We use the out-of-the-box CTIOS as our agent desktop for testing. Our testers attempt to sign in as agents, and what do we see? Well it’s not what you hope for. Here is the error:

Error 10158: An attempt has been made to log in to a device that has unsupported IP addressing mode configured on UCM. Supported IP addressing mode for Agent’s Device is IPv4.

Well shoot — the error is pretty clear the issue is on CUCM. First, we are not using IPv6 in our enterprise so that’s not the issue. I check the IP Phone configuration in CUCM and verify there is no IPv6 settings enabled, nothing found.

I check the Enterprise Parameters for IPv6 on CUCM, it too has IPv6 set to False.

Well the error seems fixable and we’re not talking a back-out of the upgrades yet (albeit one of my worse fears). I ask Google — no real hits there. Next, we leverage that Cisco support contract and call our friends at Cisco TAC and see if they have seen this. I open the case online and call in to bump the severity. Yes TAC has seen this, once. Fixed within 5 minutes of getting an engineer. The engineer said she had only seen this one other time and that other time took several hours to figure out (I don’t feel so bad now).

So what’s the fix? Check your Common Device Configuration (CDC) profile settings in CUCM. You’ll spot it right away. Change the IP Addressing Mode from “IPv4 and IPv6″ to “IPv4 Only”. Restart your agents phones and you’re back in business!

Testing went fine once we got the agents logged on. Considering my last TAC call was almost 7 hours long into the early morning hours, I was so happy to be home in time to pick-up some take-out for the family for dinner.

To the Cisco customer that fought this initially for hours, I salute you. I have been in that boat too and I thank you.

This morning started off with a trouble report that outbound calls to our external conference bridge number were resulting in a “fast busy” after 2-3 minutes of being on a call. Of course there also happened to be a corporate wide “all managers” meeting this morning that was using the bridging service which increased the urgency greatly. Upon testing, it was easily reproducible. Sure enough, the call would go “fast busy” at about 2 minutes 53 seconds.

Now your first course of action is to always blame a vendor. In this case, we had the options. a) The telco carrier, b) the conference service provider or c) Cisco. There is no wrong answer here. I opted for the conference provider mostly because: 1) beating up on the telco is a routine occurrence in network engineering and 2) I had a hunch I would be talking to Cisco TAC about this issue anyway, so they would get their turn.  Given the options. I decided to keep it interesting and go with option b.

Now blaming the vendor not only buys you some time to troubleshoot further internally, but you have something you can say you have done when the calls come in for a status report on the outage — which is usually about 30 seconds before you are actually made aware of the initial problem.

The first thing I noticed right away was that when we reproduced the issue, no call timer was showing up on the IP Phone display after the conferencing service answered the phone. This told me that the voice signaling platform was not aware the call was even connected. Our first clue.

At this point, I decided to see if the problem would happen if I sent these calls to another PSTN trunkgroup on another Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) gateway. I made the route pattern configuration changes in Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) and made a test call, worked like it should. Well dang, this likely exonerated the conference bridge service provider. Next I redirected all the remaining call types by modifying the route patterns away from the impacted gateway to alternate gateways and this restored service for the users.

At this point, I created a test route pattern for a specific number (co-workers cell phone) in CUCM so that I could continue to troubleshoot root cause of this problem without the end-users suffering. Next it was off to the gateways to see what the carrier and the gateway were telling each other. Cue the Command Line Interface (CLI) command: debug isdn q931. Best. TDM. Debug. Ever.

Once I enabled the debug I saw the problem right away (the blog post title gives you a clue). Let’s take a closer look.

Here were the debugs of a failed call:
Aug 25 09:07:05.863 CDT: ISDN Se0/2/0:23 Q931: RX <- CALL_PROC pd = 8 callref = 0x800B
Channel ID i = 0xA98397
Exclusive, Channel 23
Aug 25 09:07:08.707 CDT: ISDN Se0/2/0:23 Q931: RX <- ALERTING pd = 8 callref = 0x800B
Progress Ind i = 0x8488 - In-band info or appropriate now available
Aug 25 09:07:10.067 CDT: ISDN Se0/2/0:23 Q931: RX <- CONNECT pd = 8 callref = 0x800B
Aug 25 09:10:03.946 CDT: ISDN Se0/2/0:23 Q931: TX -> DISCONNECT pd = 8 callref = 0x000B
Cause i = 0x8AE6 - Recovery on timer expiry
Aug 25 09:10:03.970 CDT: ISDN Se0/2/0:23 Q931: RX <- RELEASE pd = 8 callref = 0x800B
Aug 25 09:10:03.994 CDT: ISDN Se0/2/0:23 Q931: TX -> RELEASE_COMP pd = 8 callref = 0x000B

That sucks. Clearly “we” are transmitting the DISCONNECT message, but why (other then some timer expired). This means the telco carrier is  likely innocent too.

