I was pleased to find there is a Wordpress app for the Blackberry as the excellent keyboard make writing posts really rather painless.
The app just seems to work, the only thing I needed to do to get it to work was to enable XML-RPC for my blog. The setting for this can be found by logging into your site and then going to settings -> writing.
You can find the app here.
Office Communicator has been available to staff at Kent for some time now. Basically this tool allows people to Instant Message other users, make VoIP calls to them and view their presence (the last is very useful for telling if someone is available before wandering round to see them). It also integrates nicely into Outlook, allowing you to view presence and initiate calls without switching applications.
Recently I’ve been taking part in a pilot organised by one of my collegues in the development team. This pilot was to integrate the Mitel phone system which the university uses with Communicator. This has taken a lot of work on his part, but paid off today when the integration was pretty much completed.
So, what does this mean? Well, the coolest thing is the ability for my work phone to follow me to wherever I have a broadband connection. For example, as I type I’m logged into Communicator on my laptop at home. If my phone rings on my desk at work my Communicator client also rings and display the caller id for the incoming call. I can then answer this as if I’m at my desk. While this is the ultimate form of taking work home with me, it’s very useful for the type of job I do as I often provide out of hours cover and work from home on occasion. I can also initiate a call using Communicator and it is placed through the university phone system.
I’m very impressed by how well the system works, and it will certainly prove useful for me. I’m looking forward to having a play with the Exchange voicemail (voicemail appears in your email Inbox) and the call attendant in the near future.
Today I was going through the stats for part of the University email system. When an email from outside the University is sent to a Kent address is passes through one of two mailhubs (internal email is handled a little differently). These hubs look at the where the email has come from and apply a number of tests to try and determine if the email is junk email. One of the most effective methods we use is a number of DNS Blacklists (DNSBL), these have the details of hosts that are likely to have been sending junk email in the past. Doing a lookup against these lists is pretty cheap (in terms of processing time) when compared to the content scanning that SpamAssassin does. For this reason we do this test as early on as we can.
Pulling the stats for 2009 showed the following;
There isn’t a 1 to 1 correlation between rejected connections and junk emails as each connection could have sent many emails had it succeeded, but also the scripts that send junk email could also try multiple connections after being rejected. However this figure is a good indication that our inboxes have been saved from over 200 million junk emails!
The DNSBLs we use are also very accurate, with only one false positive in the two years we’ve been using them.
Out of the 22 million emails delivered it’s likely that a good percentage were also junk email, but once email has passed the initial checks it is assigned a junk email score and then the end user determines at what level the email should be declared junk email and moved to the appropriate folder.
I recently came to the end of my mobile contract and despite being a longtime iPhone user decided to switch to using a Blackberry. This was for a number of reasons, the main one being I was missing a qwerty keyboard, but also I tend to get bored of any device after a while and *everyone* has an iPhone these days. 
Blackberrys are slightly special in that to use them properly you need a Blackberry contract with your mobile provider and most people will need access to a Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) to receive email. Companies that heavily use Blackberrys deploy the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) for their users that gives email, calendar, contacts etc. access for their users. If you use BIS to talk to Exchange it only handles email and nothing else.
As I heavily use my calendar and contacts I’ve had a look around for a solution that can sync these without using BES. There seem to be two main products which I’m going to try, AstraSync and NotifySync. Both implement Activesync, which is the Microsoft supported way of interfacing with an Exchange server using a mobile device. I’ll post my experiences with these here once I’ve had a play.
One of the key jobs the Operations team in general, and myself in particular, undertake is the managing of the data protection systems that we use, to well, protect data. Essentially this entails having copies of data in locations other than the live ones in case of catastrophic problems. It also means that data can often be recovered in the case of less world ending scenarios, such as finger trouble with the delete button.
We use a number of systems to protect data, the simplest of these being the backup tape nightly of data, with a full once a week and just the changes backed up on other nights. This approach is fine for 90% of the systems, but some, such as email, are more important and require a different approach.
For around 18 months we’ve been using a Microsoft product, Data Protection Manager (DPM), to protect this data as well as some central file servers and MSSQL databases. The theory behind DPM is that a replica of the data to be protected is built on the DPM server, changes made to the live data are then applied to this replica on a frequent basis, meaning that the window for restorations is much smaller. Instead of potentially losing a days worth of data, as little as 15 minutes is at risk with DPM.
Unfortunately the product didn’t perform as seemlessly as we hoped, with numerous bugs requiring fixes by Microsoft and a lot of manhours being spent maintaining the system. Restores were also less than painless, meaning it wasn’t adequately performing the function it was built for.
We were happy with the way DPM was meant to work, and so looked for a product that did something similar, but in a more robust way. This is where Netvault FASTRecover comes in.
Netvault FASTRecover (NVFR) works in the same way as DPM but with even more granularity. It is possible to select a time frame down to 30 seconds to recover from (depending on how frequently you are replicating data of course). It also does restores in a clever way, essentially restoring a stub first and then restoring the rest of the data in the background. They claim the initial data restore can be done in 30 seconds, one to test I think.
This fast recovery capability is key for systems such as email. It means if a mail database on our Exchange system becomes corrupt we can restore a good point in time very quickly allowing people to start working again. The background restore prioritises requested items so emails that people want to read will come back quicker. We’ve yet to fully test this ourselves, but the demonstrations are impressive.
So far today I’ve installed Redhat Enterprise on the server (itself a rather impressive beast, being an HP DL380G6 with dual quad core processors, 38GB of memory and all the NICs in the world!) and installed the actual NVFR package. Configuration was easy and I’m currently running tests on a VM that’s pretending to be a file server. Next stage is to see how well it protects Exchange!
Well, this post is the usual first post waffle and provides an introduction to myself and the aim of this blog.
My name is Ian Carter and I’m a Computing Officer within the Operations Team, which is part of the IT section within Information Service. We look after the day to day running of all the central IT services, including networking, email, servers and backups. I personally tend to specialiase in mail and backup systems, though all of team are multiskilled and I also spend a fair amount of time supporting Windows, Solaris and Linux servers, storage, and the applications that run on them.
I plan, as time allows, to document some of the more technical aspects of the systems I look after, especially mail, as we get quite a few queries from people that don’t quite understand exactly what happens to email sent through our systems.