All posts by Steven McNutt

About Steven McNutt

I am a technical support analyst and manager with more than fifteen years of experience. Although specializing in the Microsoft line of products I am also familiar with and have worked with (among others) the IBM AIX and Red Hat Linux operating systems, as well as the installation and maintenance of Cisco and Nortel networking equipment. I have obtained the following Certifications at differening times over my years of working in the IT field: -CISSP -MCSE (NT4 and Windows 2003) -RHCE (v3) -CNA (v4) I currently work and reside in Cleveland but I also frequently work in both Cincinnati and central Michigan as well. 

Upgrading to Server 2008

Server Support

I’m a little late on this, but it has more to do with what’s supported on Server 2008 and having the time to upgrade the servers.  Of note are the two bigger issues when upgrading:

  • One of my servers was formally a Server 2000 box and as such doesn’t have the largest hard drive.  Now existing as a Server 2003 virtual machine I decided to boost the drive size.  This required boosting the drive size in Hyper-V, changing the simple dynamic disk to a basic disk by using this Microsoft tip (sorry I don’t remember which site gave me the tip), and then finishing up with PartedMagic.
  • Next up is removing/uninstalling Powershell.  Since my disks were low on space I was rather diligent about removing the compressed patch uninstall files under the Windows directory so I didn’t have the Powershell uninstall sitting around anywhere. Since I had no other choice, I went through a lengthy process of building an un-SP* Server 2003 virtual machine just so I could get the Powershell uninstall files.  To save others the pain I am sharing the files here.

As well, perhaps due to the age of the OS on the box, the Frontpage extensions had a nasty hook into the OS with the constant upgrade error of “setup has detected that Frontpage server extensions is installed on this computer” blah blah blah.  I paced through the tip here and the one that did it was deleting everything in the registry labeled “web server extensions”.

Free Hold Music

Uncategorized

At a couple points in the past I’ve attempted to scrounge around on the Internet for royalty free hold music that we could use at my place of work.  I must admit that I was never successful, but I also must admit that I can’t remember why.  If I had to guess I would say that it was for reasons similar to my hunt for royalty free artwork: the quality was poor, or the license allowing for it’s free use was dubious at best.

When looking for royalty free music there’s two hurdles: is the song itself public domain, and is the recording.  The former is easy enough as anything more than a hundred years old is pretty safe, but the latter is quite tricky since recordings have been known to fade in and out of ‘public domain’ access.

However a vendor that I called on had quite horrible hold music and I was pondering their logic of torturing their customers thus when I realized that their work around was to record MIDI music of public domain songs.  Well ‘song’ was more like it, and the MIDI chip they used sounded like it had been resurrected from the mid-80s, but the approach was novel!

A better approach than the one they used is to use classical harpsichord music (the tinny sound of that instrument doesn’t lose much in the translation to MIDI) and then use one of the commercial MIDI-to-WAV/MP3 converters (or if your so given, record the MIDI output on your computer).

Remote Voicemail on the BCM

Network Communications

For quite a while we have relied on dialing ‘**’ when dialing into the BCM to check our voicemail. However, our snazzy new touchscreen cellphones don’t handle ‘clicking’ the asterisk in a quick, consecutive fashion. I looked around on the Internet for an alternative, but then realized that I could just use the number that is used by the voicemail system as it’s ‘forward’ destination (ours is 300, but yours may be different).

iTunes Error

Desktop Support

Thanks Apple, this clears up a lot…

ituneserror

I should mention as well that it’s not very pleasing to have to put iTunes on a computer to support a user’s device, couldn’t Apple at least brew up a smaller sync app?  Though to be fair Blackberry’s sync app isn’t much better; Microsoft get’s the ‘best sync app’ prize in my opinion.

(Update: I forgot to mention that our fix for ‘could not sync calendars because the sync server failed to sync the iPod/iPhone’ was to uninstall and reinstall iTunes, though I was sure to delete ‘Apple’ registry keys and file folders in between).