Gel's Blog

My yearly membership to Mozy was coming to an end and I had been running into some issues with Mozy, so I switched to iDrive. I'm still doing my initial backup (80 GB does take a long time to upload), but the initial transfer is going well. The major advantages that I've found with iDrive are:

• I can run iDrive on my server (Windows Home Server or even Windows Small Business Server), which is always on anyway.
• I can backup mapped drives, so I can backup the data from my workstations directly from the backup computer without having to first copy the data to the backup computer and then have the backup computer send it to the online backup server.
• Speed... This one is really nice, I was only able to get about 1 Mbps upload to Mozy while I'm getting over 3 Mbps upload with iDrive making the initial backup and the incremental ones much faster.

As it stands now the initial backup has not completed yet (but I've got only 4GB left from 80) and the backup did stop a few times, so I've had to baby sit it a bit more than I was hoping, but hopefully with new versions and for incremental backups it will not be an issue.

Going to their website and login on shows that my files are there. Next step, pick some random files and make sure that the data is actually correct.

I know that the iPhone is the new cool device, but as cool as it is, it doesn't seem to allow to play wav files from emails even with their new update that is supposed to enable that feature. In order to support the cool kids, I've added MP3 as a conversion format to vm2wm.com so that iPhone users don't feel left out. I've ironed out a couple of issues and the service should be running well now. If you've got an iPhone and want to listen to your voicemails, then check out vm2wm.com, the service works with most VOIP providers that send voicemails as WAV files (Vonage, Lingo, Packet8, Broadvoice, Comcast, Callwave, and more).

Microsoft recently announced that they will be releasing a new product called Windows Home Server which would be a centralized repository for your data files and more. Even though the software is based on Windows Server, it it geared towards the enthusiast and the multi-PC household.

What are the key features of Windows Home Server?

• Drive Extender: A technology allowing to dynamically increase your storage (redundant and not) by adding more drives. You don't need to repartition, or reformat your drives, the new disk will be added to your storage group and the new space will be merged with the rest of your disks. Need some extra storage? simply plug-in an external USB drive and you're ready to go.
• Automatic full workstation backup: You're computers get backed up automatically, with intelligent merging to reduce the redundant file blocks among computers (let's say you have 4 computers running Windows, you would only get 1 physical copy taking space on your server drives. If your computer crashes, simply insert the restore CD and within a couple of hours, you're back to a fully installed, functionning and configured machine with all your previous data.
• Automatic password replication: Finally common passwords on all your machines for your accounts, without requiring a domain. We were supposed to the Castles in Vista, but the feature got cut, Windows Home Server finally brings it to the masses. You can now change your password on 1 machine it will automatically change on your other machines.
• Central Repository for your Shared Media: Not only do you get a centralized file share for your files, you get a central repository for your Pictures, Music, Videos... All protected with redundancy (if you want).
• Central management of health of your machines: You can quickly check from one place that all your PCs have their Anti-Virus updated, Firewall is up and Updates are installed regularly. Yes it does sound like the Windows Security Center, but at least it's fully centralized so that you don't have to go to each machine to get the current status. Doesn't seem like much, but SBS R2 has that integration with Microsoft Update and it's just great to be able to see that an update has failed on a particular machine, or that a machine hasn't been updated for over a week.
• Secure remote access to your data: WHS allows you to securely connect to the server and get access to your data. Forgot to email yourself a file before leaving for work? The file is readily available to you.

While some of these features are already available in different products, I think that the combination of them all under a single, simple product makes Windows Home Server very attractive.

Now, that leaves me with some dilemmas.

• I've already got a Small Business Server, do I want to also have a Home Server? Well, if the next version of SBS included the Home Server functionality that would be amazing. Do I want to run 2 machines for similar needs? I don't necessarily need the password replication if my machines are part of my domain. But Drive Extender makes things so much easier to get redundant extensible storage...
• This still doesn't solve the fire and theft problem and Mozy does not support Windows Server for their non-professional offering, and going to a pro version would make the cost not worthwhile for someone like me, so I'd have to go back keeping a copy of my important media on a workstation to be able to keep the regular Mozy server. Hopefully they'll realized that there's a good market for Windows home Server and offer a hybrid service. $10 a month for unlimited storage for Windows Home Server (excluding the machine backups). Hey make it a branded version of Windows Home Server while you're at it.

I'll keep posting about my experience with Windows Home Server and am really looking forward to trying out Beta 2 seeing the thing in action.

Everybody knows they need to backup their data. How many do it consistently? I don't think that many people. I've been burned before by a crashed hard drive and told myself that I'd take precautions, but I never a suitable solution. Some of my requirements include:

• Ability to be offsite (in case of fire or theft).
• Needs to be big enough for my data.
• Can be automated.

