Weight Loss - My Journey

I rarely have a great deal to say to people; most of the posts on this blog are the ramblings of someone talking to no-one in particular which is exactly what this post is going to be about. However, unlike the normal tech posts this is about a personal issue that I've finally dealt with.

Today, for the first time in probably 20 years i'm what the NHS would consider 'normal'. Not Obese, not overweight, merely normal.

When I started trying to lose weight I was 138kg (21st 10lbs, a BMI of 41.6)

Fast forward 9 months and I'm now 82.7kg (13st, a BMI of 25 exactly). 

That's a loss of 55.3kg (8st 10lbs) or very nearly a third of my body weight.

What does this mean in terms in size?

• I started off as a 46 inch waist (which I wore below by stomach) and i'm now a 34 inch waist when worn over my stomach
• I've dropped 2 shoe sizes
• In a t-shirt I've gone from an XXL to a S/M depending on where it's from
• Jackets, from an XXL to a S/M again depending on where its from
• Aircraft seat-belts now fit and I no longer worry about needing an extension
• None of the clothes I had 9 months ago fit anymore

Things I didn't expect

• I get cold; where as before my excess fat was keeping me insulated I now get cold very easily and have to wear more layers to compensate
• I'm more fragile; if I knock myself the force hits my bones and is not absorbed by my fat layers anymore and is much more painful
• Seats are often less comfy; because again, more pressure on my bones without that insulating layer of fat to take off the edge
• More people talk to me when i'm out and about; it really does seem that a LOT of people in this country judge based on size
• Re-buying a whole wardrobe is expensive

How did it happen?

Exactly how you would expect:

• Ate less
• In all honest I probably ate to little as often I was on sub-1000 calories a day but I still had breakfast, lunch and dinner with a desert in the evenings
• Exercised more
• Started off as 15 minutes on the exercise bike
• Moved on to 30 minutes on the cross trainer
• Then 40 minutes Zumba on the Wii
• Now its a 1 to 2 hour walk every evening instead
• 45m swimming every week
• Found food I could enjoy and can continue to eat (thank you Hairy Dieters)
• If I had to go to somewhere like McDonalds I'd swap fries for a salad and have the lowest calorie burger available.
• Was still able to have fish and chips every weekend (and have done so since March!), the full swimming session would make up for it.
• Smart Scales (weighing myself daily, seeing the difference and logging it automatically really helped me)

What Now?

Weight maintenance - when I started this it was a change for life therefore even though I've finished losing weight I won't be going back to my old ways. That doesn't mean I can't have a McDonalds if I fancy it, but I have to question whether I really need fries with that. As for Lattes, black coffee (no sugar!) is the way I drank it and will now continue to drink it. These sort of choices are the ones that seem to have made the difference to me; Little big changes which i'm now going to stay with.

Cliche pictures

Exchange 2010 and Receive Connectors (Relaying)

I'll be the first to admit that I can be a total nub at times - which is why when I recently migrated a network and introduced a new exchange server I ran into a small problem.

On the previous server, clients were able to send email from their bespoke software directly to the server but they couldn't do this anymore.

I checked all the settings on the receive connectors and everything seemed fine - eventually I tracked the problem down to a power-shell command that needs to be run on the receive connector in question (thank you http://www.msexchange.org/articles-tutorials/exchange-server-2010/management-administration/managing-relay-connectors-exchange-server-2007-2010-part2.html)

Get-ReceiveConnector <RelayName> | Add-ADPermission –User “NT Authority\Anonymous Logon” –ExtendedRights ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient,ms-exch-bypass-anti-spam

As a heads up, if you try and copy and paste the command off the website mentioned above there's a typo in it which will throw an error (look closely and there is a space between smtp- accept- which needs removing)

Back on track - I should now be able to send a mail.. but no, still coming up with unable to relay.

Eventually I read the most useful advice that I've EVER read when dealing with receive connectors..

