The unity*dc blog

Category: Technology

Solution to the 1035 error in Mac Mail when sending digitally signed messages

Thu, 7th May 2009

We like people to be sure that mails from us really are from us, so we digitally sign them all. This has been fine until recently when several Macs have started producing the following error message when sending a digitally-signed email:

Operation could not be completed.
(MFMessageErrorDomain error 1035.)

We hunted around on the internet for possible solutions and this worked for us:

1. Open your keychain (look for "keychain access" in Spotlight)
2. Under "Keychains" (usually the top left list) choose "Login"
3. Under "Category" (usually lower left list) choose "Certificates"
4. In the list in the main panel, find the certificate for ".Mac sharing" and double-click it
5. In the popup, click "Trust" to expand its settings, set the "When using this certificate" to "Always Trust", and close the popup
6. Locate the certificate you're using to sign your email, and do the same for this one
7. Completely quit Mail and restart it and it should work normally

Hope that helps!

Problem with searching emails in Mac Mail

Tue, 17th Mar 2009

Some time ago we switched to Macs from PCs and one of the many improvements I've experienced was with Mac Mail over Outlook 2003. Mail is much simpler to use and its search feature was in a totally different league to Outlook. During the transition, if I wanted to find an email, it was quicker to go to my car, fetch my Macbook, fire it up and run a search than to do the same search on Outlook.

However, recently, with one of the Leopard updates, this great search feature stopped working. If I clicked on "entire message" it wouldn't find any messages, no matter what I searched for. I tried a number of weird and wonderful recipes, including installing various utilities, all manner of command line mumbo-jumbo and more.

Eventually I found a solution that works, and thanks to Russell Jones for letting everyone know about it:

• Open Terminal.
• Delete the file ~/Library/Mail/"Envelope Index"
• Execute this in Terminal to force Spotlight to re-index itself: sudo mdutil -E -i on /
• Close Terminal and wait for Spotlight to do the business. (During this time the "entire message" option will be greyed-out in Mail.) You can check progress by clicking on the magnifier top right in Finder.

Why even non-geeks should get excited by cloud computing

Wed, 1st Oct 2008

Cloud computing is the next big thing in computers. Geeks are beside themselves with excitement. But like many big advances, there's reason for business people to get excited too. Why? Ever grumbled when your office server ran out of space or worried if your website will be able to cope with millions of hits from a big campaign? Cloud computing is like having stretchy computers. How big's a cloud hard disk? It's as big as you need. How powerful is a cloud computer? As powerful as you need it to be. This is the beginning of IT as a commodity utility where you only pay for what you use.

The good old days of physical computers

In the good old days of the 90s, we'd have one computer to do one thing. We'd have a file server to store our files, a mail server to run email and desktop and laptop PCs for people to use. Typically, each of these machines would be provisioned to be able to cope with the maximum expected peaks in demand. For example the mail server would be sized to cope with everyone in the office hitting their email at a busy time like 9am on the first Monday back in January. For the web server you'd try and guess what the maximum likely peak traffic would be and cater for that. How many times has that been wrong? The net result of this was that most computers sat around all day using less than 1% of their capability. Together they had a brain the size of a planet and what were they doing? Running screensavers.

Virtualisation

A few years ago some bright sparks in the software business invented a way to make more use of this wasted capacity. With a technology called virtualisation they gave us the ability to split one physical computer into several virtual ones. Rather than having one computer for email, one for the office file server and so on, we could run all of that on one physical machine. Great news for software companies but a bad time to be a hardware manufacturer. The problem with this was that the peaks and spikes we worried about in the 90s were still there, just with virtualisation we were betting on the peaks for each application never happening at the same time.

Data centres

In the last few years broadband internet connections have got much, much faster and more reliable. So reliable in fact that many companies have decided to ditch the server room in their office and move their servers into an off-site data centre. They'd save costs on electricity, floor space and probably a support guy or two. This resulted in an explosion in the number and size of data centres worldwide.

The cloud

Not so long ago, some geeks were working in a data centre watching over computers that despite virtualisation were still only running at about 5-10% of their capacity. At lunchtime they'd pool their cash together and buy a mega family bucket from KFC to save money. They wondered what would happen if all the computers in the whole data centre could club together too and act like one giant computer. They could use this one massive virtual computer to do geek things that would normally take hours in milliseconds. Wow. Then one of them reminded the others that the customers would still need their applications running in the data centre. The answer was plain - run these applications as virtual machines on the massive virtual computer. This is cloud computing.

Stretchy computers

Because cloud computing gives you a virtual machine and not a physical one, changing the size of it happens in software and not hardware. So to make a machine more powerful or give it bigger storage, there's no need to buy and install hardware, one can simply move a slider on a screen. In fact it's even easier than that. Software knows how hard it is working and how much storage it is using, so it can move the sliders automatically, without you having to get involved at all.

