Friday, March 10, 2006

Been busy putting out fires

It's been a busy week. A number of our sites, each of which supports a large number of simultaneous users, have been repeatedly knocked offline. Naturally, this is pissing off customers and people in my company.

In some cases it looks like we've been the victim of several DDoS attacks. We've been looking at how to make our service more resilient and are reaching some conclusions, but you'll forgive me if I'm vague on the details.

On a more positive note, I've started using Microsoft Entourage on my iBook more frequently for work email. Two things made this possible: 1) getting the correct WebDAV server settings for our Exchange farm, and 2) a patch that MS put out last year which resolved an issue with Entourage mangling calendars on an Exchange server.

I've used Outlook in several successive incarnations for about seven years. Since Day One, I've thought it sucks donkey balls. It's a gigantic bloated slow pig. I'd rather not even have to use a groupware app at all but it's kinda necessary given my employer's corporate culture. I could restrict myself to Outlook Web Access but that's not nearly as convenient as a local client. My ideal solution would be to use Mail.app's Exchange connectivity and have Apple add WebDAV suppport for Exchange servers to iCal. That would be cool.

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