Neal's Admin.Notes.

Nextel A-GPS Service Down

So here I am driving to New Jersey last Saturday in search of a gate for my dog only to realize my trustworthy and all knowing Nextel- Motorola GPS / i830 color phone was not working !!. Arrrgh. Here I was stuck..lost in NJ with no clue on how to get where I was going or how to get home after. luckily I drove around for an hour or so till I came across some familiar territory to find my way back ( Oh yeah....Petco didn't have the gate in stock...they only sold it online...go figure . Thinking my phone was malfunctioning, I had Nextel overnight me a replacement. Monday night...here I am, stuck in Brooklyn with no GPS ( yes, I don't know why I didnt check it before I leaped from Manhattan into Brooklyn ) !!! Apparent after some serious questioning , Nextel / Motorola has a network and software issue affecting GPS on their key phones.

So its July 31st, they seem to have fixed the network, but working out the logistics on getting the software updated on the phones... I guess I will just have to rely on good ole Expedia, or Mapquest to get me to where I'm going.....hmmmm, how about Atlantic City ! If you have a Nextel phone that utilizes the A-GPS (Assisted Global Positioning Satellite) service , you can check their site for updates on the situation...

DNS Intermittently Stops Resolving Some Host Names like Yahoo, Mindspring etc

For the past week, we've had users not being able to send out emails to the likes of Yahoo, Mindspring, Blackberry.net, Verizon Wireless and a few other providers. Now the thing is there was MyDoom attack on some of these sites. Once we verified the domains were up and functional...we tried checking to see if there was a blacklist being used and our domain RUDIN.COM was being blocked. We gave up and started searching within our own internal DNS records.

Randomly, the sites would be resolved if you did an nslookup form the cmd prompt. I finally found out that the cache was not being cleared or is it wasnt clearing it in a timely fashion. So the temporary fix was to go into the Administrator Console and clear the DNS cache. Called up Microsoft and they had a fix to my problem ....A HOTFIX!! - See KB Article 830905.
So tonight I patched our DNS server and miraculously, the Exchange 2003 Mail server started routing all the backed up mail it had in its Queue.

If you have any questions or would like the patch, feel free to email me.

The Backup Completed, but Some Files Were Skipped

For a month or so, I was doing backups of our Domain Controllers using the Microsoft Backup agent, instead of our usual Veritas 9.x . After a few days, I noticed the following errors with Event ID: 8001

The Backup Completed, but Some Files Were Skipped
Warning: Unable to open "c:\windows\SYSVOL\domain\DO_NOT_REMOVE_NtFrs_PreInstall_Directory" - skipped.
Reason: The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

This problem occurs because the Windows Backup program tries to back up the DO_NOT_REMOVE_NtFrs_PreInstall_Directory folder during the System State backup. To fix this nagging message as it is will not jeapordize the backup I called Microsoft, and they issues a HOTFIX for it.

Feel free to email me for this patch if you're having the same problem.

Lookout Software bought by Microsoft

A while back I did a review on the Lookout indexing software for outlook. It was just made official that they've been bought by Microsoft. Check out the press release

Way to go Lookout..!! :)