My very short ski experience with Britt and Michael Janyk
February 17th, 2010. Published under General, Life, Sports. No Comments.
Sometime around 1995 or ’96 I spent a winter in Whistler teaching skiing. I was teaching in Whistlers Ski Scamps, the kids ski school, and having a great time. I was teaching school groups during most of the week, but on the weekends I had the chance to teach the same group of kids every weekend. That was the most fun because the kids were pretty good skiers and I got to see them learn lot over the course of the season. That weekend program was run by Andree Janyk, Britt and Michaels mom. She was a tough person to work for; she expected a lot out of everyone who taught in that program, but she was quick to praise you when you were doing a good job.
Close to the end of the season we had some big event where all of the groups got together, all the weekend groups and all of the racing groups. Andrees son Michael there with some group of racing kids, most of whom were a bit older than the group I was teaching. Britt was hanging around there somewhere too, but I think she was already on a development team by that point so she was really just helping her mom out. For one reason or another all of my kids left early that day (it was a beautiful March day) and one of the coaches with the racing groups had to leave. That coach asked me if I’d ski down to the village with his group then let them go off on their own. I was about to head down for the day so that was fine with me. Michael happened to be in that group of kids.
Once we got started going down the hill I was flying down the hill, enjoying being able to ski fast and not worry about whether the kids I was leading could keep up or not. I thought I was keeping ahead of them no problem until I looked back over my shoulder to make sure they were all still there only to see Michael right on my heels and a look on his face of “Why the hell did we get stuck with the slow guy?”. I did everything I could to ski the fastest I possibly could, but I definitely couldn’t outrun any of those barely-teenage-kids. I like to think I did pretty good, but when I was skiing flat out I was barely keeping up with them! I won’t even get into how tough it was to keep up to Britt and her mom skiing out one day.
Now that both of them have been on the national team for years and Britt just came 6th in the 2010 Olympic downhill race I think my ego can bounce back from barely being able to keep up with them ;)
Updated Exchange 2010 Storage and Role Calculator
January 23rd, 2010. Published under Technical. No Comments.
The Exchange team posted an updated version of the Exchange 2010 Storage and Role calculator over on the MS Exchange Team blog. Plenty of updates, but Ross does a much better job of describing it that I would, so check out his entry for all of the details.
Fine Grained Password Policies and Password Expiry
June 29th, 2009. Published under Technical. No Comments.
I was working with a customer recently to implement a new Fine Grained Password policy for their administrative and elevated accounts. This new policy would force those admin accounts to change their password every 42 days rather than the standard 90 days that their default policy enforced. When we implemented this new policy we changed a few passwords and went to look at what the acctinfo32.dll reporting showed for password expiry. Typically on a changed password this tool would show that the password would expire in 90 days and we wanted to show that our policy was working fine and displaying 42 days. Except when we looked at the users it was still showing that the password would expire in 90 days.
This had us puzzled as it was obvious that the policy was being applied since we also enforced those users to have a longer password than normal. We scratched our heads for a while, but then we set to some testing. We changed the MaximumPasswordAge to be 5 minutes, then changed a users password. Right away we knew this was going to work because as soon as we logged in we got the message from the desktop that our password was going to expire that day. Still, we waited the 5 minutes and sure enough, even though acctinfo was showing 90 days, our password expired as expected.
It looks like many tools that display password expiry are looking at the default policy and don’t yet take Fine Grained Password policies into account when constructing that information. I have no idea if there will ever be an updated version of the acctinfo.dll or not, but this might be something to keep in mind as you are implementing Fine Grained Password policies.
Fine Grained Password policy links:
AD DS: Fine-Grained Password Policies
AD DS Fine-Grained Password and Account Lockout Policy Step-by-Step Guide
Exchange 2007 error: Passive node added as Exchange Server Administrator
February 21st, 2009. Published under Uncategorized. No Comments.
I ran into an odd issue recently and in talking to a few other guys I work with they noticed the same thing at some of their customers and in their labs. So after some digging we finally came across this KB Article that describes the problem and how to resolve it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951578
Essentially, when installing an Exchange 2007 Mailbox cluster, the passive node is granted Full Control over the Clustered Mailbox server Active Directory object. This gives it Exchange Server Administrator rights and manifests itself by showing an error when viewing the Organization Configuration or when running the get-ExchangeAdministrator PowerShell command. The error that is given is: The account is not a member of Exchange View Only Administrators
How to change the username associated with a Windows Mobile 6 device
November 21st, 2007. Published under Technical. 1 Comment.
I was just asked how to change the username that is associated with Mobile Outlook on a Windows Mobile 6 device and was surprised that you couldn’t just edit the connection and do that. It took me a bit of digging, but here is the process to do that on my HTC 5800 (works on a HTC S720, same device), I haven’t tested it on anything else:
To change the username you need to delete the Exchange sync relationship on the device (cant sync to two exchange mailboxes at the same time). Open ActiveSync then:
Menu>Options>Menu>Delete
You get an Alert message, click Yes and your sync relationship will be deleted. Once that is done you can follow the steps above to create a new one (associate with a new username).