Lets compare the failed debugs to the debugs of a good call:
Aug 25 08:57:39.591 CDT: ISDN Se0/3/1:23 Q931: RX <- CALL_PROC pd = 8 callref = 0xCFDD
Channel ID i = 0xA98397
Exclusive, Channel 23
Aug 25 08:57:41.515 CDT: ISDN Se0/3/1:23 Q931: RX <- ALERTING pd = 8 callref = 0xCFDD
Progress Ind i = 0x8488 - In-band info or appropriate now available
Aug 25 08:57:41.527 CDT: ISDN Se0/3/1:23 Q931: RX <- CONNECT pd = 8 callref = 0xCFDD
Aug 25 08:57:41.531 CDT: ISDN Se0/3/1:23 Q931: TX -> CONNECT_ACK pd = 8 callref = 0x4FDD
Aug 25 08:57:43.487 CDT: ISDN Se0/3/1:23 Q931: TX -> CONNECT pd = 8 callref = 0x807C
Display i = 'Voicemail'
Aug 25 08:57:43.523 CDT: ISDN Se0/3/1:23 Q931: RX <- CONNECT_ACK pd = 8 callref = 0x007C
Aug 25 08:57:44.703 CDT: ISDN Se0/3/0:23 Q931: RX <- CONNECT pd = 8 callref = 0xD072
Progress Ind i = 0x8482 - Destination address is non-ISDN
Aug 25 08:57:44.707 CDT: ISDN Se0/3/0:23 Q931: TX -> CONNECT_ACK pd = 8 callref = 0x5072

Can you spot the missing messages? Yep a missing CONNECT_ACK message (plus some additional subsequent messages). Why was the CONNECT_ACK missing? These gateways are MGCP controlled which means that CUCM controls most of the key configuration information and it is pushed to the MGCP gateway upon registration. Maybe MGCP was messed up. With calls redirected it seemed like an easy thing to try. So we “reset” the gateway. No change.

Well at this point it is time to admit defeat and collect relevant information including CUCM traces and phone-a-friend at Cisco TAC (Technical Assistance Center). I typed up my Service Request (SR) online and called TAC‘s toll-free number to bump it to a Severity 2 (Network Degraded). Cisco doesn’t allow you to create anything other than a Severity 3 service request online. The contact center agent gladly changed the priority for me and routed me to an engineer. I gave the engineer a high level overview and he said, let me do some quick research; I’ve seen this before and I think it’s a bug. After a few minutes he came back and asked if we could try something. ”First, place an inbound call to the MGCP gateway.” I did; worked fine. He said, “Now try your outbound call again.” Well hot dang, it worked. The CONNECT_ACK was sent and the call worked. He indicated this confirmed the bug.

The defect is known as BugID CSCto98848 (Cisco Login Required) within Cisco’s DDTS (Distributed Defect Tracking System). It does have a workaround which is good, however, it does require a CUCM patch to fully resolve it. We restored normal call routing for now using the workaround, but if MGCP registers or CCM restarts we will hit the bug again.

How did we hit this bug? Well the night before, we had performed maintenance on half of our CUCM servers where we took them out of service to add 2 GB of additional RAM. This was done in preparation for some upgrades we are doing later in the year. Nothing had changed configuration wise, but we did “mess” with the system the night before.

