Technology at Harley

Updating iOS Devices for Google Apps

August 6th, 2014

So you already have your Harley email setup on your iPhone or iPad, right? When we switch to Google Apps you will need to update your device to talk to Google’s servers rather than Harley’s.

Removing the Existing Profile

Assuming you setup your iOS device using our mobileconfig generator, you simply need to remove the profile and recreate it. To remove the profile touch Settings ➡ General ➡ Profile – iPad Setup Config and tap the red Remove button.

This won’t delete any of your data from your mailbox, only from the device.

If there is no profile there, you either didn’t setup your email or did it manually. To remove a manual setup, click on Settings ➡ Mail, Contacts Calendars and select the account. Then there should be a delete button there somewhere.

Adding the New Profile

Once you’ve completed these steps you can go to our updated mobileconfig site to setup the new profile: http://hrly.sl/ios

Set your Default Calendar

Once you’re setup remember to set your Harley calendar as the default. If you don’t and aren’t paying close attention when you create calendar events, they will only reside on the device and not sync to your mailbox. Tap Settings ➡ Mail, Contacts, Calendars ➡ Default Calendar and tap your Harley calendar. Depending on how many personal email accounts you have, there may be many calendars to choose from.

Add the Google Drive App

You also might want to consider installing the Google Drive app for your Apple device. Once connected you can then view and edit all your Drive documents from anywhere: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-drive-free-online-storage/id507874739?mt=8

Posted in Email, Google Apps, Google Apps Migration, Harley, Mobile Devices, Walkthrough | No Comments »

Password Change Required

August 5th, 2014

In order to access your new Harley Gmail account you need to change your password. New passwords must be 8 characters or more. They can be any combination of letters (upper or lowercase), numbers and symbols. Even if your current password is already 8 or more characters you still need to go through the motion of changing the password so the synchronization software running at school will see the new password and set it on Google’s end too. If you want to keep your current password just change it to something temporary and then change it back.

If you’re in school on your office/classroom computer you can simply hit ctrl+alt+del on the keyboard and select “Change a password…” from the menu that appears. Fill in the new password twice and you should be all set.

If you’re at home or somewhere away from school you can change your password through our webmail site Outlook Web Access:

Go to https://webmail.harleyschool.org and login with your current username and password.
Select “Options” from the menu on the lower left side of the page:
Scroll down and select the “Change Password” button second from the bottom:
Fill in the information. “Account” is your username (the part to the left of the @ in your email address), then your current password and then the new 8 or more character password twice. Then hit “OK” and you should see a message about a successful password change.

Once the switch has taken place our old webmail site will be unavailable, so you should really change your password a head of time. You can always change it from within school at any time.

Posted in Email, Google Apps, Google Apps Migration, Harley | No Comments »

Going Google

August 5th, 2014

Our aging email system has been a thorn in my side for a very long time. This summer it finally got to the point where something had to be done. The latest version of Microsoft Outlook included with Office 2013 is incompatible with the version of Exchange Server we are currently running. This left us with 2 options: upgrade Exchange or move to a totally different solution.

I’m a huge fan of Exchange as far as functionality, but upgrading would require new hardware, licensing and time. And we’d still end up in the same spot in a few years.

We decided to move to Google Apps for Education. This will fix our disk space issues as users each get 30GB of space. It will fix the time/manpower issue as it’s hosted by Google and not internally. It fixes the hardware/cost issue because it’s free.

I’m very excited for this switch to happen. I know people will freak out and not want to give up their precious Outlook, but in the end it’s best for everyone.

(This is sort of old news, as this was decided in the early summer, but I figured as I’ll be posting other GAFE info it’s good to have the back-story.)

Posted in Email, Google Apps, Google Apps Migration, Servers | No Comments »

OWA 2003 and Internet Explorer 10

May 12th, 2013

This one stumped me for quite a while. I’ve had random complaints that “webmail isn’t working” but I could never catch it in action, it always worked for me (on my desktop, laptop and even my phone). People would tell me that the webpage would say loading forever. Finally someone with a laptop who was having the problem brought it in so I could play with it. At that point I figured out it was related to Compatibility View in Internet Explorer 10.

If you add “webmail.harleyschool.org” to the list of sites to use Compatibility View or simply click on the little icon in the address bar the site displays perfectly again.

This really irritates me because Outlook Web Access (OWA) is a Microsoft product, and it doesn’t work as well as it should in any browser other than Internet Explorer and now the new version of IE won’t display it correctly without tweaks.

Posted in Email, Harley, Website | No Comments »

Eye-Fi Cards in the Enterprise

May 8th, 2013

The concept of the Eye-Fi SD card is really cool: It’s an SD card for your digital camera that has wireless connectivity/uploading capabilities built-in. So you take a picture and your card will upload the picture automatically to your computer without having to connect the camera or manually copy pictures from the card. The concept is fabulous, but the implementation leaves a few things to be desired.

Now imagine how useful this would be in a school? Have all your cameras equipped with Eye-Fi cards and have them transfer pictures to a central server that everyone has access to for storage. It sounds like the greatest idea ever, until you try to implement it.

I did this back in the fall and while it functions, it’s really dirty and I still can’t believe they make it as difficult as it is to accomplish this. I used the word enterprise in the title to mean using the cards not as a consumer. I have one of these cards at home for personal use, it works fine with the software that ships with it.

