Alfa BBT

One of the important features of the new (unboxing here) Atom based Synology NASses is Wake-On-Lan. This technology keeps the network interface powered on when the remainder of the device is powered of. The goal is to let you power on the device over the network by sending a “magic packet”, which is based on the MAC-address of the target network adapter.

The MAC address of a Synology NAS can be found in the admin interface:

For those of you looking how to remotely shutdown the NAS while testing; the command can be found in the right top corner ;-)

First of all you should activate the WoL feature under “System > Power”:

I decided to give free SolarWinds WoL utility a try as suggested by smallnetbuilder. It’s limited featureset is more than sufficient for a little home network, but you’ll need to provide an e-mail address before they allow you to download it.

Open the SolarWinds Wake-On-Lan tool and enter both the IP- and MAC-address of your NAS. Click the “Wake Up PC”-button:

Click “OK” on the notification window:

A little monitor pops up…

…and alerts you when the target is powered on.

The whole process takes about a minute.

After having this solution approved by the Misses I scheduled the NAS to power down every night @ 3AM.

This leaves sufficient of a time window to use the NAS for downloading stuff overnight:

“Nachtsurfen” as we call it (between 00:00 and 10:00) reduces the download limit with only 50% of the size of the downloaded package.

I’m using a WD NetCenter for my home storage needs since about 3.5 years. This unit is not only very slow but it also has a very basic feature-set. It’s not possible to reorganize your data (move files around, rename shares etc) via the web interface. There’s no console access possible either.

Hence a decent NAS was on my wishlist for some time already. The needs/nice-to-haves I had in mind were:

• 2 or 4 disk model:  I want to use RAID (on top of regular backups) to better protect my data, so 2 hard disks is a minimum. A 4 disk unit might be more future proof.
• Capacity: The NetCenter unit has only 500Gb, but data is growing steadily as the Misses likes to play around with Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. I’ll start with recuperating 2x 1Tb disk I have sitting in another machine. I can upgrade to 2x 2Tb later if needed.
• Network: gigabit
• Budget: not unlimited ;-)
• Full-featured management tools
• Some form of Download manager
• Better performance
• Energy saving features e.g. hibernation, WOL etc…
• ISCI

When Synology published the official press release on the DS710+ last week it was time to treat myself on a late, it’s February after all, new years present. It went quite fast actually:

1. 11/02 – Press release
2. 15/02 – Noticed the device in a trusted web shop as “out of stock”. Signed up to be notified by e-mail notification when the device is in stock.
3. 16/02 – “In stock” e-mail notification. Ordered about half an hour before the deadline for next day delivery.
4. 17/02 – Package arrived about 14(!) hours later

Last but not least, the unboxing pics;

I did look into QNAP too as they have a similar unit, Ts-259 Pro-Turbo, but went for Synology because the communtity seems lager in our region and the features match a tiny bit better with my needs. For those interested; both manufacturers have demo environment of their management tools online:

• http://demo.synology.com:5000 (Account=”admin”, Password=”synology”)
• http://www.qnap.com/liveDemo.asp (Account=”qnap”, Password=”qnap”)

Update 2010-03-06: If I wetted your appetite with the pics above, proceed to Overclock3d.net for some detailed shots of the internals of Synology’s DS710+

It seems that Microsoft published the second Exchange 2010 exam today: Exam 70-663: Pro: Designing and Deploying Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

The contents at a glance:

Planning the Exchange Server 2010 Infrastructure
* Design the Exchange Server 2010 installation.
* Design message routing.
* Design the mailbox server role.
* Design client access.
* Plan for transition and coexistence.

Deploying the Exchange Server 2010 Infrastructure
* Prepare the infrastructure for Exchange Server 2010 deployment.
* Deploy Edge transport server role.
* Deploy client access server role.
* Deploy hub transport server role.
* Deploy mailbox server role.
* Deploy server roles for coexistence and migration.

Designing and Deploying Security for the Exchange Organization
* Design and deploy messaging security.
* Design and deploy Exchange permissions model.
* Design and deploy message hygiene.
* Design and deploy client access security.
* Design and deploy Exchange object permissions.

Designing and Deploying Exchange Server 2010 Availability and Recovery
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for Exchange dependencies.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for CAS role.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for mailbox server role.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for hub transport role.
* Design and deploy high availability and disaster recovery for Edge transport server role.

Designing and Deploying Messaging Compliance, System Monitoring, and Reporting
* Design and deploy auditing and discovery.
* Design and deploy message archival.
* Design and deploy transport rules for message compliance.
* Design and deploy for monitoring and reporting.

