Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

A few weeks ago, my HTC MTeoR died suddenly, when the upper half of it’s keyboard became unresponsive. I decided to replace it, and have seen a good offer for HP’s iPAQ 510 Voice Messenger.

This isn’t a full features review, more a few notes about my thought about this device. I had only one SmartPhone before it, the MTeoR mentioned just before, so most of my comparisons will reference that device.

This device comes from a different price range than the HTC MTeoR i had before - while the HTC retailed at about 800 CHF without contract, the iPAQ 510 started at much lower prices, it can be had from 350 CHF without a contract. As such, i didn’t really expect much from this device.

My attitude changed slightly when i opened the packaging - while the HTC came in a bleak and unnamed Swisscom package, the HP device was in a much better wrapping. It contained a handy quickstart guide, a manual, and the phone hat protection labels all over it.

The display of the HP has a resolution of 172×220 pixels, while the MTeoR had a 240×320 resolution. While the HP display isn’t as crisp and detailed, and displays bigger fonts the MTeoR, it’s not actually that much worse. And of course there’s the price difference between the two devices.

The HTC device had UMTS, which i always have disabled in order to save power. The HP device doesn’t have UMTS, but it does have WiFI. Because my company is still in the 90ies when it comes to telephony, i couldn’t play with the VoIP features.

An interesting twist is that WM6 no longer requires registry hacks to import self signed certificates. This is good for small businesses which use self signed certificates with Exchange Active Sync.

The making of the device seems to be better than the MTeoR, the latter had the problem that the back cover never really held, and seemed to lose its grip more than once a week. The HP device looks sturdier, and is also a tiny bit thicker than the MTeoR, but it’s also a bit lighter. They keys on the HP are much better suited for my hands (they’re bigger).

I like the new enhancements that come with Windows Mobile 6, but you’ll find much better sources on the Web when talking about WM6.

I think this device is worth it’s money. It’s not a top of the line smartphone like the Motorola Q9, and it’s screen is it’s biggest disadvantage. It’s sturdily made, and will probably last a year on the field (SmartPhones always seem to be made with PHBs in mind, but they’re quite useful for field technicians too).

Fancy graphs are only for managers

I’ve heard this one more than once, and it just isn’t true. While hard numbers are good for many things, they are usually not adequate for looking at Network connections.

Especially with the advent of VPN connections throughout multiple ISPs, companies, etc. there is a need to have a less subjective view of the quality of these links. Luckily there are many open source options available for graphical network monitoring.

The most important tool for WAN connections is SmokePing. With Cacti, you can graph almost anything. SNMP support is built in, and you can also use scripts. I’ve used many scripts with SSH commands and public key authentication to transfer even sensitive statistics over the network.

DNS is often overlooked by novices - it doesn’t look to complicated, but in the end it is the glue that holds the internet together.

I’ve written about DNS before (sorry, German only), but i still use all that knowledge i learned back then every day. DNS is important for Active Directory (which has a whole seperate page of possible issues), but it’s also very important for e-mail.

I’ve seen many smaller IT companies or hobbyists that host their own DNS (which is fine, it builds experience) - but usually without a secondary DNS server.

The problem is that without any DNS server responding for a domain, strange things happen. While it would be very clear by the standards that this is just a temporary failure, and the mail should be held in the queue, given the right combination of DNS resolver and MTA, mails may bounce.

There are many companies offering secondary DNS services, but they’re usually not necessary - ask someone you know with a static IP address, and play secondary for him. Or if you really want your own infrastructure, rent a server in Germany, which is pretty inexpensive and gives you a secondary MX and DNS server.

We recently had to connect a distributed, legacy system using RS232 to a modern network. One of the main ideas behind it was to centralize it - but this can be rather difficult when talking about RS232 in a variety of locations. We looked around, and found a company that made what we were looking for.

Moxa sells many embedded adapters, we bought the cheapest one, the NPort 5110. In Switzerland, these can be bought from Disdata, and cost about 160 CHF.

The good thing about those devices is that they support real COM operations mode on Windows Server 2003, Vista in both x32 and x64 editions. Many other companies do not yet offer x64 drivers or Vista support.

