This time it was much longer than we had even dreamt of, but this was caused by a few server settings which our hosting partner fixed.

Thanks for hanging in during the upgrade process. I know some of you had a hard time when PamFax was offline.

Let me explain a bit why this update was so important and complex.

It all started last week when our hoster updated our server park to a full load balanced cluster. This was needed to cope with the increase in traffic we have had the past year. PamFax3 is much more efficient when it comes to scaling up so we decided now is a good time to put new hardware in as we need to do the upgrade anyway.

Then after the upgrade there were settings to be checked, etc. This took time. Then on Monday late afternoon (European time), we took PamFax offline. The team started to convert the databases and migrate users data to the new system. This is a huge amount of data so it took time. We unfortunately had to take PamFax offline to do this.

We did the databse conversion with the help of Amazon EC2 cloud servers, we had up to 15 running at a time!

After this we upgraded the core systems. These being the various modules PamFax consists of. PamFax3 is a complete new development and not a mere upgrade as the version number might imply.

Based on our experience and close monitoring of the PamFax2 system, we started designing PamFax3 back in summer last year. We wanted to have a very modular and scalable system which is able to process a lot of data and grow with us. We designed the system from scratch with these and other requirements in mind.

So, after the usual birth pains we’re now up and running. Thank you for hanging in during the upgrade process, I know it was not easy for some of you. I still hope you will forgive us this time as we do not do updates regularly (last one was PamFax2 in April 2009). We designed PamFax3 in such a way that we do not anticipate having to take the system down anymore!

You may now ask, what does PamFax3 offer? Well, first of all blazing fast fax delivery. In addition we redid the PamFax Portal design to be easier to use. There is also a new login/sign up screen. You can now login with your OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and a bunch of other accounts. In addition many small improvements and features were added. The PamFax BCP was renamed to “My Company” to make the company group faxing capability a bit clearer.

Last but not least, in June/July we will also be adding a new client application of PamFax for Android.

For partners we now have the PamFax API, this allows you to fully embed the PamFax functionality easily and quickly into your application or device. We already have a few project going and plan to announce them soon. If you are interested to join, let us know. The same faxing cost model applies to the API as when using PamFax – however no additional charges are made when using the API.

We are very excited to have PamFax3 and hope you will enjoy our efforts. We’re back now with a very powerful platform and based on it we have many plans and ideas for new stuff. Stay tuned!

At that point you really get hit hard by reality again and that you can’t do anything in our job without internet and power.

After another 2 hours, the electrician found the problem: a new lamp that was just attached the day before in the corridor had some cabling issues that only came out now as the lamp was switched on the whole day and got warm. If we would have not had this lamp on for so long, this problem might have never occurred!

So the guy who attached this lamp will get fired immediately! I will check twice when attaching the next lamp so such a thing could not happen again.

Yes, redecorating the offices can be a fun thing…

And the best: all this without any additional hardware, setup, installation, …

Apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused, we have tried to keep the downtime as limited as technically possible. The server upgrade was done in the lowest traffic time to minimize impact.

Internet with remote control on TV/Media Center/Wii are things we have been working on for years and thus we are proud to say that Ebay and Philips have selected us to provide an Ebay channel on the new sets.

Based on our mceAuction technology we have adapted the Ebay content to work seamlessly on the new Philips systems.We will provide the channel via our Jaast brand.

We will be providing the Ebay channel on all new Philips Net TV enabled devices!

Ebay navigation on the TV is very simple, the same intiutive way of browsing Ebay as with mceAuction on Microsoft Media Center and Jaast on Wii.

The 8000 series are connected via wire compared to the 9000 series/Cinema 21:9 which are connected via WiFi.

Picture of initial Net TV launch at IFA 2008 (note the Ebay logo is missing).

You can download the Philips Net TV – Feature Press Release.

It also comes with a handy administration console, which can be accessed from every client machine. This console can be extended easily with addins by third party software developers. As some TapiRex customers already asked about a Windows Home Server console addin for TapiRex, it was a good point to get started trying this new Windows Server operating system.

So I tried to find it in the MSDN Subscriber downloads, as we have several subscriptions to MSDN Universal, which theoretically includes all Microsoft operating systems and all other software. As I was unable to find a download there, I googled the web and found out that Microsoft decided not to make Windows Home Server available in MSDN Subscriber downloads. Urgh. So we pay lots of money to not be able to get access to a Windows operating system to develop new addons for it. What a decision…

So I just ordered a Windows Home Server license from eBay, which was delivered quickly and did only cost around 90 Euros.

