Archive for January, 2010

Screen Saver for Background Video

Friday, January 29th, 2010

“And Now For Something Completely Different”

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

This week, Apple launched their newest product: the iPad. The sleek iPad is a revolutionary new look at the NetBook, but able to run most of the 140,000 applications that are in the App Store for the iPhone. Given the popularity of the App Store so far and the new development methods introduced for the iPad you can rest assured that even more feature rich applications will be developed for the iPad as time goes on. Not that Apple hasn’t led the charge in using the new iPad APIs: iWork has been ported to the iPad. This means that you can create rich Pages, Numbers and Keynote presentations in addition to interacting with a number of cloud based services and leveraging those existing iPhone applications.


The iPad is aluminum and glass, comes with up to 64GB of space, a multi-touch LED screen, 802.11n, Bluetooth and can have a 3G data connection for only $29.99 per month. All of this in a secure, easy-to-use interface that we’ve all grown accustomed to!

Want help integrating the iPad into your Enterprise? Let 318 know if you have interest with mass deployment, purchasing or development: our developers are on hand to work with you on commercial and enterprise applications as needed!

Preparing for Exchange 2007

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Make sure you have a fully updated Windows 2008 64bit install setup for the following commands to work. Note that Windows 2008 R2 will NOT work with Exchange 2007.

Exchange 2007 has a lot of prerequisites that need to be installed before you can install Exchange 2007. Instead of going through a bunch of Wizards and using trial and error to make sure you have everything installed, you can set them up using a command line.

The first command that should be run is:

ServerManagerCmd -i PowerShell

This will install and configure everything that Exchange 2007 needs for PowerShell.

IIS has several components that need to be installed to use Exchange 2007. You can create a quick batch script that includes them all. The following commands need to be run:

ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Server
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-ISAPI-Ext
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Metabase
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Basic-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Digest-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Windows-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Dyn-Compression

If you plan on using RPC over HTTP (Outlook Anywhere) you will need to run this command after all of the IIS commands have finished:

ServerManagerCmd -i RPC-over-HTTP-proxy

After running these commands you should be ready to run the actual setup files. When you run setup.exe you should see that everything before option 4. Is greyed out. Option 4. is what triggers the install. If anything has not finished look through the command lines to make sure no errors have shown up.

New ActiveStorage iPhone App

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Active Storage has released a new iPhone app that you can use to monitor the status of their new XRAID ES. If you are interested in the Active Storage products then please call 318 at 310-581-9500 for more information and pricing.

The App is available on the App Store.

ACLs and NFS

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

The permissions that a user obtains for NFS shares will boil down to effective permissions. NFS doesn’t support ACLs, but it does honor them for Mac OS X NFS clients when bound to the directory.: if a user is granted read/write via an ACL, they WILL have read/write access via NFS. However, there are a few things to note here.

First and foremost, granular ACL’s won’t translate completely. Secondly, although you might have effective write privileges via ACL’s, if you don’t have write privileges via POSIX, it will *look* like you don’t have privileges when you do an `ls` on the mounted NFS volume, however, if you try to read or write a file, it will work without issue. Poorly written software might inspect the POSIX permissions and determine that you don’t have access when you really do. Most software will attempt to read/write an asset and will report errors when encountered (as it should).  Lastly, ACL inheritance IS honored over NFS as well, so any files/dirs your users will create will have the appropriate ACL’s assigned on the backend, though displayed POSIX permissions once again won’t be especially accurate.