2013-07-10 · 14:27

Leaving messages for non-UM-enabled users

Recently I got a good question from a coworker. He was working with a customer who was piloting Exchange Unified Messaging, and the customer was a little confused by a poorly-documented behavior of Exchange UM.

Consider that you have four test users who are UM-enabled: Alex, Brian, Carole, and David. You also have four users with Exchange mailboxes who are not UM-enabled: Magdalena, Nick, Oscar, and Pete.

The customer reported that he could dial the default automated attendant, or into Outlook Voice Access, and use dial by name to call Alex, Brian, Carole, or David.

However, he had Exchange configured to allow callers to leave voice mail messages without ringing the phone first (what I call “the coward setting”; it’s controlled with Set-UMDialPlan –SendVoiceMsgEnabled:$false). He was able to leave messages for Magdalena and the other non-UM-enabled users, which surprised him and generated the question.

This does seem odd. It’s easy to understand why you can leave a message for the first four users: they are UM-enabled, so they have extensions to which Exchange can transfer the call. But why can you leave a UM message for a user who isn’t UM-enabled? It’s because leaving a voice mail directly for a user doesn’t involve ringing an extension, so not having an extension assigned isn’t an obstacle. When you select that user for a message, UM will play the greeting (which is almost certainly going to be the system-generated TTS version of the user name, as a non-UM-enabled user probably will not have recorded a greeting) and record the message, then deliver it through the standard path.

The More You Know…

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2013-07-05 · 10:32

Does Test-OutlookConnectivity work?

I’m going to have to go with “no, it does not” as my answer, but you can try it for yourself.

First off, the cmdlet documentation says you can specify a probe type, but not what the probe types are. This is an unfortunate oversight, considering that you can’t use the cmdlet without it. However, a little more digging turns up a troubleshooting article that says you can do it like this:

[PS] C:\>Test-OutlookConnectivity -ProbeIdentity 'OutlookMailboxDeepTestProbe' -MailboxId paul@betabasement.com -Hostname betabasement.com

Sadly, when I do that, all I get is an error:

WARNING: Could not find assembly or object type associated with monitor identity 'Outlook.Protocol\OutlookMailboxDeepTestProbe\PAO-EX01'. Please ensure that the given monitor identity exists on the Server.

This duplicates results reported by fellow MVPs Paul Cunningham, Brian Ricks, and others; I’m mentioning it here to help make the community aware of the issue, in the hope that it will soon be fixed in CU2. If you’ve been able to get it to work, please let me know in the comments.

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2013-06-27 · 15:42

TechEd Europe day 2, or, “A side trip to Segovia”

I woke up on time, showered and dressed, and took the shuttle bus to the convention center so that I could give my presentation on developing Exchange Web Services applications on iOS. While the talk itself went well, my demos failed, and I don’t know why– it didn’t seem to be the proxy issue I mentioned yesterday. I learned a valuable lesson, though; from now on I will always have a pre-recorded backup demo. In fairness, Navin Chand suggested that all speakers have backup demos, but I foolishly assumed that my demo would work (and, in fairness, in the nearly 15 years since my first presentation at a Microsoft event, they always have). Lesson learned.

Afterwards, I had another “ask the experts” session, along with Tom Kaupe from the Exchange Online Protection team at Microsoft. We got a few more good questions for the list of things I need to write about, but overall the session was fairly quiet– the attendees were obviously busy attending the day’s breakout sessions. When my shift was over, I took off for the metro station because I’d decided to make an afternoon trip to Segovia. Why? It’s full of good stuff, that’s why, including a Roman aqueduct, a huge cathedral, and the Alcazár de Segovia, a historic castle.

Getting there turned out to be fairly simple; RENFE, the Spanish national train service, has a high-speed express train that goes directly from Madrid’s Chamartín station to the Segovia station. The trip only takes about half an hour, so I jumped on the subway from the Campo de Las Naciones station adjacent to IFEMA, took it to Chamartín, and found that I had no idea how to buy a ticket for the commuter train. There is a ticket machine adjacent to the exit for the metro, but the trick turns out to be to exit the metro station and go aboveground to the actual train station. At that point I was easily able to buy a ticket for about 30€. With a bit of time to kill before the scheduled departure, I was able to find a shop selling sandwiches, where I had an excellent jamón serrano poboy– jamón on a baguette. It was delicious. Too bad it’s so difficult to import Serrano ham back into the United States.

