks. I believe it’s a posh dress code as well. This should be interesting. Although the trip down there will be long. Getting a train to London Victoria, then a coach from Victoria down to Southampton.
See you all in 2011! Let’s hope everyone has an awesome New Year!
Over the past week or so the UK has basically come to a stand still. In-fact looking at my road you would think it was a war zone. There’s abandoned cars, damaged cars, demolished walls. But sadly it’s no war zone, it’s just snow and ice, and everything seems to stop.
I live on a slight hill and have seen many a car or van come spinning off on the slight S-Bend corner with islands on them. They always land in the same place, the poor guy who’s house is diagonally inline with the corners.
I have lost count how many times that wall has been rebuilt!
So the day finally came, the day we had to move the Exchange server. The old exchange server was being transferred off site and into a cloud based system. However things where not going to be simple. The problem we had was, we run Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2003 files are not upgradeable to 2010, and upgrading to Exchange 2007 was out of the question. So we opted for a less complicated option but involving a bit of work. We basically got everyone’s local Outlook pst files and copied them to an external drive so they could be transported to the data center. However issues arose because we use Macs. The Mac version of Office does not save data in pst files! So we had to recreate around 30 or so profiles on virtual Windows installs. Then we also archived emails to bring mailboxes down to size because everyone’s mailboxes where massive, we are talking around 5gb plus!
We began by redirecting the MX records to a special setup holding server for our email while the process began. As we would then have to manually download email and extract the pst files, a process which took around 8 hours to do. We then handed this data to the server techs who took it to the data center for us. However we ran into issues. Office 2004 for Mac does not talk to Exchange Server 2010, so we had to upgrade to 2008, then we found without patches that to wont talk to the Exchange server. So we had to apply the “Web Service Edition” patch. We then began the laborious task of updating the 20-30 Macs around the Office, then re-creating user accounts for the emails. However we ran into major issues, Web mail failed to work because of Security certificate errors, then when they where importing the data the process crashed and wa snot restarted for some time! But once we where certain emails where being correctly transferred and that we could email each other locally we turned off the holding email and had it forwarding to our new server.
So in two days we had managed to archive email accounts, extract the PST files for around 90 email accounts, reset them up, upgrade 20-30 Macs to Office 2008 and test email. So a really hard weekend! But it was not to stop there! Come Monday morning issues arose, the email was DOWN! yes our cloud based email was down! Must have been a little story or something! Overall we where not impressed!
Basically the vast amount of PST files they where importing caused the servers Information Store file to crash! Even though they where running 3 at a time on schedule it still managed to bring down the server! Then to make matters worse our BT phones went down! Even more NOT IMPRESSED at this point!
It took them till midday to get the email working again, and even then it was still not running perfect. Still a few issues here and there! Overall it’s been a rather stressful weekend! The phones are well who knows, when BT can be bothered to fix, heck they even blamed our internal phone switching system etc.