A few lessons learned here:

1. Notice the small things. I happened to notice right away that the timer was not displaying on the IP Phone. This was a significant first clue what was going on and told us where to focus our next troubleshooting efforts.
2. Know your gateway debugs. debug isdn q931 is a great Cisco IOS TDM debugging command. You don’t always need to memorize the sequence of the messages, but you can at least compare them to a known good debug to figure out the differences.
3. Know alternate call routing options. Once we knew we could route calls around the problem, we took action to do so. Understanding your dialing plan and knowing how to redirect calls quickly if needed could save you some valuable network availability minutes.
4. Know what has changed. We knew we did maintenance the night before. We didn’t make any configuration changes, but we did reboot three nodes in our seven node CUCM cluster. It seemed insignificant, but I told the TAC engineer that detail up front and he later thanked me for alerting him to these details. He indicated it helped him to zero in on the specific bug.

Hopefully this was a helpful post not only for how we approached this strange bug, but in some helpful things to think about when troubleshooting a voice issue. I really have enjoyed adding the voice components to my traditional data network engineering background. Voice issues are certainly different, however, a lot of the same troubleshooting steps can be applied in both. Know your systems, always have a plan B, and don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. Huh, all items that can apply to both aviation as well as network engineering.

According to the Twitter post the following browsers are supported at this time: iPhone/iPod Touch, Android 2.0+ & Blackberry Bold. The mobile URL is: m.liveatc.net

Testing with my BlackBerry Bold 9700 performed well! The interface is very thin/clean and you can search and browse the same feeds that are already available on the site. With single click you can start streaming any selected feed.

Thanks to this new mobile browser support, I can now delete my dozens of LiveATC.net bookmarks that I had created manually for my favorite ATC feeds.

If you have a supported phone, give it a try. I would love to hear your experience.

I have a BlackBerry Bold 9700 running BlackBerry OS v5.0 with T-Mobile so my instructions will be specific for T-Mobile users, however, I’m sure it will work with other carriers and newer BlackBerry OS releases as well, however, the procedure might need to be tweaked slightly. Let me know if you find something that differs on your model.

LiveATC.net has now added mobile support for some browsers. For details check here. You can use this as an alternative to creating several standalone bookmarks as outline below.

1. Check out available airport feeds over at LiveATC.net and make note of the feeds’ airport identifier (example: KOJC. Sometimes an airport has multiple feeds, ie: KBOS_TWR)
2. Open the BlackBerry Browser Application on your phone
3. Open the Bookmarks Window and Select Add Bookmark
4. Use this firewall formatted URL of the feed: http://d.liveatc.net/<airport-identifier> (example: http://d.liveatc.net/kojc)
   (BlackBerry Storm: Use http://d.liveatc.net/<airport-identifier>.m3u — Thanks Maria!)
5. Give your bookmark a name. Something like KOJC Live ATC Stream
6. (T-Mobile Specific for BB OS 4.5) You need to specify the ‘t-zones‘ or ‘Hotspot Browser‘ in the bookmark configuration. In BB OS5.0 on T-Mobile, you no longer need to specify the t-zones browser. I’ve tested with both the Internet Browser and the Web2Go browser and both work fine.
7. Browse to the bookmark and when prompted, select Open, and after some buffering, you’ll begin hearing the audio from the feed.

You can duplicate this procedure and create several ATC bookmarks in a sub-folder on your BlackBerry to have them pre-programmed and ready to go.

I have noticed that when you open your bookmark the Media Player will “buffer” for about 2 minutes. I found an overview of why this is happening here. Basically since LiveATC uses so little bandwidth, it takes almost 2 minutes before it fills to the buffer. Hopefully they work around this when they release their official BlackBerry application which is in the works.

Let me know how this works for you! I welcome your comments/suggestions/questions below.

Note: I’m not affiliated in anyway with LiveATC.net other then donating my own hardware/bandwidth/time for an airport feed; however, if you enjoy LiveATC.net, I encurrage you to leave a donation (the link is right on the front page). The guys that maintain the site do so as a hobby; however, it does cost real money to host/maintain the site.

Updated 05-31-2009: Added minor tweak for BlackBerry Storm based on user feedback.
Updated 06-18-2010: Added information for “Buffering Delay” and my current hardware information.

Read all the details after the jump…

At first I was a little disappointed in the release date estimates, but in taking one look at the features being planned, you can see why it has been a while since a major update.

“Logbook Pro vNext [the official version number is not yet known] will support the single user from student through airline pilot as well as the new multi-user enterprise features including group and user management, role based security and other enterprise features.”