To board the train, I scanned my boarding pass and sent my laptop bag through a metal detector. That done, I took my seat on the train, waited about 10 minutes for our delayed departure, and then watched the countryside (and two very long tunnels) pass by. Sure enough, in about half an hour we arrived at the Segovia train station, which can charitably be described as “on the outskirts of Segovia.” The #11 bus runs directly to plaza de Artilleria, which is on the southeastern edge of the actual town of Segovia. For 1€, it was money well spent. There isn’t much to see along the bus route, but as soon as the bus gets within a few blocks of its terminal stop, you can see the aqueduct, which looks much like this:

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In the central plaza there are numerous shops and restaurants, including a Burger King. Many of them were closed for summer vacation, though– it looks like much of the town shuts down from mid-June until early July.

As far as I could tell, there’s no way to (legally) climb on top of or walk along the top of the aqueduct; it’s possible that I just missed the directions on how to do so, but I don’t think so. Adjacent to plaza de Artilleria, there’s a tourist information office where for 0.20€ I was able to use the bathroom, after which they gave me a handy free map. The clerk outlined a walking route down XXX street to the cathedral, then along YYY street to the Alcázar. I set out with her estimate of a 30-minute walk fresh on my mind and a 25-pound laptop bag on my shoulder. I may have neglected to mention that it was just under 90°F when I got there…

Despite the heat, though, the walk was quite pleasant. The Cathedral itself is stately on the outside but doesn’t have the overwhelming feeling that Notre Dame, for example, always imposes when I see it. It is still quite an impressive piece of work, as you can see here:

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However, the real magic comes on the inside, for which I had to pay another 3€. Oh, and I stopped along the way for a frozen yogurt; the clerk asked me for a choice between mango and “sandía,” which I chose because it looked tropical. Surprise! That word means “watermelon”, yuck, spit. Actually, because European frozen yogurt doesn’t have anywhere near as much sugar as the American equivalent, the combination of the yogurt flavor and the watermelon was actually quite good… but I’ll be more careful next time. But I digress. Whatever your opinion of the religious beliefs which motivated it, it is hard not to be impressed with the craftsmanship and effort that went into the interior of the cathedral. I am not sure, for example, what this display is all about but it is certainly fancy:

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I think my favorite part of the cathedral was the architecture itself. For example, this walkway had a very welcome breeze blowing through it; it was quiet and cool, with a glimpse of the inner courtyard’s garden. I enjoyed the interplay of the lines and shadows with the patterns of stone on the ground.

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After another 10 minutes or so of walking,  arrived at the Alcázar de Segovia itself. You can’t really see it from far away because it’s set adjacent to a ravine which serves as a dandy natural moat. There’s also a pleasant park with large trees screening it. Walking past the park quickly brings the castle itself into view.

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Stepping off to the side really makes clear how the original structure takes advantage of the terrain– you can see that the ravine descends well below surface level. (It goes deeper still but the lens I had wasn’t wide enough to get it all). 

DSC 1362

 

The castle itself is full of all sorts of nifty artifacts, including a museum dedicated to artillery– the castle used to be the site of the royal college of artillery. There are also several suits of armor, cannons, and so on. I finished my tour by climbing the Torre de Juan II, which requires navigating 157 very narrow, very steep steps up a spiral staircase. Along the way you can see the engineering features that helped provide defense in depth for the castle: downward-facing arrow slits, holes for pouring burning oil, and the like. It was well worth the climb, however, because the view was superb. My favorite picture from this part of the excursion was this shot of the cathedral and the city of Segovia. I also had a good time taking pictures of various tourist couples who wanted their photo taken with the city as a backdrop. One of them returned the favor (notice my spiffy Exchange shirt; its presence makes this post TechEd-related).

