This week i’m doing a Cisco CIND course. And on the first day, joy of joys i’ve been doing subnetting. For those who don’t know this means working out the subnet masks and host address ranges for various numbers of subnets or hosts.
Its been a long time since I did any of this and it’s no easer than the last time I did it. Why is it less complex to work it out using binary than doing it the easy way using decimals? I think I might just be scared of numbers bigger than 1!

Even though getting my head round some of the maths is tricky, I still think ill get a lot out of the course (most of the Microsoft ones I’ve done tend to be a bit lacking in practical information), but why is one of the first things the tutors ask is ‘are you taking the exam?’ Are they all on commission from the vendors? I’ve never seen the point in taking an exam that will be irrelevant or not recognised by anyone within a couple of years. I suppose it looks good on a cv, but I don’t think it makes up for real world knowledge.

There is a new Beta version of the OpenSource, Linux based firewall available now from http://smoothwall.org/.

I’ve been a user of SmoothWall for quite a few years, and this new update looks promising, as its still in beta i’m not really willing to blow my existing firewall away just yet, but ill definitely be upgrading when the production version is released.

A couple of days ago I wrote about Windows Live! writer, I decided to download it today and this post is being written from within it. It does look nicer than the last version, and its support for tags and images is a great improvement. Ill find out in a minute if the formatting stuffs up when I upload it to blogger, that was why I stopped using the last one.

Don’t know if you have ever used it, but Microsoft wrote a bit of software called Windows Live! Writer (why does half of the products they bring out have Live! in the title?). There’s another version (beta 2) that’s been released. Read more about it at http://jcheng.wordpress.com/2007/05/30/finally-writer-beta-2/

I did download the first one, it worked ok but lacked a couple of features, and when I uploaded the postings some of the formatting didn’t look correct on Blogger. I might try the new one and see if its any better.

I have got another article up on AspFree.com, its about logging terminal server connections and you can read it in all its glory here

On a completely different topic, if you like a bit of English alt rock music, check out the Pigeon Detectives first album Wait For Me. It’s rather good

Had a very odd problem this morning with one of our mail servers, and the guy who normally fixes them is on holiday so it landed in my lap.

The server was rebooted yesterday due to ‘problems’ (no one could tell me what they were) , and when it came back up none of the exchange services would start, the first error in the system log was:

Error 7000
The Microsoft Exchange System Attendant service failed to start due to the following error: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

So another very useful Microsoft error to help me. I tried the obvious things like rebooting the global catalogue server, checked the size of the mail store etc but nothing was jumping out at me. The server hadn’t had any patch’s installed over the last week so I could rule that out.

I found a couple of web sites that said it might be a permissions problem in the registry, but that made no difference. I tried turning on more advanced logging options though the Exchange system manager but that didn’t give me much extra info.

I then tried to start the system attendant not through the services, but by running the exe the serviced used, called mad.exe in the exchange\bin folder. Running this finally give me a clue as to what was wrong. I got an error saying it could not run due to address.dll being missing.

I found this file in a couple of places on the server, and tried re-registering it at first but to no avail. Then I copied it into the bin folder where the mad.exe was, and got no error! I then went back into services, and started all the exchange ones and they all came up fine, and users could get at there email again.

I have no idea why this happened, I dont see any reason for the file to be missing, and the fix was less than obvious