Technote

I had a situation where a Zimbra server was hosting several domains. Some of them were related in such a way that there could be no downtime where any of the domains couldn't send to each other, even during a migration to another server.

One of the domains was going to be hosted by another server. It happened that the domain I'm talking about only used Zimbra for account, pop3 and smtp mail services, so I didn't have to worry about moving mailboxes and mails, but I had to make sure that the emails kept flowing.

So, the new server was set up and ready. All accounts were loaded. Email would go in and out of that server.

We made the big switch of the DNS and outside mail started to flow in. However, I ran into a problem where the mails being sent using the old server would not route after having deactivated the domain on that server. All I'd get is a 550 error telling me that user was not on that server.

So, here's what I did...

OK, fantastic, I just got a free, totally sweet, Samsung Galaxy 10" Tablet for being at Google IO. I spent the second day of GoogleIO using only the tablet (and barely my Nexus One phone) having left my backpack and laptop safely locked up. Feeling the freedom, baby! I was hoping for about 8 hours of battery, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that, after a full day of use during the conference, I still had 50% of my battery left!

Everything was going fantastic. I dropped my stuff off in my hotel room, set up everything to charge, the took off for dinner (In-N-Out, DoubleDouble combo #1, if you're keeping track).

When I got back to my room after dinner, disaster had struck! My little tablet was totally dead. Completely unresponsive. All attempts to reset by holding in the power button failed. I was getting pretty desperate...

One of my client's AVG Remote Admin servers would go to 100% CPU usage and then refuse remote connections. Sometimes it would be temporary, but sometimes it would take a start/stop of the service to get things going again.

That would be OK, once a year or so, but this system started needed it every week.

While I haven't run a full week after what I did, I did come up with a way to start off with a clean database, which is what the problem was, I think...

I had a system with an odd little problem. The user was using Excel 2003 and all of a sudden, it looked like Excel hung. Everywhere the user clicked with the left mouse button, nothing happened. The right button would select a cell an inch away from the cell that was clicked on and the pop-up menu would appear down and to the right from the point clicked. While Excel looked like it was hung, it really wasn't as even though it wasn't behaving, it was running...

Windows 7 is basically OK, but there are some things that have been added to "improve" it that drive me nuts. One of those is the default setting that causes windows that get near the edge of the screen to suddenly pop full screen. In addition to these kinds of new "features", Windows 7 also does a good job hiding where you need to go to fix these settings.

The Aero interface is what does this and the feature is called the "Snap Window Arrangement" feature.

So, if you've done some searching and hit Google and been scared off by the articles that tell you to change the registry and logoff/logon, have no fear! The setting is easy to change, doesn't require a logoff/logon, and is super simple to do, once you find it...

I was getting an error in Eclipse (Helios) when starting up complaining about "GC overhead limit exceeded". GC is the garbage collector, but I hadn't changed any limits. I was using more and larger projects...

I just lost 3 hours of my life I'll never get back because after upgrading a client to Google Apps, I couldn't get their Ricoh MP C3000 to send scans via email!

Ugh!

I've used gmail and Ricoh printers for, like, forever, and haven't had a problem with either, but neither one wanted to place nice when I tried to point the Ricoh at gmail.

I scanned forums, manuals, and tried all of the settings that work fine on the other setups I've had. I checked AT&T, Google, and Ricoh sites for info, but no joy.

It turned out to be pretty simple, and then not...

So I have a bunch of cscript I've written in vbscript and some of it updates databases.

The database connection is done through ODBC (32-bit) drivers, for example with PostgreSQL.

As I've migrated over to 64-bit on a few systems, I haven't run into problems until I have to start dealing with ODBC not seeing 32-bit drivers. This happens a lot, actually.

Anyway, my 32-bit scripts would choke with an error about not finding my connection or driver, even though I could see it fine in the ODBC manager.

The trick was to understand that I wasn't running 32-bit scripts, I was accidentally running 32-bit scripts with the 64-bit cscript program...

I'm still working to get everything 100% working under Win7 for my old VB6 developer environment. The latest issue popped up after a couple of weeks with everything appearing to be OK.

All of a sudden, VB6's IDE starts complaining "Error accessing the system registry". I had just used VB6 the week before without a problem and without any changes, so what gives?

There were a lot of attempts to help people with this error, but most were over complicated and referred to problems with Crystal Reports 8, which I don't use.

I do, however, use CR9.

After a little research I figured it out...

I have a customer using www.ubercart.org for their shopping cart system. One of the neat functions that ubercart has is "conditional actions," which gives you extensive capabilities to automatically do certain things when an order is processed (and at various stages along the way).

Well, I added a CA to tell a customer service person whenever an order was processed with a customer comment. That way, with a certain person in charge, special compliments or requests would be handled by a person.

Anyway, I went through the setup process and tested it out and everything was working.

Later, I noticed that I started getting CA and EMAIL errors in the log for the site. Worse, users would see:

"Unable to send e-mail. Please contact the site administrator if the problem persists."