and Low and behold it is coming in at about 45 min to download. it is downloading at 1450/kbs and the other is downloading at 25-240/kbs.

some would say it is the network but if I switch the connections I am seeing the same thing. so My last test is to put in my new 60 GB SSD drive on the other laptop and see how it goes.

I will post more later.

I love the volume as I can now hear conversations. And the speaker phone is great. The GPS,camera, and even the visual Voice mail is awesome however when it comes to what I use the phone for most of the time it is VERY LACKING in functionality.

Calendaring and Email Blow. I have tried touch down but it is a separate application and the calendar piece is hard to see I end up with many back to back appointments and with touch down it is hard to view. However with the base calendar the view is better but I can’t enter new calendar appointments for the corporate calendar. This really sucks.

And from a security perspective they just do not get it. With corporations working so hard to protect their mobile data. And droid not supporting full active sync functionality. this really make the phone worthless in my opinion. I am a consultant and my recommendation to all my clients is to block the droid. and Not let the connect. This is the nice thing about Exchange 2010 with allow block Quarintine. I can block all the devices that do not have solid security.

The phone is a good phone and battery life is awesome but I feel like I can’t live with out my calendar, and email. I do not want to have to buy a 3rd party app for it. especially one that does not integrate will with the base calendar and the base contacts.

I am seriously thinking about returning this phone.

It is usually a recommendation that you have 2 separate nics for this configuration. This is considered a multi-home box. As most people know when you have 2 NIC’s you should not put a gateway on one of the nic’s it can cause some problems if you do.

First thing to remember is that the MAPI network is the nic that should have the gateway. I also recommend you rename the network objects so it is easier to deal with and know which one is for which.

once this is complete then the problem really begins as you can see from the screen shot the REP network is listed as Unidentified This creates some problems with the windows firewall. And from my understanding windows 2008 R2 does not support the firewall being disabled because it disables some of the crypto stuff.

I have looked far and wide for an answer or a script to try to change the location from unidentified to something else but have not found anything there are several posts that I have seen that talk about adding a gateway to the second nic then it will allow you to modify the config but It does not work on 2008 R2.

So why is this a problem. Well all NICs that are unidentified networks are set in the firewall as public this means they are very restricted on inbound traffic. This works great for outbound traffic. and in some cases you may never realize the problem because the DAG will start to use the MAPI network even if you have set it not to replicate.

So here is what I have been doing In the advanced firewall I right click on the top object, I then go to each tab and click on the custom button shown below.

I then uncheck the repl network so that non of the firewall locations will be used with that nic. What this does is basically tell the firewall it is not supposed to work with this NIC.

This seems to work pretty well for me.

Then to verify that the replication network is being used you can run

get-mailboxdatabasecopystatus –id “mailboxdatabase\server” –connectionstatus |fl

This will give you the ability to see which network is being used for replication

And so far I have found nothing suspicious and the traffic does not lie. So after reviewing the data. I sat down with my wife and started asking the questions about where she has accessed her account from. and I found out that she has used 2 community computers. both were Windows XP and odds are they had a Key logger in place.

so how did they get into so many accounts. Well that comes from the fact that like most users she used the same password for most accounts (not any more) once they had access to her email. they searched for common info like “ebay” “Facebook” and others. And since many of these sites send you updates to your primary account listed and they include the user name “dear Username”. then all the attacker did was find those websites and try the account username with the password they had for her email.

Since they were all the same he was in like Flynn. Once in he started doing all the things they could to collect cash and equipment. Luckly we caught on. However they realized it. and started changing personal information on the hotmail account and others. As well as the infamous “security question” This locked us out.

Now on a good note EBAY was fast and quick to help us. and we have control of that account. However Hotmail has not been so helpful we are still locked out of the account. to no avail this is some what disastrous. my wife has stuff in there from almost 10 years ago.

So what does this mean, well you should follow some basic security steps:

Don’t use the same password on all accounts

Don’t use community computers if you have to use Single use login passwords

Change passwords often

Use strong password’s or a passphrase at least 8-15 characters

pay attention to accounts

Was kind of taken back a little bit and she stated that she had not been on the computer. She asked me to go look at what was going on. This friend indicated that someone was asking for money and that she was in trouble. This person was impersonating my wife.

Then the phone really started ringing at this point. there was more then one person that was talking with this impersonator. and many had been asked to send money because she was in another country and in trouble.

I immediately changed the password and deleted the Face Book account. now the reason I did both is because if the person was actively using face book and logged in it is possible that they could change the password and her information used to change the password. You know the secret question!!! By changing the password and immediately shutting it down. The attacker can not reactivate the account.

With Face book you can re-activate your account with the username and the password. so if the attacker knew the password and username he could simply re-activate the account by logging back in. But since i changed the password before deactivation he is stuck.

So then she said we should check her Hotmail account. That was the start of a long night. we changed the password and logged out. And went to log back in and BAM he had changed the password, and the “SECRET QUESTION” had been changed. UGH he had us we were locked out of our own Email. (for some reason her phone has stayed connected so we have been watching the email fly).

On to EBAY we immediately jumped on to EBAY and sure enough he was THERE we started trying to change the password and delete all the payment information. And BAM he had changed the password and that infamous Secret Question. As well as the phone number you can use to have them call you to reset the account. UGH this guy was moving fast.

We contacted EBay immediately And they started helping us. we finally gained control of the account. when I logged in i found all the information this guy had put in place including part of the cell phone number. And an address that is invalid in Washington DC. The Cell number was a 202 area code and ended in 21 but not sure of the number in between. I thought I saw the full number while I was changing the info so I tried calling it. But it went to a generic voice mail.

So now that I have control of EBAY I start moving to take control of her hotmail account. And low and behold I found out why I do not like free accounts. there is no one to call or to ask to have the account disabled if you do not have access to the account. if it has been Hijacked and you can not make the changes your self you are kind of stuck. there is a form you can fill out but then you have to wait several hours. or it can be even longer in some cases. And the form  is extremely long and you need to provide as much detailed information as you can to try to help prove the account is yours.

During this time the person is still using the account requesting money from your contacts and just being a general pain. he is perusing our email and deleting all he wants to copying every thing he wants to keep that they may find as valuable.

It sure makes you feel violated to see it all happen and know they have access to your personal information. All in all it was a huge lesson Luckily we have been able to at least keep up with him and change many things before he actually was able to accomplish any real financial damage. AS of right now we seem safe but we will not really know for several months or years. We have had to put a watch on all of our credit and accounts for fraudulent activity as well as begin an in-depth review of our credit report.

we are lucky we caught it as it was happening but it happens fast. And finding what you need to do can be a real challenge. 

Honestly I like the Dell better it has a better screen and the Keyboard feels better. But wanted to see how this will work. Well. the facts are in. My HP is 4-5 times as fast loading outlook then my Dell.

On my Dell with no SSD drive 64bit 4 GB of RAM outlook 2010 loads in about 30 Seconds. On my HP TX2 64 bit 4 GB RAM outlook loads almost instantly. Same with word and Excel.

So I guess that Means SSD for me all the time. from here on out. it is just to obvious.

This makes me wonder about other server issues related to drives. More now then ever before.