Change the FQDN that the receive connector provides in response to HELO commands

Why so useful? Well, you can instantly see which connector you are connecting to and find out where the problem lies. Immediately, I could see that I was connecting to a default connector which has no purpose. So I disabled it and tried again - BOOM

And that is why i'm a nub.. it's so obvious and so brilliant!

PS. don't forget to restart the transport service when you make changes :)

Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 and Sage Accounts/Sage Line 50 2015 data service (SBS 2011)

Sage have released their yearly update, however this time around it seems that they've decided to make it more difficult to have your Sage data installed on a server instead of a local PC.

If you have Sage on a network share but no app installed on the server and you update it to 2015, then you may (will!) receive a warning message when you try to connect  that the "Sage Data Service" is not running on the target server.

Usually I don't have the Sage software installed on server - its just another access point that needs maintaining. Instead, the data just resides on a share.

So the fix is to install Sage on the server - but alas, Sage have decided that SBS 2011 is not worthy! If you try and install it from the auto-run app it says that you don't have a compatible system.. even though we all know its 2008 R2 in disguise.

The solution? For me it was a simple task of navigating to the install folder on the sage CD and then running "clientserversetup.exe" instead of trying to install it from the auto-run application.

One thing that may also help is SP1 - but then if you're running SBS 2011 and you don't have SP1 you need a bit of a slap anyway :)

Hope it helps someone.

Edit: It seems that if you can install Sage from the auto-run it actually gives you the option of just installing the "Data Service" instead of the whole application so it may be worth looking into that. But for my part, the above solution fixed it quickly for me.

Edit 2: I confirmed today that SP1 has nothing to do with this - its all down to running the executable instead of installing from the autorun

Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) 2011 Expired Certificate Renewal

We have a lot of SBS servers at our clients and naturally the self signed certificates (our clients don't like parting needlessly with money, so we never end up having third part signed certs) expire after 2 years of creation.

In the past, I used to run the "Set up your Internet Address" wizard to re-create the certificate as suggested on many forum posts, however I discovered a much neater (and probably correct way) of doing this earlier in the year.

1: Open up the Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard Console
2: Go to the Network Tab
3: Connectivity Tab
4: On the right hand menu select "Fix my network"
5: The wizard will search for potential problems and should identify that the certificate has expired
6: Renew the certificate

And that should be all

If the certificate isn't showing as expired in the fix my network then the setup your internet address wizard has never been ran - which could cause problems!

Dealing with exchange and small zips containing viruses using transport rules

I have a number of client who often fall for the "Please pay this invoice. Open attached file" type of email. They get it, open it and are then infected with a virus.

A lot of these type of mails seem to slip through spam and AV services, therefore following a suggestion elsewhere I've created the below guide to filter out small attachments. The logic is that generally only larger files get zipped, so if its really small chances are it's a virus.

I understand that this is not always the case - some people zip to password protect and you could add a section to the rule to allow emails from certain addresses always through or certain file names etc. The below is a basic set of guides to follow to setup a filtering system that will move small zips/rars/whatever you want to a different location.

1: Start by making an email address for all the crud to go to - occasionally it may be legitimate and you may need to take a look at it.
2: I made a mail enabled public folder and gave access rights to certain people just in-case something sensitive ended up in there
3: Once made, it's time to head over to the exchange management console
4: Go to Organisation Configuration, Hub Transport and then Transport Rules
5: Create a new Transport Rule, I called mine as below (for when I forget what it was for!)
Name: Small Attachment Spam
Comment: Catches spam by looking for small attachments (ie zips) and moves them to an alternative email

6: Leave the Rule enabled and click next
7: From the list of conditions select "When any attachment file name matches text patterns" and tick it
8: From the same list, also select "When the size of any attachment is greater than or equal to limit"

Double check what you have ticked! If it doesn't work later its because you've most likely selected the wrong option here as there are a few named very similar things

