BFTech Impressions

This article was stolen from here:

When you call DELL customer support for any help, they will ask for either Service Tag or Express Service Code. You also need service tag to download drivers and documentations from DELL support website.

When you have physical access to the system, you can easily identify the service tag affixed on the body of the server. DELL support siteshows the exactly location of the service tag and express code stickers for various DELL equipments.

When you don’t have physical access to the server, you can get the same information remotely from the OS level. Using Windows or Linux command line you can easily get DELL service tag as explained below.

1. Get DELL Service Tag on remote Windows system

Login to the Windows remote-host using VNC or remote desktop connection. Use WMIC on Windows to get service tag as shown below.

C:\>wmic bios get serialnumber
SerialNumber
ABCDEF1

Following WMIC command will give make and model number along with service tag.

C:\>wmic csproduct get vendor,name,identifyingnumber IdentifyingNumber    Name                Vendor
ABCDEF1              PowerEdge 2950      Dell Inc.

If VNC or remote desktop connection to the remote-host is not available,  execute the following from the local-host to get the service tag of the remote-host.

C:\>wmic /user:administrator /node:remote-host bios get serialnumber
SerialNumber
ABCDEF1
[Note: Replace remote-host with the machine name of your remote-host.]

2. Get DELL Service Tag on remote Linux system

Login to the Linux remote-host using SSH. Use dmidecode on Linux to get service tag as shown below.

[remote-host]# dmidecode -s system-serial-number
ABCDEF1

3. Get DELL Express Service Code From Service Tag

Service Tag is a base-36 integer.  Once you have the Service Tag, you can calculate express service code yourself. Express Service Code is base-10 decimal integer of Service Tag. Dell uses express service code mainly for their support call-routing. When you call dell support, their automated call-routing system may ask you to enter express service code, which you can easily enter in your telephone, as it is just a bunch of numbers, instead of characters.

Use the following online tools to find express service code from service tag and vice-versa.

• Creativyst Dell-Number Widget
• Dell PC service tag/code converter from PowerDog Industries

The scanner is small and light, and doesn’t try to be more than it is: A good, small no-frills basic color flatbed scanner.

The installation routine has an option for custom install, during which you can choose not to install the extra bundled software if you don’t want/need it.
At the end of the installation, it asks if you want to check online for newer drivers. I did so, and it found a newer driver (22 MB in size). I wish it had done that BEFORE installing the stuff from the CD, but it probably doesn’t make much difference either way.

Once the software was installed, Windows 7 64-bit found the scanner without fuss.

The scanner has some buttons on it, which I don’t intend to use, so I will leave their function to other reviewers.

The scan utility is pretty standard as scanners go, which is good. It does not bog you down with stylized frames around the windows and animations. It just brings up a rectangular dialog box with some options on it. The default setting is “full auto mode” which I suppose is good for non-technical people.

In addition to “full auto mode” you can switch it to “home mode”, “office mode” or “professional mode”, which have different settings and abilities relevant to each of those profiles. Home mode is more centered around what the image is going to look like. Office mode is more centered around how fast it will scan and what options will be applied to it. Professional mode is full of all kinds of interesting dials and knobs that you can twiddle to apply effects while scanning to get it just right. People who like to fiddle will have a field day with Professional mode.

Once you’ve chosen a mode, the process is pretty straightforward. Do a preview scan to find your image on the glass, select the area you want to scan, rotate/crop it, maybe fiddle a little more, choose what resolution and file type to use, and then scan it.

I would like to complain about one small but very annoying (to me) detail:
The software remembers that when I am in “Home” mode I want to scan at 300 DPI, and when I am in “Office” mode, I want to scan at 150 DPI.
However, the software does NOT remember that I want to save as JPG in Home mode and PDF in Office mode.
Seriously? How difficult is that? Can you really have missed that? Is it a “corner case”? Nobody would ever want to do THAT…

When I called tech support, the representative who barely spoke English told me that it was by design, so that you can get exactly what you want each time. Care for some SPIN, anyone?
If he had told me that it was a known issue, and they intended to fix it in an upcoming driver release, that would have been acceptable.
But no, they played it like it’s supposed to be that way, and it’s annoying.

I suppose that if this is the biggest complaint I can come up with, it’s a pretty good scanner and software package.

I just moved a couple of blogs from a local server to a GoDaddy hosted environment. Here are the steps I went through.

First, find out what version of WordPress GoDaddy’s hosting center is currently using. Upgrade your local blog to that version before you start, and verify that your plug-ins work. Update the plug-ins if necessary before you move the blog.

When you’re ready to move it, the first thing to do is back up your MySQL database. Use something like MySQL Administrator to back it up to a .sql file.

Log into your GoDaddy environment and use the hosting center to install a WordPress application with MySQL database. Open your new hosted WordPress blog (empty at this point) to make sure it works. Then proceed.

Now it’s time to import your MySQL database. But first we have a choice to make:

Do you want direct access to manage your database using your own admin tools, or are you content with the web-based one GoDaddy provides?
Is your database VERY LARGE? So large that it would be exceeding difficult for you to edit the .sql file with a text editor?

If you answered NO to both of these questions, use “Option A: Edit your .sql file to reflect the new database name.”
If you answered YES to either of these questions, skip down to “Option B: Create the database and reconnect WordPress to the new one”.

Option A: Edit your .sql file to reflect the new database name:

The next step is to import your .sql backup file into the new GoDaddy MySQL database. But first you have to edit the .sql file and change the database name in three places, to match the database name the GoDaddy created for you.