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After my tour of the Alcázar and tower, I went to the small café located on the grounds. It’s located in the building that used to be the royal chemistry lab, and I can believe it; I’m not sure what kind of crack they put into the hot chocolate but it was the best beverage I’ve ever had– like drinking liquid chocolate pudding. Sadly they were out of churros, but that’s probably just as well. So fortified, I walked back into town, caught the #11 bus again, took the train back to Madrid Chamartín, then took the metro back to the hotel. All in all, a day well spent!

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2013-06-26 · 09:22

TechEd Europe, day 1

TechEd Europe opened on Tuesday, while I was still in transit. I missed the keynote, which is pretty much par for the course. I think the last TechEd keynote I attended was the 2005 version that included BattleBots.

My first assignment for the day was working in the Ask the Experts area. That’s not necessarily what it’s called, but that’s what we all call it. ATE is my favorite part of attending conferences such as TechEd and MEC because you never know what kind of questions you’ll get from attendees. They range from very simple to incredibly complex and environment-specific. The interpersonal dynamics are fun too, because different attendees have different attitudes towards the product and their experience with it: some positive, some negative, and some befuddled. I always enjoy meeting live customers and finding out what kinds of challenges they face, and ATE is the perfect venue for it. (I have a separate post planned in a day or two summarizing the questions I’ve gotten while I’ve been here.

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After working ATE, I went and had a delicious lunch of grouper in some kind of salsa. It was certainly better than the normal convention-center food. And speaking of better, the event staff here has been fantastic– uniformly cheerful and helpful.

After lunch, I went to find the speaker’s lounge. Along the way I noticed a sign for the prayer rooms, something I’ve never seen at TechEd before. I considered going there to work on my demos, but good sense won out and I went to the lounge instead. While there I found the same problem I’d noticed at TechEd in the US: my demos didn’t work. The code they run attempts to do an Exchange Autodiscover connection to autodiscover.robichaux.net, which a) should work from anywhere because b) it’s hosted by Microsoft. However, it didn’t, and I couldn’t figure out why, so to do my New Orleans demos I tethered to my cellphone and used the network. I had the same problem here, sad to say,and I assume it’s because there is some upstream proxy or router stripping out a header that my code needs… but darned if I know what, and I didn’t have time to run through Fiddler to see. I decided instead to download NetShade, which fixed the problem pronto. 

Demos done, I went back to the show floor to walk around. There I had a great talk with Kemp Technologies’ Bhargav Shukla, who is one of my fellow MCM instructors (though he teaches both Exchange and Lync). Among other interesting topics, I learned that Kemp has a prototype load balancing appliance for Windows Azure– not a device that goes on-premises and directs some traffic to an Azure network, but an actual VM that runs on Azure and does load balancing natively there. Microsoft isn’t quite sure how to package and sell Azure objects that are not applications, but I’m confident that they will figure it out. Bhargav also let slip that Kemp is in the process of adding PowerShell support to their load balancers, which marks a first as far as I know. It speaks well of them as partners in the Microsoft ecosystem when they embrace Microsoft’s technologies in such a comprehensive way. (The other takeaway from our talk: I’m jealous of the two days Bhargav spent driving a motorcycle around metro Madrid!)

I also got to meet Ed Wilson of Microsoft, the original Scripting Guy. He offered me the opportunity to write a couple of guest columns, and I eagerly accepted. Look for more news on that soon.

In the evening of the first day, TechEd historically holds a reception n the expo hall where attendees can mix and mingle. We had a great turnout at the combined Exchange/Office 365 booth; I gathered several good questions from attendees that I’ll be writing about a bit later. The energy of TechEd Europe is always quite a bit different from the US show; it’s smaller, so it feels less formal and less rushed. The exhibitor mix is different, too. Even large companies such as Dell and Intel which have a presence at both places typically send different staff. Microsoft is no exception; in addition to many of the folks I’d seen in New Orleans, Nathan Winters and a host of other European and UK Microsoft staff were on site.

I finally got back to the hotel about 9:30pm after a short but slightly confusing ride on the Madrid metro system. This seemed late, but of course by Continental standards it wasn’t even dinner time yet. I took care of some administrative baloney with my bank and mortgage companies, then remembered: someone had suggested I visit Madrid’s old post office (better known as Palacio de Comunicaciones). Although  I could have taken the metro again, it was nearly 11 before I left my room and I was in a hurry, so I took a taxi there, shot a ton of pictures (my favorite is below) and then taxi’d back.

