All of that takes up half of my basement.  The other half is a kind of junk room.  It has a freezer, home gym, laundry room, bookcases, etc.  The idea is to take one small corner of it and make it my home office.  Then organize the rest so it can also be a place to store the kid’s toys.  Side note, our kid’s current toy room is our living room and bedroom.  That needs to change.

The area for my home office is pretty small.  Unfortunately it can’t get any bigger since it is boxed in by the doors to the laundry room and the exit doors.  The space is about 96” x 86”.  I need to fit a large desk area, cabinets, and a couple bookshelves.  That is a lot but I think I can make it fit.

This is it minus doors and a few small miscellaneous details.  There are two bookshelves on one wall and my desk on the other two.  One desk has a keyboard tray and the other is lowered for a laptop or for writing.  The large black box on the one desk is my multi-function laser printer.  A small color ink jet goes above it on that shelf.  Below the printer is a file cabinet.  To the left of the keyboard tray is my main computer.  Above it will be a pull out shelf with my flatbed scanner.  To the right of the keyboard tray is my mini-rack.  I’ll have about 15U for my two home servers, switch, UPS, etc.

This is my favorite detail. (Click to enlarge)  The back of the desk has a couple doors to allow you to get to the computers.  You can easily get to the back of my PC to mess with cables.  This is also actually the front of the server rack.  Instead of trying to mount the servers from under the desk, I can simply slide them in from here.  There will be doors but I’ll add plenty of ventilation.  This should cut down on noise and keep them nice and hidden.

Lastly the framing behind the desk is hollow or it has holes between the hidden supports.  This will allow me to have great cable management.  Everything will be tucked out of the way.  I’m currently looking for a nice but cheap three monitor bracket.  For now, I’ll put my monitors on the desk but I would like to eventually mount them to give myself a bit more room.  There are two 20” 4:3 monitors with a 24” widescreen in the middle.

I’ve attached the sketchup if you would like to take a closer look but please keep in mind that it is still a work in progress.  I have a lot of demolition to do before I can get started and some of my measurements may need to change.

What do you think my desk is missing?  Are there any cool geeky things you think it needs?  Somewhere there will be a popup power/USB hub but there is room for more geeky stuff.  If you were building a home office from scratch, what would be on your wishlist?

Everything wood was made by hand.  That includes the cabinets, doors, shelves, frame, everything.  My lovely wife helped install the tile.  My only real complaint is the wood I chose.  It is all oak.  I went with that since it is cheap and easy to find locally.  If I could do it over, I would have chosen something more interesting.  Walnut or a dark mahogany would have been my first choice but it is expensive and hard to come by around here.

I’ll try to post about my next project within the next few days.  I’m building a home office.

*I still have a couple things I want to do but they will have to wait for me to finish a couple other projects first.  I want to add locking glass doors to the upper center cabinet as well as in front of the wine cabinet.  My kids are young but I would like the option to lock away the liquor as they get older.

Check’em out and if anyone would like a larger version of any pics, send me an e-mail or leave a comment on this post and I’ll get it to you.

THE GALLERY

This has been a pretty interesting year.  When I switched over to this blog for all of my technical posts, I figured I would pretty much lose all my readers.  I mean if my mom doesn’t need to wade through the tech posts to find the one somewhat interesting to her, that will significantly reduce my numbers. But instead of that happening, this has been one of the better years as far as readership goes.  I’m not quite sure what has caused it.  Was it the more focused posts or the content?  Was it due to my larger involvement in the tech community?  My guess is it is because I’ve taken a more active roll in social networking when it comes to tech.  Hopefully 2010 is an even better year.

Speaking of 2010, I think I may make a few minor changes to this blog.  I’ll still have the tech posts but I may toss in a few non-IT related ones.  I’m one of those guys with a lot of hobbies and I enjoy sharing them with people.  Because of that, you may end up seeing more posts related to them.  I’m into amature photography.  Also there are few things I love more than taking some pieces of wood and turning them into something beautiful and/or useful.  Once the weather gets warmer, I’ll get out to the shop more and possibly post about it on here a little.  We’ll see. Don’t worry about me getting too broad with my posts.  I’ll keep the more personal posts and political commentary elsewhere. 

Thank you all for reading and I’ll see you next year!

If you are still experiencing the problem, grab the December 2009 cumulative update and patch.

When you try to perform a search in a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site, the “This List: Name of list, doclib etc.” scope for a list is missing. This issue occurs because https:// is used to visit the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site.

That looks an awful lot like what we were experiencing.  If you are still seeing this issue, try installing the latest updates and let us know if it fixes it.

