Yes, I haven’t posted in awhile. Mostly due to the fact that business had picked up right after I swapped themes. All that work on the theme for naught it seemed.

Thanks to the seeming incompetence of a Microsoft Certified Partner, the blog will see it’s first post since the change.

Sad it had to come to this.

I was contacted by my prior employer about his friend’s company that needed some help. No problem, can do. Upon contacting the prospective client, it seemed that the Certified Partner they hired to build/install a new SBS2003 box had left some loose ends on the box. Not little loose ends. Big ones.

No VPN? Check.

No access to Exchange e-mail for certain users? Check.

SSL Certificate errors? Check.

SmartPhones/Blackberries unable to receive mail? Check.

The CP (Certified Partner from here on out) had made numerous trips over the month since installation to try and resolve these issues to no avail. Of course, they charged the client for each failed trip. The client wasn’t happy at all.

I showed up early in the morning after first contact since their business had been pretty much crippled for the past month. First thing I noticed was a SonicWall TZ150 which had VPN capability. Checking the setup, all seemed fine on the firewall side, so I asked the client if their remote users were receiving errors on the SonicWall VPN client. “What’s that?”, she asked. It turns out the CP had failed to instruct the client on the proper usage of the product they recommended to the client. They’re a construction business, not IT support. Unacceptable. I forwarded the VPN port to the SBS server and setup their remote users with remote access since the CP failed to leave information or software for the SonicWall. Remote users login successfully. Cheers begin.

Next on tap, the Exchange users unable to send/receive mail. A quick call to the users revealed they were getting mailbox full errors. It can’t be this easy, can it? Yes, yes it could. A quick change to the 125MB default mailbox size yielded free mail flow once again. Too easy.

The SSL certificate errors, I knew as soon as she told me. Wrong FQDN name on the cert. Quick run of the CEICW and plugging in the correct FQDN resolved the issue.

Roughly 3 hours into the visit and I’ve fixed everything that was crippling their business, that the CP couldn’t fix over the course of a month.

Now for the SmartPhone/Blackberry issues. The CP had arranged for the purchases, so it wasn’t like they didn’t know the client wanted to use the devices for that purpose. I had no prior experience with mobile technologies as none of the other setups I performed needed it, so I explained to them this fact beforehand, but I would delve into the issue and correct it. They had no problems with that all considering I just fixed their main issues.

Fixing it took longer than I had hoped due to the fact I didn’t have a SmartPhone to test with myself. Troubleshooting consisted of making singular changes to the borked configuration and then contacting them to test the changes and report back any errors. This would generally take ~4-6 hours per change since they had a business to run themselves and it wasn’t a vital aspect they needed.

After day 3, during which I had made ~5 changes and gotten the Blackberries to work, the SmartPhones were still experiencing issues related to logging in. It just so happened my fiance had a day off and wanted to go shopping. Since I was waiting on word of the latest change results, I went. It turns out she wanted to go shopping for a new phone. Hmmmm. When all was said and done, she bought me a T-Mobile Dash (Windows Mobile 6 SmartPhone) as a late birthday present after watching me work on this issue for the past few days.

Things will go much faster now.

2 hours after getting the phone home, I had Direct Push working on their server after making several more changes to their Exchange configuration, since I could test immediately. The resulting e-mail I sent from my new phone to theirs arrived late at night on their phone and was responded to with great joy. I love it.

In all fairness to the CP, they were probably sending out newbie technicians to fix seemingly easy problems. My advice, hire better newbie technicians or send out the big guns. Actually, don’t.

Now, the client is ready to jump into Terminal Services. Too easy. Thanks for the new client.

SBSC - 1, CP - 0

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