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I noticed on the return that the area around the Melía Castilla has a surprising number of tall, slender, very attractive women just loitering on the street. I have no doubt that they are there to serve as tourist guides for anyone who is lost and needs help. Madrid is lucky to have so many fashionable ambassadors in such a convenient location, but since I knew where I was going I was able to make it back without any of their help.

After all that activity, I was pretty well exhausted, so I checked in to tell the boys goodnight and hit the rack– though it has many other charms, I can say that the hotel beds at this particular hotel are not unlike sleeping on a brick sidewalk. Then it was time to get up and get ready for day 2!

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2013-06-25 · 06:29

TechEd Europe: day 0

As I started writing this, I was in the back of a Delta MD-80 heading to Atlanta, thence to pick up Delta flight 109 to Madrid. The process reminds me in many ways of the first real set of international business trips I made, back in 2000-2002; Many aspects of the travel world have changed since then, but some have not.

For example, I have two laptops. Back in the day, I carried a ThinkPad for running Windows apps and a Powerbook for everything else. Now I’m taking my MacBook Pro because I need it to do demos in my TechEd session and my Dell-issued laptop because I need it for Dell work. All of the attendant weight, volume, and hassle constraints that come about from dual-wielding laptops are the same as they ever were.

Then there’s my cell phone. I have carried a Nokia 920 running Windows Phone 8 as my daily phone since November of 2012, and I am very happy with it. Unfortunately, AT&T wouldn’t SIM-unlock it for me, so I won’t be able to use it with a local SIM in Spain. That meant I had to dust off my iPhone 4, which is SIM-unlocked. I started using it last night and found it to be terribly clunky and slow compared to the 920. I don’t mean the data speed itself is slow, although it is; the phone UI itself is terribly slow compared to the 920. However, I like having iMessage available to chat with the many, many iOS users among my friends and contacts, and I am also toting my Pebble, which is completely unsupported and therefore essentially useless with Windows Phone. (Side note: I am eager to see what kind of Windows Phone announcements come out at Microsoft’s Build conference this week; I’m looking forward to more details on Nokia’s Amber and on Windows Phone Blue, or 8.1, or whatever it’s called now). So on balance, I’d have to say that the taking-a-US-cell-phone-to-Europe story is pretty much unchanged as well.

Delta surprised me with what’s known as an “operational upgrade,” or op-up, on the Atlanta-Madrid leg. That is, I didn’t buy a business class ticket, and I was not eligible for an upgrade based on my fare class, but Delta wanted to make more room in coach for paying passengers, and they had some empty business-class seats, so they moved me. I certainly wasn’t going to complain; this is the first time I’ve ever gotten an op-up and I was glad of it. I slept almost the entire way in the seat pod; by mashing buttons you can convert it into a narrow flat bed that ends up just about at floor level. The experience was oddly like sleeping in a mummy sleeping bag– the pod is only about 12″ at the footwell, and since I wear a size 13 shoe it was a bit of a tight fit.

We arrived on time at the Madrid airport, and I took a taxi to the hotel that Microsoft arranged for speakers, the Meliá Castilla. It’s gorgeous: very stately and European. Apparently it is near a bunch of nifty stuff but I was only there long enough to take a quick shower and catch a shuttle to IFEMA, the large conference center where TechEd itself is being held. I worked a shift at the “ask the experts” area and got a few good questions; more to say about that in another post. Then it was off to the speaker lounge to check my demos for tomorrow’s session. More to follow… 

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2013-06-25 · 06:13

Exchange 2013 Inside Out early access versions on sale

For a limited time, O’Reilly and Microsoft Press have the “early access” editions of Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Connectivity, Clients, and Unified Messaging and Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability on sale for $19.99 each. This is a fantastic deal given that you get early electronic access to the books– I am still in the midst of working on my book, but you can get access to parts of it now to learn what you need to know, well in advance of its official on-sale date. The deal is good until 0500 PDT on July 3, so you have a bit of time to take advantage of it. (Note that the sale doesn’t apply to the bundle that includes both the print book and the early access electronic edition).