Without reading any manuals, these thingies were up and running in 10 minutes - this is quite good. A few years ago i’ve worked on a similar problem, and i don’t even remember what product we used - i just know that it wasn’t as easy as it was today.

There’s a great post about Capturing application crash dumps from the guys of the Windows Performance Team.

In other words, i found nothing to write about today.

My first post at another blog.

Read my System i 515 Hardware Review.

I was always afraid of exams - usually until it started - because then i had better things to do. After i was done with my apprenticeship by passing my LAP, i thought it was finally over with exams. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

My focus here is clearly on Microsoft and IBM certifications, because those are the only ones i’ve got experience with.

I know many people that are afraid of certification exams - i was too, until i got some experience with them.

The first IT exam i took was the Microsoft exam 70-294. Two years ago, i’ve found my company lacking enough Microsoft certified personnel to make us stay in the Microsoft Partner Program. Something had to be done, and Microsoft even offered special Bootcamps for Partners. I booked the one with the nearest date and a topic that i was at least familiar with.

The bootcamp itself was very interesting. I, and some guy that was sent there by the RAV were the only attendees. The trainer however, know his topic very well, and i’ve learned quite a few things. A day later, i attended my exam and passed with just a few points over the required score. All was well.

Fast forward two years later, our CEO decided that we should earn the Microsoft Small Business Specialist. Again i’ve booked a one day bootcamp for exam 70-282. The attendance here was very interesting - and MCSE, an MCT and two sales guys. The course itself was rather worthless, i didn’t learn anything i didn’t know before. On the following monday, i passed the exam with a lot of room to spare. I didn’t learn for it, i didn’t do anything to prepare myself. And yet, i passed, with a good score and lots of time to spare.

I’ve got four years of experience dealing with Microsoft’s Small Business Server, and all of it’s related products. And that’s exactly what the exam tested. I knew all the stuff, because i’ve done it all before, for customers, in reality. Not in a virtual environment, not by reading a textbook, but at work.

At that point i decided to try something - why shouldn’t i just go and complete an MCSE certification? I registered for the next Exam online through Prometric. Exam 70-270 covered Windows XP. Again, it was all just trivia that i’ve done before on the job - of course i didn’t know all answers, but you can always take an educated guess. I passed.

After a few more exams, i had my MCSE. Without too much learning, and especially without cheating. One of the problems that IT certifications face are cheaters - people that use Braindumps to memorize the answers, and are then able to pass an exam.

I’ve seen people with enough technical knowledge to pass the exam still using braindumps. The problem here is two fold:

• People are afraid of exams, and want to make sure that they pass
• Exams sometimes have out-of-this-world questions

Not much can be done about the first point - just to repeat that failing an exam isn’t the same as having bad grades in school. You won’t get in any trouble, you will just have lost a bit of money.

The second point however is fixable. Microsoft did a lot in this respect, but there are still several questions which refer to ntbackup. Nobody uses that in a production environment, and even if they do, they probably don’t know what the difference between a “full backup” and a “daily backup” is (the latter is not incremental or differential, it uses the timestamp on the files). That’s why even people that are good at their jobs need to prepare for exams.

This is more of a rant than something constructive.

You get what you pay for - at least in the hardware world. If you do not have enough information, it is always difficult to say what you should buy, and how you should compare prices.

The problem is that it is sometimes hard for a customer to understand why there are so many ways to fulfill one single goal, and why the different solutions might have gigantic price differences. If you’re a sales type of guy, it’s important to make sure that you offer the right components, and make sure that the competition does the same.

Example

I need 1 TB of Storage.

Okay, this sounds simple enough. You can now make an offer for a simple 1TB Disk and an USB2 disk case. Totals at about 600 CHF including MWST.

Does this solve the customers problem? Does it help him? Is it what the customer wants?
Maybe. You don’t know.

You can generally leave a better impression if you ask the customer what he needs the storage for, and also think about secondary problems like backups.

I need 1TB of Storage for our ERP-Database running on one of our IBM x3650 servers. We have no idea on how we should back it up, though.