The first exam Exam 70-662: TS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Configuring is already available for a month or 2. For some reason it seems to have slipped through my RSS feeds without me noticing it. Guess I’ll need to add another one.

Time to start preparing.

I wanted to quickly reblog (as opposed to retweet) a recent blog post from Ilse Van Criekinge as I did have a little “Aha!”-moment upon reading it:

One of the first warmly welcomed new features included with the next release of Microsoft Office Outlook, being 2010, is the ability to open up multiple mailboxes (up to 3 by default, and up to 15 using a registry entry) and the fact that when you send a message using one of the accounts the mail will be saved in the Sent Items folder of the sender’s mailbox. When opening a shared mailbox in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, it required you to create at least a rule to have the message moved from the primary mailbox its Sent Items folder, to the shared mailbox its Sent Items…

But…it seems that ever since June 2009, 30, this isn’t necessary anymore!

Read on…

On a Virtual Center 4 update 1 installation I noticed an Perf Charts service error on the performance overview tab. The advanced performance tab is functioning as normal.

There are 3 VMware KBs related to this type of error:

• KB1009872
• KB1010172
• KB1013877

Unfortunately none of these solved my problem.

In virtual center U1 the configuration of the performance charts database has changed location. It’s now located in C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\conf\Catalina\localhost\statsreport.xml.

VMware updated the KB article (KB1013877) in the mean time to reflect the changes in Update 1.

A colleague noticed my impressive list of exchange related blogs/sites in Google Reader and asked me to share them with him on occasion. Luckily you can export all feeds from a specific folder via some workaround.

Exchange RSS Feeds

You can get the resulting file by downloading it from RapidShare (I’ve activated TrafficShare for this file, so no nag-screen there). You can then import all of these feeds to the RSS-reader of your choice in just one shot.

The hard part is keeping up ;-)

Note: If you are more into mailinglists than you should have a look at this blogpost from Joeware. (ref. ADFind)

Those of you that are eagerly looking for some bed time reading material (and aren’t satisfied with the “Exchange News Ticker”-widget in the lower right corner of this blog) can check out the Exchange 2010 KB-article news feed as explained by Paul Robichaux.

See RSS feed for Exchange 2010 KB articles – Paul’s Down-Home Page: Exchange, security, and more.

Henrik Walther wrote a nice article on Exchange 2010 for the December edition of TechNet Magazine:

The recently released Microsoft Exchange 2010 Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version, like its predecessors, includes a wealth of new features and improvements over existing ones. As a matter of fact, with this release, Exchange now consists of approximately 21 million lines of code.

Exchange developers had five main goals in mind for Exchange 2010: to help organizations achieve new levels of reliability, better performance, simplified administration, improved protection of communications and greater business mobility for users. In short, and with the global economic crisis in mind, they aimed to create a more flexible and optimized product that would lower the costs of running an Exchange 2010 infrastructure.

Since April 2008, I have spent a good deal of time testing Exchange 2010 beta and release candidate builds in my labs, as well as in two enterprise customer environments. In this article, I will take you on a tour through the most exciting changes and improvements in this latest and—without doubt—greatest Exchange version we have seen so far.

Read on.

When WordPress.com announced the e-mail subscription feature end of last year I immediately started thinking about using it in combination with Evernote to create automatic backups of my blog posts.

Here’s a little how to:

Add the e-mail subscriptions widget to your blog Log out of WordPress to make sure it doesn’t recognize your existing WordPress account. Log in to Evernote and copy you Evernote e-mail address from the settings page Surf to your own blog and subscribe with your Evernote mail address. As usual when signing up for something on the internet you’ll need to confirm that the e-mail address you provided is really yours by clicking on an activation link. In this case the mail is sent to Evernote. It will be automatically converted to a new note by their services.Choose daily or weekly schedule. Corrections made after publishing your post might not be included in the copy sent to Evernote when selecting  the “immediate” schedule. More details under “settings”:All posts will be automatically forwarded to Evernote and converted to notes.

I’m keeping them in a separate notebook as you can see. As far as I know there’s are no “inbox rules” that you can create to do that automatically for you, so you need to do some drag & drop now and then.

WordPress.com & Evernote; Better Together?

Note: WordPress (both *.com & *.org) offer you the ability to export.backup your entire blog to an XML file

While you can use it to restore your entire blog, it’s not a human readable format. So it’s not a solution for quick access to some of your old content.

I’ve got some Google Wave invites left. Put a reply in the comments if you’re in desperate need for one…