 

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2013-06-16 · 08:12

UM Call Router troubleshooting adventure

Yesterday I was in Redmond, teaching the UM portion of the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master: Messaging class. This was the first rotation for this particular class, which replaces the MCM Exchange 2010 class, so I had all new content and an eager group of 14 motivated, smart MCSM candidates, including fellow MVP Michael van Horenbeeck, several people who I knew from online interactions (hi, Hany and Jerrid!), plus candidates from Germany, Israel, the US, Australia, and probably a few other places.

The teaching session went well, although my slides have a few lingering rough spots that I’ll need to polish. In this rotation we had a brand-new, and much improved, lab environment, so when Michael called me over to have a look at something my first thought was that it was a lab setup issue.

He couldn’t get the UM Call Router service to run after he’d enabled a certificate for it and set its startup mode to “dual”. These steps are required if you want to integrate Exchange UM with Lync, but they must be done in a specific order: first you change the startup mode with Set-UMCallRouterService (which will complain that you can’t enable secure SIP without a certificate!) and then you use Enable-ExchangeCertificate to assign the certificate.After he did so, the UM Call Router service stopped answering requests. When he ran netstat, he saw that it was listening on the IPv4 and IPv6 loopback addresses, but not on the assigned IPs for that server. The call router service had logged event ID 1621, which said that the UMCR couldn’t start because “the Client Access service was disabled.” This didn’t make a bit of sense, so we started digging.

First, I verified that no one else was having this particular problem—and they weren’t, so it seemed to be localized to Michael’s environment. Next I spent some time researching event ID 1621 on the intertubes, but that didn’t take long; the only two mentions I found were on TechNet, and the suggested solution was to reinstall Exchange. Nope, not gonna happen.

Michael had the bright idea to check the service component availability.. and it came back as “inactive”. However, the service was still running and would respond to telnet requests on port 5060 on the loopback address. This seemed very odd.

We ued Set-ServerComponentState to force the UMCR back into normal state, and it started listening on 0.0.0.0 again! So clearly the problem was that Managed Availability had killed off the service—now we started investigating why.

After a number of experiments, our theory was that because the UMCR couldn’t start in dual mode without a certificate assigned, so Managed Availability decided that it was unhealthy and marked its state as “inactive.” To test this, we ran Set-ServerComponentState to put the UMCR in maintenance mode; sure enough, the next time the service was probed, it unbound from 0.0.0.0 but remained bound to both loopback addresses. Forcing the service state back to healthy caused it to rebind to 0.0.0.0.

This leads me to point out a couple of things:

  • It strikes me as very odd that after Managed Availability marked the service as inactive that it kept running. I assume that this is on purpose; the service stays up so that Managed Availability can continue to probe it and keep its state updated.
  • The description for event ID 1621 is so bad it isn’t even wrong—the service wasn’t running because it couldn’t start with an unassigned certificate (and in fact, there was a separate event indicating exactly that). The problem had nothing to do with the (non-existent) client access service being disabled.
  • I didn’t see any events logged indicating that the component was in an unhealthy state, although I might have missed them. Once we’d fixed the binding problem, as we transitioned UMCR into and out of maintenance mode, we saw event ID 1648, indicating that the UMCR was returning to healthy state.

Clearly I still have a lot to learn about Managed Availability! I recommend starting with this blog post, which explains in more depth how you can find out what sort of mischief it may have committed on your unsuspecting services…

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2013-05-24 · 04:30

Transitions (or, “Dell, you’re getting a dude!”)

Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post here titled simply “We’re moving to California.” Now I’m writing this post because… I’m moving back to Alabama.

I’m also switching jobs; effective June 3, I will be joining Michael Przytula‘s Global Communications and Collaboration team at Dell as a global principal consultant. My first project will be assisting a large automotive supply company with their migration from Lotus Notes to Office 365, so I’m jumping back into the Exchange world with both feet.

The reasons for these changes can be summed up simply: in order to be an effective father to my sons, I need to be where they are. For two years, I have been commuting faithfully at my own expense to see them every other weekend, plus one week per month during which Acuitus allowed me to work remotely. This has been a great experience in itself in many ways, but it has also been emotionally exhausting, physically tiring, and extremely expensive. The constant back-and-forth has made me at times feel like a visitor, not a father, and I’ve had to miss a great many milestone events because they happened at times when I wasn’t, couldn’t be, there.