The next version of Logbook Pro will also offer a new user-interface as well as several Web 2.0 enhancements allowing for updates from a multitude of systems all with a similar interface. Personally, I’m hoping for a BlackBerry application, but I’d settle for a BlackBerry bookmark application to a mobile enhanced web interface. Need a mobile beta tester guys?

Some of you may remember I did knock the Logbook Pro application about a year and a half ago in this post, where I noted my installation problems under Vista. I do understand that they are a small development shop, however, if they manage to pull off everything they are claiming in this next release, we are going to have one heck of a logbook application on our hands! I can’t wait to see the finished product — just don’t take too long.

My wife and I don’t really watch too much TV anyway but if I was going to ditch my cable, it was going to not be without a few caveats.

Read all about our new TV setup after the jump…

Since “a la carte cable” is not going to happen anytime soon, I was going to have consider other options. However, if I was going to ditch the cable TV, there were a few requirements. My wife was amazingly patient as I threw our whole A/V setup into a tizzy and came up with the new design.

First of all my requirements:
HDTV — The new solution had to support HDTV. We had the HDTV add-on package with our Comcast cable, but this was pretty much the primary (XX.1) local HD “Over the Air” (OTA) channels and a few other HD cable networks. We pretty much always watched the 10 or so HD channels with the cable box since HD televisions make standard definition TV look really bad.

DVR — I was late to jump on this bandwagon, but as my friends and co-workers warned me, once you got it, you cannot live without it. If I was going to ditch the cable box, I had to have a solution that supported recording. I also want need to record one channel while watching another. Our DVR recording lineup pretty much consists of shows that air on the broadcast networks — making OTA a viable option.

Remote Control Support — I’m not joking. Whatever solution I chose, I did not want to have to “rig” something just to change the channel. The small “junky” remote controls do not count — I wanted a “real” remote control with a skip button, and more than four keys. (Yes, Apple, your junky remote controls do not meet this requirement)

Monthly Recurring Expense — My goal of the new solution was to totally eliminate, if possible, the monthly recurring charges we were seeing with the cable; or at least reduce them. I knew I was going to have to spend a little bit of money up front, but my payback goal was 4-6 months.

My options:

Microsoft Media Center — We got a new computer back in February 2007 with Microsoft Vista Home Premium. This version of Vista includes Windows Media Center. Up until now, I had never used it, but I had launched it a few times and the interface looked pretty well done. If I went this route, I would need a tuner card of some sort and a remote control. The DVR function is built in to Media Center.

Computer with a Media Extender — Since I liked the Media Center interface I considered an Extender. It would keep the TV area clean and neat, but there was one small problem. That is until the past couple of weeks, the only Media Extender that supported Vista Media Center was the Xbox 360. I don’t want a game console and it seems like a waste to spend that money only to obtain the extender functionality. My timing for this project was impeccable as the Linksys DMA 2100 and 2200 had been announced and were due out in late November, but there were some last minute delays that made this box at least a month out. The D-Link DSM-750 had already been released, but it too was $300 and I still needed a tuner for my PC if I went that route.

TiVo — The ‘TiVo Series3 HD’ and new ‘TiVo HD DVR’ (marketing departments never cease to amaze me in the technology industry) had pretty good reviews, however, my goal was to eliminate the recurring monthly cost; TiVo charges for monthly guide data and their online services.

My New Design:

Vista Media Center — This provided the HD Support, DVR and eliminated the monthly recurring cost. I did purchase the Media Center keyboard and remote control which worked great!  The Microsoft Media Center remote control and Keyboard is pretty nice and they worked natively (no need for drivers) with Vista. The video card (Radeon X1300) already had a DVI output so this was a good fit. The skip feature is about ten times more responsive vs. my Comcast DVR.

TV Tuner — Our DVR line-up pretty much includes shows from the broadcast networks, so an OTA ATSC tuner would be perfect. A quick check of AntennaWeb reviled that all but one independent network was broadcasting a digital signal here in Kansas City. I opted for an ATSC tuner since I really don’t care to watch the analog channels; they will be turned off in 2009 anyway. The first tuner I used to test the Vista Media Center TV functionality was an ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI (about $130). It worked well, but I quickly realized that not having two tuners was an issue. We’d be watching one show when the DVR needed to take control and would flip the channel. The additional cables going into the back of the PC also was cluttering up the living room. After checking many sites, I settled on a network attached dual ATSC tuner (SiliconDust HDHomeRun). It was a little bit more expensive than a single tuner (but less than two PCI tuners), but I loved the fact that I could tuck it away in another room with an antenna hooked up and it would stream the signal down to the Vista Media Center over the home network. Dual tuner functionality without adding wire clutter — perfect!

