Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

By now we all know about the couple of days it took for the .Mac to MobileMe transition to happen. I didn’t really complain about it - during the whole time, email was working fine (from a mail client), and sync was working most of the time. It was just the new web apps that took a while to come up.

More recently, on Friday, there was a complete mail outage for 1% of MobileMe users, and said outage has still not been fixed (as of Wednesday mid-morning). I’m in that 1%.

I’m not really too upset for myself; I’m watching this more from an academic perspective. I use the MobileMe sync a lot between two Macs and an iPhone, and I do use the email, but not often. The fact that mail is down doesn’t dramatically affect my life at the moment. And in general, I’ll be the first to say I really like MobileMe and what they’re doing with it.

But after the email being down for 5 days so far, the techie in me can’t help but wonder what is wrong. Apple put up a KB article about it, saying:

On Friday, July 18, 2008 (2008-07-18) we experienced a serious issue with one of our MobileMe mail servers. This issue is currently affecting approximately 1% of MobileMe members. Affected members are unable to send or receive email at www.me.com or access email using any email client software such as Mail on a Mac or Microsoft Outlook on a PC.

Let’s look at what could perhaps cause something like this:

1. Complete server failure. Well, in 5 days, you could for sure have another server in there. Actually in more like a couple of hours, assuming their service contract with Sun (they appear to be using Sun’s mail servers) is up to date.

2. Disk failure. Perhaps the entire disk array that this 1% of mailboxes is stored on melted down. Even if this was true, you could almost certainly restore from backups in hours, or worst case days.

3. Centralized disk failure. If they’re using large storage arrays, it’s possible there was a systemic failure and they can’t get it back online. However, they’d probably have a much bigger problem than a 1% outage if this was the case.

4. Multiple storage failures. If multiple drives all failed at one time, causing an array to come down, and there was no usable backup, then they might send the failed drives out for data recovery - eek. But still - I would think this could be completed in a day. I’ve never done it, though, so perhaps this takes a while.

5. Data corruption. If something went terribly wrong, and the server was writing corrupted data, it could conceivably destroy a lot of data before your monitoring knew something was wrong. Hmm. Restoring from backup is the obvious thing to do, although you might have incremental data loss from the window since the last backup (assuming transaction logs corrupt also).

Like I said, I like MobileMe, although it’s certainly taking a PR beating right now. But I’m definitely curious what’s going on, and what could possibly take 5+ days to recover from. Any ideas?

It seems lot of folks are having problems getting Exchange push email working reliably with the new iPhone 2.0 software. For me, it worked flawlessly when I was outside of the office, but when I was in the office and connected to our corporate LAN via wi-fi, it was unreliable at best. If I instead connected to another wi-fi network (like the guest network from the folks two floors below us), everything worked fine.

There is an Apple KB article talking about this:

When roaming between home and office networks with Wi-Fi enabled, “push” may stop working if your company’s Exchange ActiveSync server has a different IP address for intranet and Internet clients. Make sure the DNS for your network returns a single, externally-routable address to the Exchange ActiveSync server for both intranet and Internet clients. This is required so the device can use the same IP address for communicating with the server when both types of connections are active. A workaround to avoid this issue is to disable Wi-Fi on the iPhone.

Yep, that sounded like the problem. Our internal and external DNS for our corporate mail server is different, just as the article surmised. But it turns out in our case, it was non-trivial to change them to be the same thing.

But it turns out there is a workaround that works for me. If you go into Settings / Wi-Fi, find your wi-fi network, and click the blue button next to it, you’ll see something like the following:

And here’s the tricky part. Tap on the “DNS” setting, and edit it. In my case, rather than using the internal DHCP-assigned DNS servers, I typed in two external DNS servers. These new servers will override whatever is returned from DHCP, and when asked for the IP of our mail server, they will return the externally-facing IP, since that’s all they know about.

And that was it! The push email is now working 100% reliably. A little too reliably, actually. :-)

Note - I obviously no longer have internal DNS resolution within my corporate LAN, but that’s not a problem for me. Your mileage may vary.

Note 2 - this also assumes your external mail server IP is accessible from your LAN. This may or may not be the case, depending on how your firewalls and the rest of your network are configured.

Last time, we looked at how clippings work in NewsGator Enterprise Server.  At the end of the video, I mentioned that there are other ways to share clippings with other folks…I was referring to a feature called group clippings.

Group clippings are basically clippings that are shared among all the members of a group.  That group might be an Active Directory (or LDAP) group, or it might be an ad-hoc group defined in NGES.  The clippings for that group are, by default, private to that group - so you can have a confidential conversation among the members.

