Disclaimer: I’m not a Comcast subscriber, but I play one on TV

Comcast has me scratching my head. A friend of mine pointed out the following post on the Comcast goofiness. For a long time now they have been messing with DNS and if you happen to screw up and look up a site that does not exist in DNS, you get the Comcast ad page. Many of the tech savvy folks out there simply got around that by putting up their own caching server or using opendns. I know I did when I found out that Mediacom started messing with DNS like this.

Well, the keynote was today at noon CDT, let’s see how I did.

1. The standard stats of how well the iPhones and Apps are selling Yup, got those. And they were impressive! Something along the lines of 50,000 apps, over 1 billion app downloads and somewhere in the range of 40,000,000 iPhones and iPod Touches. Nice!

2. iPhone 3.0 will be released with availability right away for iPhones. Once again iTouches will get the $20-$30 shaft. (Seriously Apple, why do you treat them like second class citizens?) Ok, I was off but only by a little. 3.0 will be available on June 17th. That’s pretty damn close in my book. Once again iPod touch users get the shaft. $9.95 I believe was the upgrade price. C’mon Apple, this is bullshit. They paid for the hardware and updates just like everyone else.

Here is my quick run down of predictions for the keynote:

• The standard stats of how well the iPhones and Apps are selling
• iPhone 3.0 will be released with availability right away for iPhones. Once again iTouches will get the $20-$30 shaft. (Seriously Apple, why do you treat them like second class citizens?)
• Snow Leapard will get a July release date with kick ass Exchange/AD support.
• No netbook…again! The bloggers will cry party foul. Even CNN will get in on how much Apple has disappointed the rumor mill.
• One more thing….Steve Freaking Jobs. He comes out, stock jumps 10 points.

Ladies and Gentlemen, today you are going to learn a lesson on why you do NOT edit the active directory directly for exchange attributes.

Background

A long time ago, we had a very crappy provisioning system for our hosted Exchange 2003 platform. It worked ok, but missed a lot of things that we wanted to have set. They also were kind of pricks when it came to licensing so making a ton of money on the platform was hard to do. So, we decided to roll our own. It wasn’t that hard to reverse engineer what was being set for users, groups and contacts. There were a few obstacles of coarse but we were able to get a pretty good provisioning system setup. However, this too had its faults. Sure we had total control over the code and could update things as we needed. But we were still working in a void. We really didn’t know _everything_ that was happening on the system that needed to actually happen. Plain and simple, we were missing things. Not to mention future services would require the same amount of dev time reverse engineering what needed to be set. That’s not a scalable solution.

For our Hosted Exchange 2007 environment, we offer a BlackBerry Enterprise Server that allows users to connect their crackberries and have the full functionality that one expects with these devices.

Various automation scripts have been put in place that make it easy for the user to see who has BlackBerry enabled for their account, add additional users and so on. Today, we discovered a rather annoying feature that exposed a bug in our code. Not a horrible bug, but one that did affect the user and their experience with the customer portal.