Antenna — I originally started with an old set of rabbit ears, however, the dual tuner introduced the need for a splitter for the second tuner which took the signal level too low for an unamplified antenna. After doing some research, I settled on a Terk TV5 Amplified TV Antenna and it worked great. I set it upstairs in the office on top of a bookshelf next to the HDHomeRun box.

Closing Comments:

After running with this setup for about 6 weeks now, I’ve made a few observations. First, having the computer next to the TV is not ideal, but the functionality does work pretty well. We did run into times where we wanted to just use the computer for a quick minute, but had to turn on the TV to see the screen — not cool. We quickly moved the LCD monitor down with the computer and setup “Hotkey” activated monitor profiles (Alt-1: LCD, Alt-2: TV, Alt-3 LCD+TV) using the ATI Catalyst Control Center application. Second, a Media Center Extender would probably be the cleanest setup if you only have one home PC; however, it can be done with just the PC just fine. Having a network attached tuner simplified the cabling into the PC and is a much cleaner looking install. Third, spend some time getting your LCD resolution setup correctly on your HDTV and play with your graphics card advanced controls to fine tune the picture. I had a horrible interlacing issue on the stations broadcasting in 1080i. This issue was resolved by activating, what ATI calls, the “Automatic Deinterlacing” feature — ah, much better. Third, the Media Center DVR functionality is great. Add a Media Center remote control/keyboard and you have a great DVR alternative to the, in my opinion, crappy, Comcast DVR service. Forth, there is a lot of legal online content (eg: iTunes), however, if you are a big sports fan, you will probably be disappointed with just OTA. Sports are probably the farthest behind getting themselves positioned into new waves of distribution. Vista Media Center has some pretty nice Internet TV shows which use your Broadband connection to stream content; however, much of it is still in SD.

Cost Breakdown:

SiliconDust HDHomeRun: $160
Media Center USB Remote Control and Keyboard: $90
Amplified TV Antenna: $50
Total: $300 (Payback at $90/Month with Comcast: ~3.5 Months)

Mission Accomplished…

Read all the details after the jump.

So why was I attracted to the BlackBerry Curve? It has a faster processor, has Wi-Fi/UMA (the ability to make calls over Wi-Fi), and a full QWERTY keyboard.

What’s New? (Stuff I care about)

1. The BlackBerry Curve has the new navigation ball that was introduced in the BlackBerry Perl and it replaces the “click wheel” on the side. I was hesitant at first, but after adjusting the ball sensitivity to my liking (90% sensitivity), I’ve gotten used to it and I like it much better than the “click wheel” I had on the 7100t.
2. Wi-Fi Support — the BlackBerrry Curve has integrated Wi-Fi, but don’t expect it to drastically improve your web browsing speed. It is maybe a little bit faster, but it is hard for me to tell the different between EDGE and Wi-Fi if in a good coverage area. No issues getting the Wi-Fi setup at home using WPA security, however, we’ve had lots of problems with our Enterprise Wi-Fi at work which uses much more robust type of security (802.1X – PEAP). We have been working this issue with both RIM and Cisco the past few days and the support cases on pending on both sides. RIM did acknowledge to us on a phone call that their are “known issues” with the Wi-Fi and Over The Air (OTA) software “pushes.” I’m guessing these will be resolved with a patch or the upcoming BlackBerry OS version 4.3. You should have no issues with the 8320 on on your home Wi-Fi network or down at the local coffee shop.
   Update 12-2007: In working with RIM, we have discovered the root cause of the 802.1X PEAP authentication problem I mention above. See my post over at BlackBerryForums for more information.
3. UMA Support — the T-Mobile version of the 8320 has UMA support which is the ability to make phone calls and receive “push email” via a Wi-Fi connection. Even if you don’t subscribe to the T-Mobile “Hotspot@Home” service, the device will route your calls over Wi-Fi if a connection is available. You can override the network preference if you don’t want your device to utilize the Wi-Fi for voice/data which is a nice option. I have not whipped out my packet sniffer yet to see if this data is encrypted going to T-Mobile/RIM, but given it uses UDP ports 500 and 4500, I suspect they are doing some sort of tunneling for security; if you happen to be using an unencrypted WLAN. Using UMA does allow your BlackBerry to get email and access other data services while on the phone — pretty cool!
4. Multi-Media support — the BlackBerry Curve has music, video, and picture support. The 8320 has a camera with flash, but don’t go replace your digital camera just yet. Personally, I really don’t care for a camera on a cell phone and would rather give-up the camera if I could get integrated GPS support like the BlackBerry 8820. Currently, only AT&T has released the 8820 so I’m happy with the trade off — plus I do not like the 8800 series keyboard.