Moving back was simultaneously a no-brainer (of course I need to be where the boys are!) and a very difficult decision to actually execute on. I believe that ultimately it is the right thing to do for my sons, so that’s what I’m doing.

As much as I believe that what Acuitus is doing is important and worthwhile, and as much as I’ve enjoyed the experience of living and working in California, and as hard a transition as it will likely be, it’s time for me to move on by moving back. I am optimistic and energized about working with Dell, and I am delighted by the prospect of being able to spend more, and better, time with the boys. Against that I have to weigh the upheaval, expense, and hassle of moving, the sadness of leaving valued friends and coworkers behind, and the feeling of unfinished business that comes from leaving Acuitus in the midst of our VA school project.

On balance, though, I am more optimistic than not… as I said back in 2009, it takes work. I still believe that’s true, and I’m going to put in the work that’s required. We’ll see what happens…

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2013-05-23 · 05:30

Thursday trivia #94

  • My heart goes out to all those in Oklahoma affected by the May 20 tornado. If you can help, please do.
  • Microsoft releases lots of documentation on how they do things for their internal network. Here’s an example: two papers on best practices for securing Active Directory.
  • I am delighted to report that a whole bunch of my students from the Navy school I helped run in Pensacola have been promoted to IT2. Well done.
  • You could pay $817 for this book on Amazon, or you could read the PDF for free: Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners. Very well worth a look if you’re at all curious about programming. (Old guy note: I learned to program in Z80 assembly about… well, a long time ago.) It’s less than 50 pages.
  • Speaking of programming: this guy got a lot of press by writing a Wall Street Journal editorial saying that he’ll only hire people with some fundamental knowledge of programming: “Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won’t Hire You.” 
  • The boys and I saw Star Trek Into Darkness the other day. It was good, but I preferred the 2009 Star Trek better. I have high hopes for Man of Steel, though.
  • TechEd North America starts in less than two weeks! I’m putting the finishing touches on my slide deck and demos. If you’re there, stop by my session or the Ask the Experts booth and say “hi”.

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2013-05-22 · 21:15

Gun collecting, state by state

From my homeboy Pat Richard on Facebook, original source unknown:

You may have heard on the news about a southern California man put under 72-hour psychiatric observation when it was found he owned 100 guns and allegedly had (by rough estimate) 100,000 rounds of ammunition stored in his home. The house also featured a secret escape tunnel.

My favorite quote from the dimwit television reporter: “Wow! He has about a quarter million machine gun bullets.” The headline referred to it as a “massive weapons cache!”

By southern California standards someone owning 100,000 rounds would be called “mentally unstable.” Just imagine if he lived elsewhere:

In Arizona, he’d be called “an avid gun collector.”

In Arkansas, he’d be called “a novice gun collector.”

In Utah, he’d be called “moderately well prepared,” but they’d probably reserve judgment until they made sure that he had a corresponding quantity of stored food.

In Texas and Montana, he’d be called “the neighborhood ‘Go-To’ guy.”

In Alabama, he’d be called “a likely gubernatorial candidate.”

In Louisiana, he’d be called “an eligible bachelor.”

In North Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina he would be called “a deer hunting buddy.”

And, in Georgia, he’s just “Bubba” who’s a little short on ammo.

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2013-05-17 · 06:21

PIREP: my first “real” cross-country

Last weekend I took my first “real” cross-country flight. Executive summary: this is the one of the major reason I got a pilot’s license: fast travel, on my schedule, to do things that otherwise would be prohibitive. It’s been a lifelong dream of mine, but one with a practical side.

I recently earned my high-performance endorsement and got checked out in the Redstone Arsenal Flying Activity (RAFA) Cessna 182. This plane is bigger and faster than the Cessna 172 I’ve been flying. RAFA’s C182 is an older model, and the interior shows it, but it is mechanically in great condition, and it’s nicely equipped with a moving-map GPS and a decent autopilot. It can travel at up to about 145 knots, and its endurance is about 5 hours when fully fueled… longer than mine!