So for the last couple of years, I've been doing a combination of DAT tape backups and replication across multiple drives around the house. While it's been working, when my server drive failed I was able to quickly change the drive and get all my data back. But as time goes by, my data starts growing and outgrowing my backup system. I now need 3 DAT tapes for my pictures and 2 for my music (and I'm not obsessed with taking RAW pictures or ripping lossless CDs). Doing that on a regular basis is not a practical thing. That's where I've been doing mostly replication across 3 drives around the house nightly and evert couple of months, I'd do a backup on tape over a weekend and take the tapes to work. For the really important stuff (email, documents, source control...) I've been doing a daily backup onto tape and doing a rotation to reduce the risk of data loss.

While the system is kinda working, I've been looking for a better system. I've looked at online backup services and found something that sounded like it should work. I had heard some mentions of Carbonite from coworkers and finally took the time to go to their website and take a look. It looked really promising; for $5 a month, I would get unlimited storage. Since I've got a fiber connection, uploading my data might take some time but it's still much much faster than a cable or DSL connection. They've got a 14-day trial for which I signed up, downloaded their app and started backing up my data. After some time, I took a look at what was happening and was really disappointed by the speed of the backup. I was getting about 128Kbps of upload speed, way to slow for my 2Mbps connection. At this speed, it would take me almost a month (if not more) to upload the more than 50GB of data that I needed to send. After doing some reading about their service, realized that Carbonite throttles their connections if your data exceeds a threashold (don't remember the exact limit, but less than what I needed). By the time my trial period was going to be expired, my data would still be on it's way to their servers.

I then decided to look at other services. I found Mozy which also offered unlimited storage for $5 a month or if you don't need more than 2GB of storage, they offer a free service. So I signed up for the free service, found 2GB of data that I wanted to backup and started the backup. I was happy to see that I was getting my full upload throughput. After 3 hours or so, my data was on their server and even accessible on the web. This was enough for me. I registered for the full unlimited service and started uploading all my data. It's been a few days and I'm almost done. I feel much better now about having my data automatically sent as it changes, new music, new pictures, new documents... They'll all be protected almost as soon as they appear on my computer.

My next step will be to see how the incremental backups do work and that my data is recoverable and accessible.

As a side-note, Microsoft is introducing a home server, visit http://www.stopdigitalamnesia.com for more information, that will be the subject of my next entry.

Well, people are starting to register for the vm2wm service which is nice. I spent yesterday evening adding support for MMS. So now, not only can you get your voicemails as emails on your Windows Mobile device, you can get them as MMS messages on your cell phone (currently only tried with Cingular, but since MMS is a standard, other providers should work fine).

I don't have the resources to test all types of providers and handsets (works with Windows Mobile devices and tried Motorola cell phone), but I don't see why it wouldn't work with all handsets that support MMS.

Register for the service

I noticed that my first official blog entry was hit often enough to prove that there is interest in having a global solution to the vonage voicemail/Windows Mobile incompatibilities. Since asking people to run an exchange server simply to get their voicemails available on a Windows Mobile device is not a feasible solution, I thought I could start offering this conversion as a service for people to subscribe to.

So here it is: vm2wm.com. What does this do? Simple, when you register with the service, you get a special purpose email address on the vm2wm.com domain which will act as a conversion relay for your voicemails. This email address will be associated with the email address on which you want to receive your voicemails, then all you have to do is to point your voicemail service (currently only tested with vonage) to your vm2wm.com email. The service will receive the mail, convert the voicemail and send it back to your associated email address. That way when you pickup your email on your Windows Mobile device, you'll be able to listen to it without adding new software or any configuration change on your device. Your messages never get stored on our server, they just get passed through and end up in your inbox on your smartphone or your PocketPc or whatever device you want to use.

If you're interested, please visit http://www.vm2wm.com and request information or an account.

Please send inquiries and feedback to vm2wm@vm2wm.com

1. This program requires Windows Mobile 5 and above.
2. This is signed with a Developer certificate so you need to have your phone application unlocked, and you will get a "Unknown Publisher" message when you install.
3. If you want to be able to use the calling card feature from looking up a contact in the dialer program, you need to have the application policy enabled (HKLM\Security\Policies\Policies:0000101b=1)
4. You need the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP1 available here: Download .NET CF 2.0 SP1

Here is a rough how to use guide:

1. You can create a many calling cards as you want, but only one is set as the default, that's the one that will be used when you make a call. If you want to change the default card, simply choose the card that you want in the list box, and select the Set As Default menu.
2. To dial with the calling card, simply lookup the contact. If you are in the contact list you will have submenu called Calling Card with the options of calling any of the numbers of the contact. If you are in the contact screen itself you will have menu items for calling the contact (Call Home, Call Work...)
3. The program is assuming that you are in North America and that you have a + before all your international numbers, otherwise the 011 will not be added properly. If this doesn't work in Europe or elsewhere, please send comments, I'll try to fix it.
4. The Prefixes to use with card item, overrides the default card based on the number you are dialing. If the phone number starts with the prefix then the card that has that prefix will be used instead of the default card. For example if you want to have 1 card that you use for spain, then you could add 34 as a prefix for that card, then anytime you select a number that starts with 34 this card will be used instead of the default card. You can add multiple prefixes and overlapping prefixes, to each card, the best matched one will be used.

I'm always interested in comments and feedback.

• Added an extra IP to the internet adapter on hisServer. This will be used to bind to a new SMTP Virtual Server.
• Created a new SMTP Virtual Server on hisServer that will be used to send mail out to myServer, we'll call this server the backup SMTP VS. A new SMTP server is necessary since the mail needs to flow out on port 26 to reach myServer, so I set the outgoing port on it to 26. Also the server is listening on port 25 on the new IP address that was just created. This is necessary because the primary SMTP VS will need to send mail to the backup SMTP VS for it to send it out to myServer.
• Created an SMTP Connector that I bound to the primary SMTP VS and set to smarthost all mail from the connector to the newly added IP address. I then added myDomain.com as the address space with a cost of 10 and enabled relaying to the domain.
• Created a second SMTP connector that I bound to the backup SMTP VS and set to smarthost all mail to myServer. I then added myDomain.com as the address space with a cost of 1 and enabled relaying to the domain.
• On myServer I simply added port 26 as a listening port on my SMTP VS.
• Updated the MX records for my domain to point to hisServer instead.

Everything is now working well. Some step might seem uncessary but each is important. It is important to have the 2 SMTP connectors since each is bound to a different SMTP VS and they both need to be able to accept mail destined to myDomain.com. It's also importand for the cost of sending be higher for the incoming VS otherwise, exchange will detect a loop and fail to deliver the mail. It's also very important to have the primary SMTP VS forward mail to the backup SMTP VS otherwise the mail will not be sent out on the right port, since the primary SMTP VS is not bound to the SMTP connector that smarthosts to myServer.

I haven't tried to do a setup where I send out a port different than 25 by using hisServer as an outbound relay. It should be a matter of simply having his primary SMTP VS listen on port 26 and having my main SMTP connector smarthost to hisServer. I'll let you try it out...

• I don't have to check a different machine to get my voicemails. I already check my emails regularly, now I see my voicemails at the same time.
• I can have the voicemails go to both my wife's email account and my own. Now I don't have to worry about deleting a voicemail that she hasn't heard, she's got her own copy.
• I can get notified right away on my cell phone that there's a new voicemail at home, by having an SMS message sent when I get the voicemail through email.

The big problem that I have is that the voicemails come in as regular Wave files which are not compressed (so a 30 second message is maybe 1MB) and don't play on my PocketPC Phone or my wife's smartphone. Well, since I'm running exchange, I decided to fix the situation myself. Exchange allows you to add all sorts of plugins (sinks) to process mail in a certain way, so I wrote my own sink to convert from a regular wav file to a GSM 610 encoded wav file (it's the format that we use for voicemails at work).

When I mentionned that I had this setup running, a few people at work showed interest, so this made me think that this should be my first blog entry.

Here's what I did.

• Grabbed an example from MSDN that descibed how to convert between audio formats and I modifed it to have a command-line application where I can specify an input and output file and have it converted into GSM 610 format (didn't need to have it do any type of custom output at this point).
• Grabbed a script from vamsoft that removes attachments based on extensions and modified it also to make it do what I wanted: take the emails, find the attachement, save it to disk, call the audioconvert program from above, replace the attachement with the new converted voicemail file and let the message through.

End result: Vonage sends me big voicemails that get to my mailbox in manageable size that I'm able to play on my PocketPC or Smartphone.

For those interested here's a link to the files. This is now also available as a relay service http://gillesk.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!981352ED04BA4DCB!238.entry 

To use, extract the files to a directory on your exchange server computer. Modify the vonage.js script to point to the right location. Modify register.cmd to have the right path for the vonage script. Run register.cmd, this will add the script as an Exchange sink.

Now any message that comes from *@vm.vonage.com will have its attachment converted to GSM 610 format. You can change the filter if necessary (if vonage changes it's from address or if you want to use it with another service).