Now you can use a UK-registered iPhone at BT Openzone hotspots for free

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

BT Openzone logoEarlier this evening, I was trawling through the fine print on the O2 website (hey, I have to do something whilst I’m eating alone in a hotel restaurant) and I found a reference to free Wi-Fi access from BT Openzone hot spots. Hang on – BT Openzone… that’s new! When did that happen?

Well, according to O2’s Wi-Fi FAQ it hasn’t happened yet but it will soon:

Wireless Hotspots
O2 has partnered with The Cloud to provide you with unlimited access to over 7500 public Wi-Fi hotspots across the UK on your iPhone. Excessive usage policy applies. From 11 July, you will also get access to 2000 Wi-Fi hotspots from BT Openzone.
Find the hotspots closest to you

O2 start page for iPhoneI tried to use the BT Openzone at the Hilton East Midlands hotel last night (7 July) with my iPhone and it worked. Just like at The Cloud, all I had to do was enter my mobile number, wait for the site to recognise my iPhone and then I was redirected to the O2 iPhone start page – which is a pretty good portal for iPhone users and even includes a hotspot finder.

O2 can be pretty shoddy at times but this is A Good Thing.

iPhone 3G sold out in the UK – at least for now

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

iPhone 3G logoThis morning, at 8am (although I didn’t get the text message until 8.50), O2 (the sole UK mobile operator able to offer the Apple iPhone to its customers) started selling iPhone 3Gs online to people who had pre-registered their interest.

Given that O2 knew how many people had pre-registered, it’s logical to think that they might have been able to judge the demand – but apparently not.

Image showing the O2 iPhone upgrade website whilst unavailable

Aside from the fact that the upgrade site was unavailable from an iPhone (which is nothing short of bizarre) my reasons for being unable to access the site were entirely outside O2’s control (I was driving when I received the message and then in a client meeting until lunchtime) but one of my friends was experiencing poor website performance before 9 o’clock, then the site went down completely for most of the morning and, at lunchtime, O2 customer service told me that the 16GB models were all sold out (certainly people were complaining on the Apple discussion forums soon after that they could only get an 8GB iPhone 3G… although that thread now seems to have been removed). My friend did at least manage to get conformation that his order had been successful (after 6 hours of trying) but by late afternoon the O2 website was clear that there was no more stock available online and that there would be more information available on 10 July.

Image from the O2 website explaining that there are no more iPhones available online

I can’t help thinking that the whole thing was stage managed – after all what a great headline: iPhone 3G sold out from pre-orders alone. Except it’s not – there is still stock in stores waiting until 11 July – and there will be more online.

Clip from the O2 website explaining that iPhone upgrade deals are only available onlineWith special pricing available to existing customers who want to upgrade to the new handset, the message is far from clear with O2 staff giving conflicting information to customers. I’m now confident that I will not need my old phone at the time of upgrade (and it’s currently listed for sale on eBay) but, twice now, O2’s iPhone “customer service” team has told me that I will be able to upgrade in store, despite the local store telling me that upgrades are only available via customer service and the website clearly stating that:

“Existing iPhone customers upgrade early to the iPhone 3G before 11th October 2008.
Only available online.”

They were similarly uninformed about the availability of the white 16GB model but the O2 website currently states that iPhone 3G is only available in black and there are rumours of an O2 internal memo that suggests the white iPhone 3G it is 3-4 weeks away.

And, even though they have told me that “there is no extra charge for Exchange Active Sync”, I won’t be surprised if I later find that only business customers can access this service.

I might get myself down to an O2 or Apple store on Friday but I’m already starting to question whether I really need (as opposed to want) 3G or GPS…

Having said that, I was equally ambivalent about the original iPhone and now I’m worried about how I will manage for a few weeks without it!

Useful Hyper-V links

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

In the week or so since Hyper-V RTMed there has been a huge amount of coverage on various websites. Here’s a roundup of some of the more useful articles that I’ve come across recently:

I have a new printer to install – but where has the OS X Printer Setup Utility gone?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

After many years of faithful service, my HP LaserJet 2200dn has started printing black lines and ghosting all over the page. Because most of my printing is for work, I asked the company to finance the repairs (or to provide a replacement) and, because they are so serious about green IT (erhum…), rather than use their engineering resource to work out what was wrong and buy the appropriate consumables, they have given me a new printer (an HP Officejet 6310 All-in-One, which seems to be a nice device but it is an inkjet – so expensive to run – and an unnecessary waste of resources as the old printer could have been fixed).

Predictably, I’m having problems installing the software on 64-bit Windows Server 2008 but I’m sure I’ll get there if I do some research (which I won’t at 10pm on a Sunday), but the XP installation on another PC was straightforward (if bloated and time consuming) and the Mac installation seems to have gone reasonably well too (using Bonjour to track down the device on the network). The only catch on the Mac seems to be that the software is written for Mac OS X up to 10.4 and I’m running 10.5.3. This means that some of the hooks in the installer didn’t work – like when it was looking for the printer setup utility and it seems that utility does not exist in Leopard. Luckily, the Leopard’s lost features blog pointed me in the right direction:

“Tiger’s ‘Printer Setup Utility’ has been removed, and all printer configuration is now done and managed exclusively through the Print & Fax system preference pane.”

I hate blog spam…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

As I write this, Akismet is telling me that it has trapped 1988 spam comments in the last 7 days and Bad Behavior has blocked a further 5437 access attempts from known “bad” IP addresses over the same period. That’s pretty alarming – given that this is a pretty small blog run by one bloke in his spare time (albeit one with quite a lot of posts)… thank goodness I have these tools to help me out (I’ve long since given up checking for false positives).