Now you already know a lot more, and know that the 600CHF solution with a single disk won’t even get close to the solution. You still don’t know enough to know everything (i.E. you could get 1TB with RAID10, but also with RAID5). You could also try to upsell to a SAN solution, though it wouldn’t be necessary. What you do have though is the possibility to upsell a backup solution - but there’s a catch here too.

ERP software is usually very important. Can the customer afford the degraded performance associated with an online backup? Or is there a need to use database mirroring and then backup the mirror? Problems like these are usually overlooked when shopping for hardware, and if you react right you have the chance to sell more hardware, sell services, and all this while helping the customer - you’re doing the right thing and making more money.

Real problems

I see this problem mostly with Windows Small Business Server 2003. Yes, you can get a fully working machine including licenses for 3000 CHF, but the question is if that’s what the customer really wants.

SBS is a product that makes many compromises in order to offer a highly competitive pricing, it even works against many Best Practices recommended by Microsoft. That doesn’t mean that SBS is a bad product, just that it’s a mixed bag. Selling two servers is usually impossible for Small Business customers, even though it would be best for Domain Controllers.

An SBS machine usually runs the whole company - it functions as a domain controller, file server, print server, Exchange server, and sometimes even ERP server or Internet gateway (i would recommend to seperate the latter two roles on seperate machines/appliances). If the SBS server is down, none of the information workers can do anything. That’s why you shouldn’t skimp on the SBS hardware. Hardware RAID, dual power supplies, brand components, updates, etc. are all important. Don’t buy whiteboxes or low end servers.

Why? You could buy an IBM System x3250, stick two 500GB disks and 4GB of RAM in it, and you have the same basic attributes - the problem is that such a machine is much slower IO-wise (you run Exchange and a Fileserver on this thing!), and has much worse reliability than better 2U servers like the IBM System x3650.

But if you’re running a bigger environment, go out and buy two x3250 and use them as Domain Controllers (and ONLY Domain Controllers).

Competition

There are many companies offering IT services to small businesses. While many of them have competent personnel that knows what they’re doing, sometimes they’re more sales than goal oriented. They will offer the wrong hardware for the job, and you’re the one who has to explain to the customer why your offer is more expensive than the one from your competition.

That’s why it’s important that even a sales understands what he’s selling.

The main advantage of being a Microsoft Partner in the eyes of a technician are free software licenses - and many of them.

In general, you get three types of licenses:

License types

Internal Use Licenses

This is the best you get. These are full fledged internal use licenses which you can use for anything inside your company. There are no restrictions on use, except that you can’t sell them, or use them at a different company. You will get volume Licenses for all relevant Microsoft products - the only thing that i didn’t like was that you don’t get Vista Enterprise with KMS, just Vista Business with a MAK Key.

You can gain additional internal use licenses by gaining competencies, or by advancing to Gold Partner.

Demonstration Licenses

You can’t use them in production, but on learning systems or demo systems for customers. They do use the same keys as the Internal Use Licenses, though.

MSDN/Technet Licenses

These are only for non-production and development. You may not use them on any productive system, even if that system is for development too. i.E. you can’t install a MSDN Office on a developers PC, when he uses Word to write documentation or Outlook to read company mails. Silly rules IMO, but you’ll have to play by them.

License List

See this link:

Software Licensing for Certified and Gold Certified Partners

You’ll see that you usually get the Enterprise or best version of each product, with the exception of Windows Vista. Usually 25 CAL/User Programs, and one or two servers for certified partners, and 100 CAL/User Programs and more servers for gold certified partners.

Partner Programs are something for sales and marketing people. In smaller businesses however, this rule doesn’t always hold true.

Because of this i gathered some experience with the Microsoft Partner Program (MPP), which might help other people in the same position as me to get this job done with as quickly as possible.

Most of these things are already covered in the Partner Program Details.

First things first: the Microsoft Partner Program is only for companies which do work in IT - if you’re just an internal IT dept, the Partner Program isn’t for you, at least officially.