You’re looking for three lines near the top of your SQL file. They start with “Create schema”, “CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS”, and “USE”.
Replace the database name on each of these lines with the one that GoDaddy created.

Option B: Create the database and reconnect WordPress to the new one
Note: Skip this section if you chose to use Option A.

Go to the DATABASES section of the hosting center, and choose to create a new database.
Note: The dialog for database creation has two very important features.
1. A radio button that allows you to choose whether your database will be externally directly accessible or not (see image below.)

2. The ability to choose the name of your database, instead of the random name that the WordPress installer chooses. The database name will be the same as the user name. The dialog does not make this clear, so when it asks for a username, that’s where you put the database name.

If your database is very large, and it would be difficult to edit the .sql file, you can create the new database using the same database name as it had on the local server. Then you do not need to edit the .sql file.

Now that you have created a fresh database, use either your local admin tools, or the web-based tools that GoDaddy provides, to import the .sql file into your new database.

Delete the database that GoDaddy created while installing WordPress.

Now that you have your database populated, edit your wp-config.php file to point at it.
To do this, fire up an FTP client and point it at your new hosted environment.

The wp-config.php file is in the folder where you installed WordPress. This might be the root folder, or it might not, if you chose to install it into a folder. Find your WordPress installation, and find your wp-admin.php file. Download it to your workstation for editing.

When editing the wp-admin.php file, be careful. I used Notepad.exe built into Windows, and it corrupted the file. It took several tries before I figured out what was happening. You might want to try another text editor, or an HTML editor. make backup copies, and when you’ve saved the file, open it again to verify that it didn’t get scrambled.

In the wp-config.php file, you’re looking for your database name. It should exist in three places: DN_NAME, DB_USER, and DB_HOST. GoDaddy creates the username the same as the database name. Edit this file to point at the correct database, and upload it back to your WordPress folder.

Upload your WordPress content.

I recommend that you create a “new blog backup” folder on your admin workstation, and use your FTP software to download the empty WordPress installation to your admin station, so that if something goes wrong with uploading the content, you can put the old files back in, or at least fish files out of that backup folder if you are troubleshooting. Since the new installation has no content, it will only take a few seconds to make a backup of it, and it might save you a lot of time.

Use your FTP software to upload your wp-content folder from your local installation. I believe that you do not want to upload any other folders – just wp-content and all of its subfolders. My suggestion is to NOT overwrite any files.

That being said, I had some difficulty with my migration at this point, and what I ended up doing was creating the folder first, uploading my content into it, and THEN installing WordPress using the GoDaddy wizard. I am not sure this was necessary. It may be that my fumbling around with which folders to upload created my problem.

Now you’re ready to try out your blog! If all went well, it should work as expected at this point.

Good luck!

I have a customer that routinely deletes sub-folders in their Outlook mailboxes.
These subfolders get re-recreated programmatically later.
They’re using Outlook 2003, and up until a few days ago, were on Exchange 2003.
We just upgraded to Exchange 2010 on the back end.

After the upgrade, the customer is having trouble deleting sub-folders. We press the delete key on the keyboard, or right-click and choose to delete, and nothing happens.
There is no error message in the Application Log to give us a clue about what is happening.

I have seen this kind of problem before, but it only happened when deleting “system folders”, for example when we somehow got a duplicate Calendar folder, or when we want to delete the “Sync Issues” folder.
In those cases, the solution was to open Outlook Web Access and delete the folder from there. So I tried it with this scenario.

Surprisingly, Outlook Web Access delivered a useful error message! Basically, it told me that it could not delete the folder because there was already a folder with that name in the Deleted Items folder.
I went and looked, and found not only a folder with that same name, but also a bunch of others with incrementally numbered names, like Folder, Folder1, Folder2, Folder3, etc.

My conclusion:
With Exchange 2003, if you delete a folder, and there is already a folder with that name in the Deleted Items folder, Exchange simply adds a number to the folder name as it drops the folder into Deleted Items.
With Exchange 2010, it fails to delete the folder and, with the Outlook 2003 client at least, fails to notify you about why it cannot delete the folder.

So it seems that Exchange 2010 is slightly retarded in this aspect. WTF, Microsoft?!

Additional: I have tested this scenario with Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007. It adds a number to the end of the folder, no problem. Unfortunately, I do not have a test platform with Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 available. However, I will have such a test platform in the near future. I will test this when that becomes available, and update the article with the results.

Tags: Exchange, Outlook, Outlook Web Access

I had high hopes for this, because WHS v1 has done very well by me, and I was excited to see a newer version which might address some quirks of v1. However, I am disappointed.

Windows Home Server 2011 is, in my professional opinion, a train wreck.

• It is bloated. Its hardware requirements are more than triple that of the original version, and when you just meet them, it runs very, very slowly.
• It has an agent that wants the user to sign in, so you have to create user accounts.
• It doesn’t seem to want to run the backups if the agent is not signed in.
• When you do create an account and try to sign in, it often complains that the server appears to be offline.
• I’ve read some other blogs of some folks having difficulties getting the restore to work in situations that v1 handled without issue. I haven’t gotten as far as getting a successful backup yet, so have not tested the restore. Yet, I’m frustrated enough with it to abort my testing right now and get on with my life.

The only good thing I can think of to say about it is that the warning screen you get when you log into the console, telling you to be careful what you do when logged into the console, is now a wallpaper instead of a web page pop-up.

I will continue to use WHS v1 for the time being, despite its little quirks.