View QuickTime video

YouTube version:

And as always, you can try all this out for yourself by downloading the free 20-user version of NewsGator Enterprise Server.

One of the first Mac apps I bought was Delicious Library. Not that I desperately needed it, but it was just too darn pretty not to buy, especially for a new Mac owner to use to show his friends. And when version 2 came out, I was super excited about being able to publish my library on the web.

Here’s my use case. I travel a lot, and I like to read books on the plane, rather than do my usual work…somehow I feel more relaxed when I arrive to where I’m going. Anyway, so I’ll be in the book store in the airport, and I’ll see an interesting book. But if it’s not a new release, then I often can’t remember whether I’ve read it before; I know I like the author, and I know I’ve read a lot of his work, but not positive about this particular book.

So DL2 and the iPhone to the rescue, right? Pull up my library, do a quick search, and I’d be all set. But herein lies the problem.

The out-of-the-box templates can be seen on Adam Betts’ blog. While pretty, here are the issues with the iPhone templates, at least for my particular use case:

1. There are only 12 books per page. Yikes - that means I have 20-some pages, and I’m not sure which page I need to go to. Or with the other template, all the books are on one page - which is nice, but leads to problem #2.

2. See all those pictures of the book covers? Those are coming to about 90KB each. Each! That means a page of 12 books is over half a meg. That’s a lot on a phone.

3. I don’t need the book descriptions and links to Amazon in there either. Those are pretty big also, although down in the noise compared to the image sizes.

What I really wanted was one page with all my books, or at least 100 or so of them, and have the page be small enough that I could load it over EDGE without having to sit down. I’d like search features too, and I’d like to be able to sort by author’s last name (so Tom Clancy would be before Brad Meltzer), but hey, there are bigger problems to worry about.

While I was browsing around, trying to figure out a way around this problem, I saw Mark Burgess’ site, and he had some sample templates. While his template wasn’t what I wanted, it showed me how to make one. So I worked on it for a bit, basically just modifying the one that ships with DL2, and this is what I ended up with:

Over 200 books on one page, and it’s coming in at just over 200KB including the images on the page. Now that I can live with!

As to how to install it…it’s not super easy. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Install Mark Burgess’s HTML template, and install it per his instructions (in the readme file).

2. Download my changes, and replace the files in the “iphone” directory in Mark’s template with the contents of this zip file.

No warranty, of course…this is at the “it seems to work for me” stage. :-)

If there is some documentation somewhere about how to make DL2 templates and get them installed without resorting to such hackery, I’d love to know about it, and then I can make this into a real template.

Anyway - hope this is helpful for someone!

The development of NetNewsWire for iPhone just might be the worst-kept secret in NewsGator’s history. But hey - that’s ok, especially since today is launch day!

NetNewsWire for iPhone uses the NewsGator Online sync platform, so you can use NetNewsWire on your Mac, FeedDemon on Windows, NewsGator Online on the web, or any of our other applications, and they will all sync together. I’ve talked about this a lot in the past…but this is really the only reasonable way to build a mobile reader, IMHO. We use mobile devices as companion devices, in addition to our desktop and/or laptop computers - they’re not the only devices we use.

The first thing to do is head on into the iTunes App Store (click the image below):

Assuming you have iTunes 7.7 installed, that link will take you to the App store, where you can download NetNewsWire:

And then you’re all set. Here are a few screenshots while you’re waiting for your iPhone 2.0 firmware to download!

Main screen:

News items:

Reading an article:

This new app also supports clippings - so you can find articles on your phone that you’d like to read later, and save them in your clippings folders. Those folders are also synchronized to your desktop apps and the online system as well.

If I sound excited, it’s because I am. :-) So stop reading now, and go to it!

And did I mention it’s free?

Onward, I say. Time for the next installment in the series, this one covering clippings.

There’s a lot of buzz about clippings in NewsGator Online (and shared items in Google Reader), especially with apps like ReadBurner making them easy to discover. There are similar use cases for clippings in the enterprise.

NewsGator Enterprise Server supports two kinds of clippings - personal clippings, and group clippings (which are shared by a group). This video covers personal clippings; group clippings will be coming next time.

View QuickTime video

YouTube version:

And don’t forget you can download a free 20-user version of NewsGator Enterprise Server. :-)

As you know, we recently made NewsGator Enterprise Server free for up to 20 users. We’ve had quite a bit of response to this - thanks to everyone who has downloaded and is using it!

On a somewhat related note, I’ve decided to make a series of 60-second screencasts demonstrating some of the features of NGES. The first of these is below, on the integrated tagging features.