I do moderate comments on the blog and some of the spammers are pretty blatant – stuff with suspect links like the spam e-mails we all get in our Inbox – but, as far as I know, none of those are live on the site. There are others that are more devious and, despite my rules for comments being pretty clear that I don’t welcome blog spam, if their product links are relevant to the discussion, then I’ll generally turn a blind eye (although one guy did repeatedly spam me to promote his product and then had the nerve to e-mail and request a direct link – as you can imagine, my answer was not a positive one).

Then, this afternoon, I noticed a very sly spammer. Some time back, I wrote a post that commented on how, after Nationwide Building Society suffered the theft of a notebook PC with several million customer records, they wrote to my two-year-old son and asked him to show the letter to his parent or guardian! I (somewhat provocatively) titled the post “a lack of business intelligence” and this seems to have grabbed the attention of a blog spammer…

You see, when someone leaves a comment on this blog, WordPress tells me their IP address (as detailed in the privacy policy and data protection notice for this site). I’ve removed the commenter’s personal details but do you notice anything strange about the following comment?

Author : [name removed] (IP: [IP address removed] , inetgw04.unx.sas.com)
E-mail : [e-mail address removed]
URL :
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=[IP address removed]
Comment:
I have just taken a job as a CIO at midsize corporation and have been tasked with implementing BI within the organiztion. This is new territory for me as I was working at a smaller company basically insuring that the essential computing infrasture was in place to insure day to day operations. One book I was going to mention that has been helpful to me is Business Intelligence Books – Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App [link removed]. I would be intersted to hear what others are reading out there.

It’s the reverse lookup on the IP address that gives it away. So you are a CIO at a midsize corporation are you? Well your e-mail seems to have coming from a pretty large business intelligence company (although it’s not clear what they have to do with the book that is being promoted).

It’s not the first time that a large company has spammed this blog. After I criticised Dell for their customer service (and to be fair they worked hard to rectify the situation – for which I gave them credit at the time), someone called “Anonymous” left a comment which linked to a forum post showing HP in a negative light. I smelt a rat and checked their IP address – sure enough it was registered to Dell Computer Corporation.

I really do hate blog spam…

Providing audio playback from a Hyper-V VM

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few months back, I wrote about using the Microsoft Remote Desktop protocol to access USB devices from within a Hyper-V virtual machine. At the time, I mentioned that this approach will also work for other local resources and James O’Neill recently highlighted that, as long as the Windows Audio service is running, the Remote Desktop client can be used to bring sound from a virtual machine back to the device that is providing access (it’s all part of a series James is writing on how to get the server he wants… perhaps he should read my post from a few months back on running Windows Server 2008 as a client operating system).

How Hyper-V works: product team videos

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve posted quite a bit of information about Hyper-V on this blog – including the Hyper-V presentation I gave at Microsoft UK in April 2008 but TechNet Edge has some videos from the Windows Server Virtualization product team that go into a lot of the detail – and where better to learn about this than from the guys who created the product?

Interview with Mike Neil (Microsoft General Manager, Virtualization) about Hyper-V RTM, including:

  • Why Microsoft decided to get into the server virtualization environment.
  • Changes between the various release candidates and RTM.
  • Challenges encountered along the way.
  • Where Hyper-V is heading.
  • IT Pro challenges for deploying Hyper-V.

Architectural overview:

  • Virtual service provider (VSP) virtual service client (VSC) and VMBus.
  • Disk operations within the Hyper-V architecture.
  • Comparison of fixed, dynamic, and differencing VHD disks.

Snapshots:

  • How virtual machine snapshots work.
  • How to properly export a specific VHD/snapshot.
  • Limitations with multiple branches of snapshots.

Backing up Hyper-V virtual machines:

  • Virtual machine snapshots and Volume Shadow copy Service snapshots (VSS).
  • How VSS snapshots function.
  • What happens with a backup for VSS and a non-VS aware operating system (e.g. Linux or Windows 2000 Server).

Disks and iSCSI:

  • Determine when to use a pass-through disk.
  • How iSCSI works and how to use it with Hyper-V.
  • Learn some best practices for using iSCSI.

High availability:

  • Guest operating system clustering.
  • Virtualization platform clustering.

How Microsoft uses server virtualisation for it’s own IT.

Exchange Server support in a Hyper-V virtual machine

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Virtualisation is great but it’s not a “one size fits all” solution – some workloads just don’t make sense for virtualisation.

For many organisations, Exchange Server is one such workload but there are scenarios when it might be appropriate – at least for part of the messaging infrastructure. Up until now it’s been unsupported (in any case, Exchange Server 2007 requires a 64-bit platform, and that wasn’t available on a Microsoft virtualisation platform before the advent of Hyper-V) but Microsoft is running some of its Exchange Servers on Hyper-V and, as Andrew “Dugie” Dugdell commented a few days back, Exchange Server support for Hyper-V is on its way.

In a Hyper-V briefing last week, I asked Bryon Surace, a Senior Product Manager for Microsoft’s Windows Server Virtualization group, to clarify the situation with regards to Exchange Server support on Hyper-V and he explained that support for virtualisation is part of Microsoft’s common engineering criteria for 2008:

“Windows Server virtualization Support
Each server product must be capable of running within a Virtual Machine (VM) as provided by [Hyper-V] on Windows Server [2008]. Each server product must handle escalation and support running in a VM at the same level as was the product running directly on Windows Server.”

Some of the product teams are still testing their products on Hyper-V but, according to Surace, Exchange is supported but recommendations are to follow on implementation (the Exchange Server product team committed to an announcement within 60 days of Hyper-V’s RTM including a detailed support statement for Hyper-V, and a TechNet article with best practices).