What's in it for me?

What does this mean for business? Well for starters there's no more worrying about if the office file server, email server or web server can cope with demand. The software business will change dramatically too. Rather than coming on a CD for you to install and look after on your own equipment, software will increasingly be a service. The software company (or a reseller) runs the software in the cloud and you'll interact with it using a web browser. There's be no need for you to worry about upgrades, security patches, backup.

Companies are already doing this with their email servers and more services will follow. At unity*dc we already run a lot of our computing on the cloud. We run our project extranet on the cloud. We back up all our old projects onto cloud storage. Our email and even our phone system runs on the cloud. What's the benefit for us? Flexibility. A new team member joins and all we need to do is buy them an iMac and an IP phone. Ten people join and it's the same. If they want to work from home, no problem. Our project extranet, email and the office phones work there too. Need us to do number crunching on 2 million customer records? No problem. Even if our office burns down, we just grab a Regus suite and we can be fully operational again in under 24 hours.

It's not a good time to be an in-house IT guy but it is a good time if you want your IT to be more powerful, more reliable and less labour-intensive and expensive.

Internet (VOIP) phones in a busy office

Wed, 13th Aug 2008

At an event I was at today a chap gave a talk about voice over IP phone phones and I thought I'd share our experiences with VOIP in our business.

We've been using a mixture of VOIP and traditional phones for about 6 months here now and we've learnt that there are some definite Pros and Cons. VOIP providers seem to promise an awful lot: cheap or free calls, fancy PBX features like conference calling and hunt groups (more about these terms later) and lots of flexibility.

The chap giving the talk today said that the main downfall of VOIP right now is the reliability isn't yet quite up with the reliability that you get from water or mains power. This tallies well with our experience - setting things up is still a bit like internet connectivity used to be with dial-up or before BT brought in their Homehubs: you need to know what you're doing with all the settings or have someone really techy on hand who does know or your phone will be flaky.

Because most of our people work remotely, we opted for a hosted VOIP solution, where the hosting people run the VOIP server in their data centre. We looked at various providers and chose Gradwell.com as they seemed best set up for our kind of business and responded well when we had problems setting-up. We chose their hosted PBX service, which they call Centrex. Gradwell's Centrex is reasonably easy to set-up and manage so long as you've learnt the phone terminology first. They have an extranet where you can manage anything you would do with a normal office phone system - hunt groups, time of day routing, voicemail, IVR menus, the lot. If this all sounds double-dutch to you, it did to us too - but persevere, I'll explain what it all means below.

The pros

We like our VOIP system because it is flexible and enables us to handle incoming calls efficiently no matter where our staff are - in the office or at home or even out-and-about. We're saving about 30-40% on our outgoing calls as all calls to geographic numbers are free with our package.

The cons

The biggest problem with VOIP is that it is totally dependent on your Internet connection. Unless you're watching the Olympics on the Internet it's unlikely that you'll notice when your connection is a bit slow or there's a bit of what techies call "latency." However, either of these things can make talking to someone over VOIP a real pain, with breaks in the speech or a nasty echo being the main symptoms. In our office we're dependent upon Regus for our connectivity so this has been a bit hit-and-miss on occasion. Thankfully we have a normal phone line as backup so we route all incoming calls to that.

Conclusion

In conclusion I'd say if you have a good IT partner that you trust to help you with your office computers and network then get them to help you with your VOIP. Unless you've got more than one office or you make a lot of international calls, you're unlikely to see a dramatic drop in costs from VOIP, but it will make you more flexible, especially for inbound calls. Over 95% of calls we receive get to a human being within 5 rings and this works well for us.

What the terminology means

PBXes are the boxes you'd have in your office somewhere to run your internal phone network. With VOIP, these are now bits of software that run on a server in your server rack/room or you can even buy a hosted service with no equipment needed, which is what we do.
Handsets are the physical phones you talk on. These look and work just like ordinary phones but cost a little bit more and they plug into your office network rather than the phone line. However, there are some that also plug into the phone line too, for a backup.
Hunt groups these are probably the best bit about PBXes. When a call comes in you can have it ring any combination of handsets so the person calling you gets to a human being as quickly as possible. We have ours set to go to the Regus receptionist first, but if she doesn't pick up in 5 rings, then all the handsets in the office ring at once.
Time of day routing this means that you can set different rules for your hunt groups etc, depending on if it's a weekday or after hours etc. The Regus receptionist goes home at 5.30 so after then incoming callers go straight to our office handsets.
IVR menus these are those annoying "press 1 for support" type menus. We don't tend to use them, preferring voicemail instead if the office is closed.