Elgin Computer Guy

What a bear! In some ways Exchange 2007 is incredible, in other ways it’s just a pain in the neck. It almost feels like they just gave up and decided to release it before they finished building the user interface. Many things that were done with a GUI interface in Exchange 2003 now require archaic commands using the “PowerShell”. What were they thinking?

Yes - it’s nice having the PowerShell, but it would be nice if you didn’t NEED it for things like moving the public folders, adjusting spam filtering and a few other things that should be a couple of clicks. So far I haven’t even found any help in the PowerShell. I had problems moving public folders - it generated some warnings and some errors, but not much info on how to correct the problem.

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So the big project is gaining momentum… Last night I was finally ready to install the first server. (There will be 5 new servers in total - an SC860, 2-PowerEdge 2950’s and 2-PowerEdge 2970’s [64-bit].)

I fired up the first 2950, told it to boot from CD and began the Server 2003 install. It got to the part of asking where to install it and gave up the ghost because it couldn’t find a hard drive. Hmmmm…. I rebooted and used the Dell CD where it prepped the drive and gathered information, then it asked for the Server 2003 CD. I gave it the CD and it spit it out. I gave it a DVD and it didn’t like that either.

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My biggest job as a freelancer started today. The customer ordered the equipment and it’s starting to trickle in. The best thing about being a computer consultant is being paid to play with expensive high tech toys that I can’t afford to buy myself. (OK, so it’s actually work and they’re tools - not toys, but I love my job!)

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The Chicago SBS User group held an 8-hour meeting yesterday to talk about disaster recovery. How timely! A customer just ordered a new LTO4 autochanger and Backup Exec. The old backup system is nonfunctional and part of my job is to come up with a disaster recovery plan.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find what I was looking for at the meeting. No offense to any members who happen to read this, but it wasn’t nearly technical enough and it got off into tangents about business continuity and non-profits. I only stayed 3 hours, so maybe I missed the good stuff?

A few hours later I ran across this site about using VMWare for disaster recovery - EXCELLENT!

How to use VMWare for disaster recovery

It doesn’t really apply to my client’s needs, but it sure applies to my own setup. What a great idea!!

BOM=Byte Order Mark
UTF= Uniform Transformation Format
WTF?! = well, you know…

Whatever happened to just plain old ASCII text?
OK, so UTF is ASCII text, but why in the world would you want HIDDEN characters in your files? Especially if there’s no way to toggle displaying them or not. Thank goodness for good old DOS EDIT.

In my last post I mentioned the problems I had with installing Wordpress on my domain. The culprit was the BOM at the beginning of the wp-config.php file. I edited the file in Microsoft’s Expression Web and it added those weird characters. I fixed it by using “edit” from a DOS prompt. I was able to eliminate those hidden characters and save the file. That allowed the script to work and obviously Wordpress is working now.

I spent about an hour yesterday looking for a way to force Expression Web to NOT use BOM, but no luck. I found a few tutorials that showed how to eliminate it by changing the UTF, but that could come back to bite you as well, as that’s where the language encoding is stored. I guess the short answer is don’t edit PHP files in Expression Web.

Here’s a Wiki article on BOM:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark

Here’s one on UTF-8:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

And finally, here’s the Wiki article on WTF?!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTF

I tried a few times to install wordpress on my domain - elgincomputerguy.com. I kept getting weird errors. I’d clear the database and start again, but the same thing kept happening.

I finally went to the support forums and found other people having the same problem and one of the suggested answers said that the file must start with “<?php” - any blank lines or spaces will mess it up. That’s when I remembered that I’d edited the file with Microsoft Expression Web and it adds some kind of weird characters at the beginning of every file.

I just found out about that weirdness within Expression Web a couple of months ago. Here’s what the file looked like in notepad:

and here’s how it looks when I go to the DOS prompt and use “edit”:

Isn’t that weird? I love Expression Web - I switched from Dreamweaver several months ago, but this odd behavior makes me have second thoughts. This is the second time it bit me - both times while I was doing PHP. You’d think I would have caught it sooner!

Notice that Notepad doesn’t display the hidden characters. If you create the file in Notepad, they’re not there, but if you do it in Expression Web then open in Notepad, they won’t show, but if you modify the file in Notepad and save it - the hidden characters remain. The only way I know of to get rid of them once they’re in a file is to use the DOS prompt and EDIT.

This one!