So being one of the first people in Queensland, Australia to get an iPad2 made me feel kind of special.. Now that being said, I’ve used them before, everyone at my work has them and so I wasn’t wowed with the normal ‘ooo it’s shiny’ or ‘gee it’s so small and thin’ because, honestly, i’d seen it all before.
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After the installation of a brand new TMG Server (TMG stands for Threat Management Gateway which is the new name for Microsoft’s ISA Server Software of old) some of the internal clients complained of unusual connection issues – including web page dropouts, ftp access issues, IM applications connecting and disconnecting over and over etc. All these issues were sporadic, over time they would improve and then bam would return again..
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I was having a problem with my Jailbroken iPhone where every time I tried to SSH into my phone with WinSCP (a great SFTP\FTP Client for Windows) it would allow me to connect for about 15 seconds or so and then completely disconnect. Most times after this I would no longer be able to SSH in and the only fix was to go back to Cydia and reinstall OpenSSH again.
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Telstra’s Sierra based NextG USB Dongles, surprise surprise, have massive problems with VPN connections in Windows7 – this is mainly to do with the WWAN drivers that Microsoft VPN & the Sierra Cards use.. They do not play well together from all reports.

There are two solutions to the problem. Both have their merits – I went down the DUN path myself.
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If you live in a SOAP world and haven’t heard of soapUI then you are doing yourself a disservice.

soapUI is an open source tool which allows you to design and run your own SOAP XML up against any web service and visually see the results come back withing the soapUI interface – it can perform full functional, load and validation testing all in the one application. Not only that it gives you full http, soap and error logs as well from the Web Server itself should you need to diagnose any problems with your Web Server or Web Service.
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As virtualisation software becomes more the norm in server environments everywhere people want to do more with less. Specifically running Project Server 2010 (which runs on top of Sharepoint 2010) in VMWare..

Now while this is possible (make sure you have lots of RAM for this VM – 4GB’s is a good start) you are more than likely going to run up against the Sharpoint Time Service maxing out your CPU, or thrashing your disks, to a point where the whole VM Server is completely trashed and won’t do anything whatsoever. This is a fairly common occurrence and I have seen it on a few Sharepoint 2007 Servers also.
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VMWare Server is a great product for running multiple virtual machines on top of a host system (in my case Windows 2003 Server) but the Web Interface is sluggish and poorly designed. But for a free product i’m definitely not complaining..

On the weekend while doing some routine maintenance I hit a point where from any machine I was unable to access the Web Interface for any longer than a few seconds before it started returning ‘timed out: cannot communicate with host’ errors. I would be returned to the VMWare login screen, log back in, and immediately get the same error – around and around we go..
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If you ask Microsoft there is no clear database migration path backwards to SQL Server 2005 from 2008..

Talk about painful!

Sometimes it just needs to be done unfortunately..

However there is a solution, while a touch annoying, that should solve your problems.

Open up Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Express (there is a free express version located here)
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