All of my XC time so far has been within California (with the exception of two short legs in the Mobile/Pensacola area early on in my training). The longest leg I’ve flown so far was Palo Alto-Bakersfield and back, a distance of about 220 miles. However, all of my flying so far has been casual. This was my first “real” XC: I had a defined mission, a longer distance, a time window to hit, and all my sons aboard. I’d aborted a previously planned trip on a similar route because the weather was just awful, so I was eager to make this trip if possible.

We’d planned to depart sometime Saturday morning. The forecast was for IFR until around 11am, gradually clearing. Sure enough, the morning started with IFR here in Huntsville, with low IFR (meaning even worse weather) further to the west along our planned route: direct from Redstone Arsenal Army Air Field (KHUA) to Jackson, Mississippi (KJAN) and then on to Alexandria (KAEX). By about 1pm it had cleared enough for us to head to the airport, but actually getting there took 3 tries as various kids remembered that they forgot important things such as contact lenses.

By the time we got to KHUA, visibility had improved to around 5mi but ceilings were still 3500′, which is low but manageable. I’d planned the flight to take place at 6500′, but that wasn’t gonna happen; however, the forecast called for higher ceilings further west, and I had a brand-new Stratus aboard for inflight weather, so we fueled and launched. After takeoff, we turned west on course and climbed to 2500′, where there were a few light bumps but nothing too serious. I noticed right off that the Stratus was connected but not displaying GPS or ADS-B data. Turning the iPad’s WiFi off and back on fixed it; it did this periodically throughout the trip, so I’ll have to figure out what’s going on. About halfway to KJAN were were able to climb up to 4500′, and things smoothed out considerably. There was a line of storms about 45nm to the south of our course, but they were moving NNE fast enough so that they were never a factor. Being able to see radar and METARs for en route airports on this leg was absolutely invaluable. At every point I had a good picture of what my options looked like if I needed them. Here’s what the Stratus data looks like when displayed in ForeFlight; The airplane icon displays our position from the Stratus onboard GPS; the green and blue dots represent airport weather results (tapping on the dot displays the detailed information), and the weather radar data is just like you’d see from a NEXRAD display.

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We landed at Jackson, taxiied to Atlantic Aviation, parked, and went inside. Nice FBO, friendly people… but key learning #1: check fuel prices beforehand! I am used to flying out-and-back legs from a single FBO, where I rent wet, and it didn’t occur to me that there might be dramatic price differences. After filling up at $6.90/gallon (with a club rental reimbursement rate of $5.11/gal), I now know better.

After a quick snack and a pee break, we loaded back up and took off for Alexandria. We were able to stay at 3000′ until about Vicksburg, when we asked for higher. Our arrival and descent into KAEX was smooth, but I had a sterile cockpit problem: the kids were bantering and I got distracted enough to begin an approach to runway 36 when I was cleared to runway 32. I caught the mistake in time, went around, and was lucky to have an understanding controller, but key learning #2: shut your passengers up as part of your descent checklist.

We parked at Million Air. They treated us like we’d rolled up in a Gulfstream. I am now a huge fan.  Unlimited soft drinks, popcorn, and soft serve ice cream? Why, yes, thank you. We needed it because, like a doofus, I’d neglected to pack any water for the flight. Key learning #3: if you pack snacks, pack drinks too, duh.

Our visit with the family was superb; we had a feast of BBQ chicken, got some great visiting time in with my mom, grandmother, uncle, and cousins, then got a good night’s sleep. Sunday we just relaxed and visited, at least until the 32 pounds of boiled crawfish arrived. After a delightful meal underneath a big tree in the backyard, it was time to head back to Million Air.

I’d planned a single leg back, without the Jackson stop, but on preflight noticed that the oil was lower than I’d like, and none of the Alexandria-area FBOs had 15W50. That necessitated another stop, and since I was familiar with Jackson I planned to stop there. (Key learning #4: carry spare oil. ) This worked out OK because the kids all needed a bathroom stop. I had filled up with fuel at Million Air ($4.81/gal), so I didn’t buy any fuel at Atlantic… so they charged me $20 for stopping by. I don’t think I’ll be back.