Installation

When installing the Windows Home Server incl. Power Pack 1 (which is based on Windows 2003 Server) on one of our servers in our server rack, it stumbled upon our 3Ware RAID controller, which is installed with 2 x 160GB harddrives as system drives in a mirrored array to speed up the operating system. I was able to load additional drivers for that controller from an USB stick, but when the system rebooted after the first installation step, it has forgotten about the driver.
Googling for this issue, I had to find out that this is a bug in the Windows Home Server installation . As the text-based setup does not have access to a USB stick to reload the drivers, I had to go out to buy an external 3.5″ USB disk drive, as the setup only accepts additional drivers from the A: drive. Do you remember 3.5″ disks? It was not that easy to find a disk to store the driver to get past this installation step. These disks have gone so rare here in the office . Previous installations of Windows 2003 did not have this problem…

But after that, setup was pretty easy. I was able to install all hardware components and to setup the Drive Extender. After setup, you have to install a small client connector software on every client machine that should backup to that Windows Home Server, which was pretty easy as well.

In-day-usage

The good thing is that the backups worked pretty well. Also, some of the available plugins from third-party developers are very useful.

But there also were some problems:

Delays in accessing shared folders: we experienced some delays in accessing shared folders on the server. Every employee in the office has some drives mapped to shared folders on the file server. This includes a personal folder and some general folders for everyone. While browsing in these subfolders on these drives, there was sometimes a lag of several seconds that makes it impossible to work with it fluently. For example, we store our downloads company-wide in a folder on the file-server. But the “save file” dialog in the webbrowser sometimes hung up for up to 20 seconds before it was able to show the folder and save the file. Once the data transfer starts, it’s fast and reliable.

Bug in drive’s size-calculation: When you map shared folders on the Windows Home Server as local drives, Windows XP and Vista are unable to show the correct drive size. After searching the web and asking some experts in Windows Home Server forums, I found out that this a known bug in Windows Home Server and that you can’t do anything about it:

Popups on all client machines: when you have the client connector software installed, all warnings from the Windows Home Server or one of it’s clients is shown on every client machine. So every user gets popup messages like “Computer X does not have virus protection installed”, “Backup on machine Y was not sucessful”, and many more. I was not able to find a way to customize these popups so that there are not shown to our apprentices for example.

So, after nearly 2 weeks in production, I am currently installing Windows 2008 Datacenter on that server machine, as the problems shown above disturbed our daily workflow that much that it was not worth it. We will install Windows Home Server as a VMWare virtual machine instead to do some software development on it. A PamFax addon is also an idea for it. What do you think?

I will report back how this all worked with Windows 2008. Does anyone have a different suggestion for a solid and fast file server operating system + client backup possibilities?

The project has been a bit dormant but this is mainly due to the fact that it is operating perfectly. The backed is extremely scalable and can handle literally millions of simultaneous chat sessions. Btw – the same platform we also use in PamFax for sending Skype chat status notifications.

So, if you’re up for some fun just lookup the Skype user “pam_bot” in your Skype and add her to your contact list. Open a chat window and type “help” (without the quotes). Then you can just type away and PamBot will answer based on what you type.

There is also a website with further details. The site is www.pambot.com.

Note that the download is not required when you just want to experience artificial intelligence in a Skype chat.

The highlights of the update are:

1. Redesigned first page in PamFax application for easier start.
2. Resend fax option added to portal. This is nice as it allows you to resend failed faxes easily.
3. Added more conversion server power.
4. If a document can not be converted to PDF due to issues in the document, there is now a gracious refund process.
5. Fixed a Vista UAC issue when Skype is started by PamFax after installing PamFax.

Besides the above we also did the normal set of minor bug fixing and improvements here and there.

Some screenshots:

Your PamFax application will be auto-updated once Skype have released the new version to the Skype Extras Gallery.

Very soon we will be posting about another cool new function we will be adding. This time it will be about integration of PamFax in Facebook, Salesforce.com and in the Vista SideBar. Stay tuned!

3 Servers are Dell 1950 with Quad Core Intel CPUs with 4GB Ram and 160GB Raid. 2 of them will be added to the PamFax backend so that we expect PamFax to be more stable and faster then. We hope to have them in position in a few days.

The 3rd Dell server will stay here in the office for development and testing of our web applications.

As we run out of storage in the office, we also ordered a new fileserver. It’s a server from ico.de. A Dual Core Intel with 1GB Ram, 2x160GB Hard drives for the system as Raid and then 2TB SATA hard drives for the data.

Yeah; toys for the boys