The program levels

Registered Partner

The lowest level in the MPP is that of a Registered Partner. You actually don’t get anything from that, except that you have access to some partner resources and can purchase the Microsoft Action Pack - the Registered Partner Level itself is free.

The Microsoft Action Pack costs about 500 CHF per year, and gives you lots of Microsoft Software Licenses, like Office, Vista, Server, Exchange, Office Sharepoint Server etc. With the Action Pack, you get 10 Internal Use Licenses for both Server CALs and Client Programs/OS. So if you’re a small company, you can get all the Microsoft software you will ever need for just 500 CHF a year.

No need to hunt after customer references or partner points.

Certified Partner

You can achieve the this level by getting partner points. Partner points are primarily gained by achieving competencies. Competencies are achieved by having Microsoft Certified Professionals on your company roster, and by submitting customer references. More about this later.

The Certified Partner Level costs 2500 CHF per year, and you loose the ability to purchase the Action Pack. Instead of having to buy it separately, it’s included in the Certified Partner Level, and gives you 25 Internal Use Licenses. You can even extend these Internal Use Licenses with Volume Licenses.

You also get both a Technet and MSDN subscribtion included into the nominal partner fee (these two subscriptions alone are worth more than 2500CHF per year, but you also get the Internal Use Licenses and other benefits).

There are also 5 free Support Incidents included, and you can order free marketing posters and other material from the Microsoft Partner Shop.

Gold Certified Partner

This is mostly the same as Certified Partner, except you need more points and get more internal use licenses. It’s usually not worth to pursue it, if you need more than 25 Internal Use Licenses you’re usually already big enough to get Gold Certified Partner Level.

Getting points

You’ve decided that you want to be a Certified Partner or Gold Certified Partner. First, you will need to register at the normal Registered Partner level, and then get at least 50 (Certified) or 120 (Gold Certified) Points.

The easiest way to get the Certified Partner Level is gaining a single, simple Competency.

First competency

I would recommend the Networking Infrastructure Solutions competency for most companies as the first competency. You just need three references and two MCPs.

If you already have Microsoft Certified Personal, you don’t need to much more than to figure out their MCP IDs. If you do not have certified personnel yet, you will need to get certified.

The easiest way for this are the client exams Windows XP and Windows Vista. If you and your coworkers know your stuff, you can take either exam without preparation and pass. Both my apprentices passed 70-620, with room to spare and without much preparation. Remember, you need two people for this!

After gaining two MCPs, and having them and their MCP IDs properly registered on the Partner Program Site, you will need to add customer references. You will need at least three customer references every year. Adding customer references is simple enough, ask the customer for permission (by phone), add the company, a tagline for the project (a detailled description is not needed) and the customer gets an e-mail. These e-mails are usually in the spam bin, god knows why. With a link in the e-mail, the customer can approve your reference.

With three references assigned to the Networking Infrastructure Solutions competency and two MCPs, you should already be a Microsoft Certified Partner (after coughing up the 2500CHF).

More points

Getting gold partner is a bit more complicated - you can get a second competency easily by getting the Information Worker competency with the Office Systems Desktop Deployment specialization. Just add three more customer references, and you’re set. You won’t have Gold Partner status yet.

You can get a few more points and a few extra quirks by having someone complete the Small Business exam, which will give your company the additional status Small Business Specialist. Microsoft offers a course for this exam for about 1000 CHF, but it’s not worth it. If you have setup more than one Small Business Server, and looked a bit at the internal SBS tools (like the integrated backup utility), you should be able to pass this exam too without much preparation. This will usually give you 5 extra points. You will also need to do a online sales assessment (look at the source, the solutions are in there), where you have unlimited free retries anyway.

If you want to get the Gold Partner level, you will need to get either a certified product (works well if you’re also an ISV), or get points by getting more sales. I have no idea how you get partner points for sales, as that’s not really my field of work.

An important tip

There are two Microsoft Partner Web Sites:

http://partner.microsoft.com/

Contains mostly marketing material and program Informations

http://partners.microsoft.com/

Contains the Partner Administration website, where can do all the cool stuff like getting your volume license keys, and adding MCPs.