Coming back we were able to fly at 3500′ to just east of Alexandria, then 7500′ from there on out. Great, smooth ride with a beautiful view of the Mississippi River crossing, the flooded bottomlands near it, and all sorts of farm and agriculture happening beneath us. I started teaching David how to work the radios, and he did a creditable job (although I think there are some guys at Memphis Center wondering what kind of aircraft a “Skyliner” is).

I used the return legs to get some practice in driving the 530W and the autopilot; I am used to flying a G1000/GFC700 172 so the knobology is quite different. This particular 182 doesn’t have electric trim so I had to do a bit of trim wheel judo to keep the autopilot happy in altitude hold mode but it was good practice. While I love hand-flying, learning to use an autopilot effectively, in the right modes at the right times, is critical to safe single-pilot IFR operations, so I want to start getting better at it ASAP.

The eastern approach to KHUA crosses several restricted areas (some for drone flights, some over propellant storage areas), so we had to turn north, fly past the Decatur airport, then remain north of I-565 until we passed Huntsville International. We landed, refueled, hit Taco Bell, and poof! A trip for the books. 

The 182 burned about 13gph and gave me an average groundspeed of 133kts over 7.5hrs on the meter. While this isn’t exactly exciting compared to faster aircraft, it beats the hell out of driving, and it let the four of us deliver a great Mothers’ Day surprise. The kids enjoyed the visit and tolerated the cramped quarters pretty well, so we’ll be doing this run again soon.

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2013-05-14 · 10:25

Exchange 2013 Inside Out enters “early release” period

NewImage Lately I have been busy working on Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Clients, Connectivity, and Unified Messaging. More precisely, I’ve been dividing my time between performing technical review on Tony’s book, Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability, and writing new content for my book. It’s all Exchange, all the time! To be more precise, right now I am about 55% done with the book: the chapters on unified messaging, Lync integration, message hygiene, client management, and mobile device management are done, and I’m working on the transport chapter now. That leaves me with chapters on CAS, load balancing, and Office 365 yet to do– certainly enough to keep me busy!

Microsoft Press is offering an early access program for these books (and a number of others). If you buy the ebook now, you get immediate access to the parts of the book that have been completed (meaning they’ve been through at least the first part of the editorial pipeline), with access to the remaining chapters as they’re finished. When the entire book is released in its final form, you get an electronic copy of it as well. I’m excited to see Microsoft Press offering early access to the book, because all signs point to gathering interest in the practical aspects of deploying Exchange 2013– something both books talk about quite a bit. We are targeting the final version to cover SP1 when it’s released, so there will be updates to the early access versions as well.

Now, back to writing!

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2013-05-10 · 06:04

Taking pictures in the air

Last week, Doug Mahugh posted this great blog entry on taking pictures from commercial airplanes. He’s done some excellent work. I don’t usually take my real camera on commercial flights, but I think I’m going to have to start. In the meantime, here are two of my favorite airborne pics. I have some other great ones but my iPhoto library is so disorganized that finding them would take more time than I can spare at the moment.

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the business end of a B-17

 

DSC 1188

en route to Petaluma; that’s Alcatraz in the foreground

 

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2013-05-09 · 05:28

Thursday trivia #93

Wow, lots of catching up to do. I’ve been writing a weekly set of notes for students at Acuitus’ school for veterans, and that’s taken all my Thursday material for the most part. It just dawned on me that I could have been posting those notes here too. Oops.

 

 

 

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2013-05-03 · 12:20

“There is always room for improvement” in aviation

Bonus double Flying Friday post today. Why? Because this article is too good not to share.

…these NASA pilots were always at 350 when needed. It wasn’t 349 or 351. They always flew on-speed. For me, sitting in the backseat for my first couple of missions in ACTIVE, a whole new skill level was revealed. They flew this way all the time. They were always on parameters. They were always on-altitude. No 34,900 ft or 35,100 ft for them. It was 35,000 ft and not a foot higher or lower.

The author goes on to talk about how this precision inspired him to fly more precisely– “Why not,” he asks, “endeavor to fly as perfectly as possible? In fact, why not endeavor to fly as well as you possibly can all the time, versus ‘just good enough’?”

Exactly. That’s what I want, and what I try to do.

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