Why 60 seconds? I mean, as someone mentioned to me last week, the shorter the video the harder it is to edit (so true). My thought here is, everyone has time to watch a quick 1-minute video of something cool…but much more than that is tougher. So, I’m going to give the 60-second thing a shot, and we’ll see how it goes. Feedback would be appreciated!

So on to the first video. This shows the tagging system in NGES:

 
The YouTube version is a bit hard to see due to the size and quality; click here for higher quality QuickTime version.

It’s been about 8 months since I started using an iPhone. Oddly, I wasn’t even interested at the time; I got the phone as a freebie for going to the Office 2.0 conference in 2007, and it sat on my desk for a week before I even activated it. Color me unexcited.

But then, things changed. Turned out I did like it, a lot. It was “fun”. I’m a sucker for fun gadgets. I switched my regular phone number over about a week later, and I’ve been using it ever since.

So the other day, I was out to lunch with someone, and he asked how I liked it. And while I was answering, I had two interesting realizations:

1. It’s still fun. I mean, all the little animations and eye candy. The little things. Could I live without them? Sure. But having them there somehow makes the whole experience continue to work.

2. It’s the first “smart” phone I’ve ever had that didn’t annoy me. I mean, really. Smartphones I’ve had in the past (from Audiovox, Motorola, Palm, and others) all eventually sucked at the little things. You know, like making phone calls. Sometimes I’d find that the phones were too busy doing something (gosh knows what exactly) to even let me make a call. Or too busy to ring when a call was coming in. Sometimes they’d lock up. Sometimes they’d get into a weird mode where anything I did would take 10+ seconds. Sometimes they’d make me want to throw them against a wall.

But oddly, the iPhone has done none of these things. It’s not perfect by any means - it’s got a few little bugs…but at risk of sounding like a fanboy, I have to say it works better as a phone than any phone I’ve had in the last 3 years.

And that is something I never thought I’d say.

Back when we announced that NewsGator’s RSS clients are now free, I also mentioned that we’d be supporting APML across the entire platform. Some of our client applications implement exporting APML at the moment…but we’ve now implemented a persistent APML endpoint in our online platform. What this means is, if you’re using sync with NewsGator Online, there is a well-known URL that represents your APML attention data.

This APML endpoint can be either public or private - it’s your choice. If it’s private, it will require your NewsGator Online credentials to access. If it’s public, anyone can access it.

Here’s how to enable this:

1. From NewsGator Online, sign in and then click on the “Settings” item at the top right.

2. You’ll now see four tabs; click on “Edit Locations”.

These “locations” are actually groups of feeds; you’ll see at least one location for “NewsGator Web Edition”, and you’ll see one location for each client you’re using. Each location forms a subset of your overall list of feeds. You can control which feeds are mapped to each location by using the “Feeds” link next to each location.

3. Next to each location, you’ll see a link for “APML” - click that link.

4. You will then see your individual APML URL for that particular set of feeds. If you wish to make it public (or private), use the checkbox on that page.

At the moment, we’re exposing feed-level attention data; we have more detailed data available, but it’s not being exposed at the moment.

Let us know if this is useful, and any suggestions you have!

Ever since we first shipped NewsGator Enterprise Server back in 2005, I’ve had this blog post in the back of my mind. We never had an easy way for folks to actually take a look at the product, and kick the tires for themselves. We had demos, webinars, conferences, and all that…but you couldn’t actually download it and try it for yourself, without buying it (or entering a trial agreement).

Well today, all that changes. You can now download a free 20-user version of NewsGator Enterprise Server, install it, and use it!

Why would we do such a crazy thing? We want more people to see it. More feedback. More visibility. This product has been extremely successful - our customer list reads like a who’s who of the Fortune 500 - but it’s been primarily deployed in larger installations. But what about smaller companies, or individual departments within companies? This will hopefully remove the barriers involved in trying out these technologies. And in the latter case, we’re confident it will lead to larger sales as the deployment grows beyond the initial 20 users.

But for those first 20 folks, it’s free! As in beer.

There’s only one catch, and it’s not really a catch. Regular paying customers get dedicated support from our enterprise support team…but if you download the free version, FAQs and community support will be via the forums. That should be ok, though - we really don’t think you’re going to have many problems. One caveat, though - this is a server product, and the installation process will ask you questions about your Active Directory or LDAP configuration and such. If you don’t think you can answer those questions, you might want to find someone to help you install it.

In case you can’t tell, I’m totally excited about this. But enough of me rambling…here is the NewsGator Enterprise Server product site, technical requirements, and the download page. (you’ll have to fill out a form to download, but don’t worry, it’s short.)