AT&T, provisioning and what they don’t tell you

So we were recently trying to get our COS or quality of service working on our MPLS network which is provided by AT&T. After dealing with countless people in Tier 1 and 2 I finally spoke with someone in Tier 3 who actually new something. A little background on COS first. You divide all your traffic up into 4 COS levels with COS1 being real time traffic. So you can give 60 percent of your bandwidth to COS2, 20 percent to COS3 and 20 percent to COS4 giving you 60/20/20 and then you decide real time traffic such as 20 percent which sits on top of that. We had numerous problems getting our Avaya phone system to work but as it turns out, AT&T has since fixed this by looking at the packet headers that are assigned by your own equipment. But I digress, so as it turns out by putting terminal server traffic into COS1 with our phone traffic, anything beyond 20 percent is dropped. This caused major headaches as to why terminal services, was so slow for our end users. By moving terminal services traffic on port 3389 to COS2 we were able to eliminate our packets being dropped and everything works great now!

Outlook 2007 Views reset to default

One of our end users asked me about why his Outlook 2007 would not keep the changes he made to his views and it kept turning on the reading pane. I googled it and I found that clicking Start > Run > and key in "outlook /cleanviews" and logging out of Outlook and back in cleaned up his corrupt views which caused Outlook to keep defaulting to the original. Now any changes he makes are saved!

Windows Server Events 1030 and 1058

I have been getting the following Events 1030 and 1058 constantly every 30 minutes on our Windows 2003 Server SP1 domain controller after a reboot. I researched the problem and all the permissions and rights to files are correct so I searched and found the following link at Microsoft that describes running the dfsutil /purgemupcache to fix the problem.

Now it's fixed until I reboot again!