Go HERE to get the updates.

Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxFolderStatistics | Where {$_.ItemsInFolder -gt 5000} | Sort-Object -Property ItemsInFolder -Descending | fl Identity, ItemsInFolder

That searches the entire Org. You will want to specify specific servers or stores.

This will be incredibly helpful to help hunt down some performance issues you may be experiencing on some servers. Also it can allow you to be proactive in improving the experience for a user. I can’t imagine a user with 30,000 items in his mailbox is saying good things about your service. For the record, at this moment, I have 3 items in my inbox. It may be a record. I don’t think I’ve had it this low since the day I got it. It is such a great feeling.

http://www.hugheserblog.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=32

A few of my favorites are in the previous post:

http://www.hugheserblog.com/2009/10/24/huey-lewis-the-news-the-microsoft-sharepoint-conference-2009/

If you would like a high quality version of any of these pics, let me know and I can send them your way.

Enjoy!

It is common for an HTML form that is requesting an e-mail address to do some basic verification.  It isn’t hard to code it to make sure the address is formatted as user...@domain.xxx.  Also a quick check to make sure the address doesn’t include things like: mailto:username@domain.xxxwould be easy as well.  Unfortunately Listserv doesn’t do this check when accesping subscriptions via e-mail.  If you send a subscribe request in an HTML e-mail, it includes the markup.  Instead of seeing:

subscribe listname user...@domain.xxx

It sees:

subscribe listname user...@domain.xxx<mailto:username@domain.xxx>

Obviously this is a bad address.  Listserv tries to process it, it fails and all of a sudden you have gigs of logs.  To clean this up, you have to find the addresses in the logs, delete them from the subscribers lists, and clear out messages from the queue.  That is what I’ve been doing the last couple hours. 

And just incase LSoft is listening, I have one other suggestion.  I appreciate you trying to keep the logs small but at least have the option to disable long log line truncation.  Right now if a line is to long, around 120 characters or so, instead of throwing in a line break or extending it, you throw up an (…) and end the line.  That isn’t acceptable.  Nothing frustrates me more knowing that the answer to the problem I’m experiencing is hidden behind a (…).   Please get rid of it or make it possible to disable that functionality.

</rant over>

Update: Thanks to Jacob Haller in the comments below, we have more info.  First off, the log truncation can be temporarily disabled using the debug_log_tcpgui keyword.  More information here: http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/15.5/sitevars.html#cDebuglogtcpgui

Even better, in the next version, they will be correcting the bug with the HTML markup in subscribe messages.  That makes me incredibly happy.  It will save me so much time and I can’t wait until the next version.  Thank you LSoft.  It is good to see a company put forth the extra effort necessary to address their customers concerns.  Please make sure you read Jacob’s comment below.

It is fully supported on VMWare 3.5+ and mostly supported on VMWare 4.  In our environment, we have 2 primary BES servers with 2 failover at a regional datacenter.  SQL is also separate with a failover.  There is a new initiative to virtualize everything and my team decided that BES would make a good candidate.  For the most part, the hardware requirements for 1200 users was minimal.  When we did the BES 5 migration we decided to move off the physical hardware and go completely virtual. 

This hasn’t turned out well for us so far.  Even though we have a pretty massive VM environment, we are still having troubles.  It isn’t due to the most common problems you see.  We aren’t disk I/O bound.  We have plenty of memory and processing power.  Our problem is because of the network.  The BES servers need a pristine connection to your mail servers.  Normally they do but occasionally they hit some bottlenecks.  The BES servers can handle a few of these but if it is an outage lasting a few minutes or several shorter ones, it can cause the agents to hit the max 10 restarts per 24 hours.  When that happens, you have no choice but to restart.  This has happened to us more times than I can count.  Part of the reason is we have been running the hosts at their max.  That is something you should be able to do with VMWare but if it spikes, it can cause latency and kill the agents.  Another thing that has happened is our DR snapshotting software has issues.  It queries for changes every hour and if you have a lot of hosts, it can cause brief locks.  Even though it is only for a few seconds, it can still cause agent restarts.

Now I’m not saying don’t virtualize.  I’m not saying our problem is related to BES or even VMWare.  It is due to how we have VMWare implemented.  If you are running your hosts at their max, you might want to rethink virtualizing BES.  I would also recommend installing some networking monitoring software on hardware separate from the virtual hosts and see if you have any drop offs.  We experience the drop offs on other non BES services but it only affects the BES.

Virtualizing BES can save a lot of money but make sure you truly have that pristine connection.  Without it, you will have a lot of headaches.