At school I currently have 14 Eye-Fi cards in the wild. To avoid the maintenance nightmare of setting up the Eye-Fi Center software on each teacher’s computer, I wanted to run a centralized Eye-Fi “server”. I’m a Linux guy, so that’s the first thing I thought of, but no, there is no Linux version of the software. Someone hacked together a python script a few years ago that had similar functionality but it didn’t work in our multiple-VLAN environment. So not only did I have to burn a license for a Windows server for this, the cards have to be activated on the machine running the Eye-Fi Center software, so I had to setup a physical machine for this because the version of VMWare we use for virtualization doesn’t have USB pass-through. So instead of being totally free and using practically no resources, I have to use a Windows license, keep hardware running, use more electricity and add more carbon dioxide and noise to my office. And if that weren’t enough, the Eye-Fi Center software installs and runs per-user, so I couldn’t run it as a service in the background, I have to login to the machine to have the helper software start and then leave myself logged in under a remote desktop session! It does actually run if you start it as a service, it just doesn’t transfer any pictures that way. And when Windows Update reboots the machine pictures stop transferring because I’m not logged in anymore. It’s very frustrating, finicky and requires way too much attention; but of course the users are all happily oblivious to this.

I’m absolutely astounded how difficult they make it working with these cards when you’re not a cookie-cutter consumer. All it would take is a few tweaks to the Eye-Fi Center software to make it start and run as a service. A Linux version would also be greatly appreciated. And then add an option in the settings to specify the destination IP address of the computer running the Eye-Fi Center software. Those couple changes would make using and managing this product infinitely easier. The fact that there are no competing products doesn’t help the situation either. If another company came out with a similar product I would switch in a heartbeat, but for now I’m stuck with Eye-Fi.

As of this writing my Eye-Fi server has transferred 9074 pictures.

Posted in Cameras, Servers, Wireless | 2 Comments »

IPv6 Connectivity

May 7th, 2013

One of the features of our new internet connection is native IPv6 connectivity. As the IPv4 address space is exhausted and will soon be very expensive to get addresses, IPv6 needs to be on everyone’s radar. Our ten year old layer-3 core switch doesn’t support IPv6 but I was able to bring up a virtual Linux server to do the routing. Obviously this isn’t an ideal situation, but until we can get a more up-to-date router, this should work for giving all our servers v6 addresses.

Fibertech gave us a /48 block of addresses. That’s 2^(128-48) or 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 addresses! I’m hoping that’s enough. If you were to scan 1 million of our addresses every second it would take you 3 times the age of the universe to scan them all.

Posted in Harley, Internet, IPv6, Network | No Comments »

New Internet Connection

May 7th, 2013

For a few years now I’ve been trying to get a metro-ethernet connection at school for our internet access. This year we finally managed it. We were using Time Warner’s highest bandwidth package, 50/5Mbps Wideband, but it just wasn’t enough. Their DOCSIS connections are still best-effort with no service-level agreements and that wasn’t quite good enough either.

We ended up signing a contract with Fibertech Networks for a 30/30Mbps metro-ethernet connection over fiber. They gave us a /27 block of IPv4 addresses and a /48 block of IPv6 addresses. I’ve been very happy with the whole process so far. The fiber was pulled on time (and I got to watch them do it) and the service was turned up right on schedule. There were no IP address SNAFUs like the last time with TWC and so far it’s working just as it should.

[Show as slideshow]

Posted in Harley, Internet, Network | No Comments »

Playing with the WordPress app

March 14th, 2013

Jim and I playing around with the Android app…

Tags: jim, joe, playing around
Posted in Harley | No Comments »

Exchange Server Limit

January 13th, 2011

Last weekend our email server hit the database size limit and dismounted the information store, halting all email transport and access.

Originally with Exchange 2003 Standard Edition there was a 16GB limit on the information store. This was one of the factors used to force you to upgrade to the Enterprise Edition which is ridiculously more expensive . When the database hit that size it would dismount causing all your users to start wrapping torches and sharpening pitchforks. They enabled a registry tweak to allow you 1 more GB of space to allow you to mount the store and reclaim some space by deleting old email.

With Service Pack 2 they upped the default limit to 18GB, which is the threshold we hit a few days ago, and allowed an absolute limit of up to 75GB. You can set this limit with another registry tweak.

Of course this couldn’t have happened on a weekday when I was here, it had to happen on a Saturday while I was out to lunch with the family and some friends. Figures…

Tags: email, weekend
Posted in Harley, Servers | Comments Off

Moved a couple servers

December 23rd, 2010

I’ve been meaning to reorganize one of our servers racks for quite a while now. I have a big UPS to mount in the rack, but according to the manufacturer they recommend not mounted any servers within 12-18 inches of the transformer as the magnets inside can damage other magnetic media such as server hard drives.

In order to mount this UPS, I had to move 2 servers to made the necessary room. Unfortunately, they were two very important server that couldn’t be arbitrarily turned off: Exchange (email) and Oracle (our student information system database).

Usually I would do something like this early in the morning before school starts, but family responsibilities now make that impossible. I ended up doing it in the morning on the first day of holiday break. Nobody was around so the timing wasn’t as important.

I wanted to mount these all in one solid block, but that 2u-sized hole in the middle was about 1/32″ too small to slide the email server into. I still don’t really understand why it didn’t fit and was not very happy about it because I had already shut down the email server. So instead of a 5 minute move, I had to remount the rails and it turned into a 30 minute affair. It all worked out in the end though.

Tags: database, downtime, email, move
Posted in Harley, Servers | Comments Off