Timothy
Parker Consulting Incorporated
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Questions and Answers Part 9 Q: I’ve been trying to send you a question through questions@tparker.com and got a DNS error, then a mail relaying error message. What gives? More specifically, why do these errors occur and how are they fixed? A: The errors cropped up because
I was switching servers (from one ISP to another). When you change ISPs, the DNS
(Domain Name Service which maps a domain name to an IP address through a
specific ISP) has to be updated. Due
to several screw-ups in e-mails by the new ISP, the change to the DNS tables
maintained by the Internet didn’t get properly updated.
That’s the reason for the DNS error. After that got straightened out, the e-mail forwarding became an issue. E-mail forwarding lets you redirect e-mail from one account to another, allowing several e-mail addresses be collected into a single e-mail box for easy reading. I forward several e-mail addresses to my main e-mail address, allowing me to see all the incoming mail on all the accounts in one Outlook window. The new ISP I changed several accounts to did not support e-mail forwarding properly, since I was forwarding to another ISP entirely. (This isn’t unusual or difficult; it just requires the correct entries in the e-mail configuration files. However, some ISPs don’t forward outside their accounts to restrict outbound traffic and to try to drum up more business internally.) The configuration file on the new ISP wasn’t set up for forwarding, hence the second message. All these problems are now straightened out and e-mails have been getting through properly. My apologies to anyone who tried to send a question and got errors. I was away from my office for five weeks and didn’t catch the problems while on the road. Q: I see Office XP is on the
shelves. When will Windows XP ship? Any
clues? A: According to a Microsoft
spokesperson, Windows XP will officially be on the shelves October 25. There are
two versions of the software to be released that day, called Home and Pro.
Windows XP is based on the Windows NT and Windows 2000 code, so should have the
better stability and application security that NT has offered, while supposedly
supporting existing Windows applications. Some
beta test results show problems with the expected sources, primarily games and
other multimedia applications, but Microsoft is working these out.
Office XP is already available and there are many lucrative bundle
packages for Office XP buyers offered in the US, but fewer here at home. Q: Are screensavers a good idea
for Windows NT servers? One person
I spoke to said they don’t take any CPU resources away from background tasks,
but this doesn’t make sense to me. Is
he right? A: No.
Here’s a simple test. Set
the screen saver to kick in after five or ten minutes of inactivity on the
console. Use a screen saver that does a lot of screen drawing, such as the
Pipes. Start the performance monitor tool and monitor CPU usage on your server.
Let the screen saver kick in and wait fifteen seconds, then hit any key
to return to the screen. You will
see the CPU usage peak when the screen saver is running.
Essentially, the screensaver sucks huge amounts of CPU cycles from the
server when it is active, and can slow down background tasks like Web servers
and application server tasks. My
advice: set the screen saver to “none” and leave it there on all Windows NT
machines that use background tasks. Q: In a column a while ago you
mentioned Veritas’ Backup Exec software as your choice for Windows backups.
This is a very expensive package. Is
there an alternative for a single workstation? A: Yup.
From Veritas, even. They
have a single system (workstation or server) backup package called
Backup ExecDesktop. It runs under most Windows platforms and works only
on the native drives of the machine. As I mentioned earlier, Backup Exec has
replaced CA’s ArcServe IT as my network-wide backup tool because it has worked
solidly for me, without loading a ton of applications like CA’s software.
I’ve used Backup Exec for two years now with no hassles, and recommend
it for network backup applications. There
are a few annoyances with the package but overall this is the best network
backup package I know of. Q: I keep getting asked about
Voice over IP as a cheaper way to make long distance phone calls. Is this now a mature product? A: Voice over IP (VOIP) is used by many companies for phone calls, but that’s over a dedicated network where reliability of the connection and all the bits of a voice call arriving together are assured. Over the Internet, you have no control over the quality of the signal, and it is not unusual to lose chunks of a conversation, or have them arrive in the wrong sequence. The result is a choppy, noisy conversation. VOIP software for the Internet is getting better, and reliability is improving (as is error correction), but this is still not a mature technology over the Internet. Quality differences are very noticeable. |
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