9: Click on the first rule in the second section down (Where is says Apply rule to message when any attachment file matches"
10: In the list, enter your file extensions. I included the dot, so my list contains:
.zip
.exe
.scr
.rar

11: You should see the "and when the size of an attachment is greater than or equal to 0B" in the list below too - leave this set to 0.
12: Click next
13: Scroll down to near the bottom of the list and this time select "Redirect the message to addresses"
14: In the section underneath, click redirect message to addresses 
15: Add the address we created earlier. If you don't want to redirect it you can select a different option such as "Delete the message without notifying anyone".
16: Click next again
17: From the list select "Except with the size of any attachment is greater than or equal to limit"
18: From the lower half, click on except when the size of any attachment is greater than or equal to 0B
19:  Depending on the client this amount changes - if its someone who may send small zips I make it quite small. If its a client who never sends or receives zips then I'll set it as high as 100kb.
20: Click OK
21: Click Next and then Click New

That's it - your rule is now live on the system. This is just a basic example, you can add more to the rule and get it to do a number of other things but this should certainly be a good start.

Cheers

Network Card Drivers for a HP DL360e Rack Server

Just a quick one; had a new server to setup for a client and had real troubles finding the correct network drivers.

After much investigation, turns out that the driver you need for a DL360e rack server is:
http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/psi/swdHome?sp4ts.oid=5317160&ac.admitted=1405944960782.876444892.492883150

Its the HP Ethernet 1Gb 4-port 366i Adapter - the card is a quad port on-board

Why HP didn't add it to the downloads section on the 360e download page I don't know but hopefully this will save someone 30mins of messing around.

Cheers

-- Update --
It has come to my attention since writing this that I may have gone slightly awry when looking for the drivers. Apparently (and I haven't yet had a chance to check this) the drivers are embedded on the motherboard in some kind of flash memory which you can get to appear much like a USB drive by looking in the BIOS

I'd love to hear if this was true - anyone out there shed any light on this?

Hypervisor not running (3112) - AMD FX series CPUs "Virtual machine could not start because the hypervisor is not running"

Having recently decided to build a new test machine for virtual activities, I decided on a budget FX-6300 (piledriver) with a Gigabyte board and 32GB of corsair memory.

After installing Server 2008 R2 and adding the hyper-v role, my first problem started with hyper-v not being able to mount the VHD files.

No worries there, that's a known problem and needs 2008 R2 SP1 installing.

After installing SP1, I ran into a new problem where I got the following error message:

"Hypervisor not running" error 3112

Lots of digging later and i'd managed to get myself into a panic; I was thoroughly convinced i'd wasted my money on a system that wasn't going to run Hyper-V. I'd checked all the basics, AMD Virtualisation support etc and was looking at other peoples suggestions such as hardware DEP.

After much searching, I stumbled on an Microsoft KB support article (2568088) which cured issues with hyper-v and the bulldozer CPUs. In desperation, I tried installing it on the off chance that it would solve my problem even though I have a piledriver.

And guess what? It did.

Thank you Microsoft for the hot-fix, perhaps its about time you updated the details to include other architectures?

I hope that certainly hopes somewhere out there as much as it helped me - KB article is below:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2568088

Edit: 10/04/2015
Looks like the hotfix details have been updated now to reflect that it started with the bulldozer series.

Update: 16/07/2015
This problem occurred today on a server following a RAID failure - the secondary plex kicked it and the virtual machines wouldn't start. Long story short, the hypervisor wasn't starting automatically. to fix, I can this from an elevated command prompt:

BCDEDIT /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto   

On a side note, it's also come to my attention that work-arounds have been added to the hotfix notes to get around the AMD issues:

To work around Issue 1, follow these steps:

1. Start Hyper-V Manager.
2. Right-click the virtual machine in question, and then click Settings.
3. Under the Processor configuration for the virtual machine, click to select the Migrate to a physical computer with a different processor version check box, and then click OK.
4. Start the virtual machine.