Other Impressions:

• My 7100t only had GPRS data service and even though EDGE is no 3G or EVDO Rev A (Verizon/Sprint), it does boast a noticeable improvement in download time. Web sites that are optimized for mobile browsing work great and are speedy to download, however, hit a site that is not optimized and you’ll be waiting a while for it to render — even on Wi-Fi.
• Why does it seem there are not very many pilot or aviation applications for the BlackBerry OS? With all the corporate pilots out there you would like someone would be developing some killer aviation apps for BlackBerry. If you know of any cool ones, send them my way, but my searching has not turned up much of anything worth loading on my device.
• Update 10/11/2007: Reception: I have used this phone for a couple of weeks now and have been pretty happy with the reception and sound quality. The volume seems to be much louder than my 7100t, however, like the 7100t it does have a “sweet spot” to get max audio output. I had a co-worker that noticed a “pop” or “click” sound when making a calls on his 8320 on UMA. I have not had this issue, but I pretty much keep my Wi-Fi off unless I need to use it.

Why T-Mobile?

1. I have had nothing but great customer service from T-Mobile. Sure, I’ve had my share of issues, but they always seem to get things fixed and in almost 8 years of service, I’ve only had to call a customer care a handful of times.
2. GSM — the sound quality on GSM is much better than TDMA or CDMA. I can tell when someone calls me from a Verizon or Sprint cell phone, both of which use CDMA. I could go into a million reasons why I like GSM, but I’m sold.
3. T-Mobile RIM BlackBerry support is pretty good. If Customer Care does not know the answer, they are happy to hand you off to RIM’s support team who can usually help you out.

There you have it, my brief, and somewhat random review of my new BlackBerry Curve 8320.

After discovering the price drop at Costco, I fired off an email to the BOL crew, and it turns out they picked it up on today’s episode (see show notes for episode 487). Molly, Tom and Veronica put on a great tech news podcast and I would encourage you to check it out. I listen to it everyday on my drive to work.

If you are interested in the audio of them discussing my email, my 30 seconds of “fame” starts at 24:17 into Episode 487. Or you can download the clip here. BOL Clip of Episode 487

Read all about my initial Windows Vista experience after the jump.

First I must say that it has been 9 years since my last computer purchase. I previously had a Dell XPS R400 — Pentium II 400 MHz 384 MB RAM — that was as maxed out as I could get it. At well over $4000 9 years ago I decided to go less aggressive this time around. Last Friday my Dell XPS 410 arrived — Duo Core 2.4 GHz 2 GB RAM — with Windows Vista. I had no choice on choosing Vista or not, but after hearing people talk about the betas for the last year I gave it a go.

A couple of notes about the computer from Dell: Thank you Dell for allowing me to order a computer system without much pre-installed software. This is the first computer I have owned/supported that I have not formatted and re-installed the OS right out of the box because there was so much other junk loaded. I still had to uninstall some of Dell’s “support” software but the uninstall process was painless. I think Dell is doing more and more to stay competitive in the market and a “no pre-installed software” feature helps a lot!

On to Vista:
Out of the box I was pretty impressed with the Aero interface. Aero is the high performance graphics card, RAM sucking, very “MACish” looking interface that all-in-all really looks pretty nice when you get over its resource sucking requirements. After hearing that lots of people had turned it off in the beta tests, I decided to leave it on after using it for a few hours.

One thing you will notice right away is all the alerts that frequently pop-up. This feature is called User Account Control (UAC). This feature restricts the permissions that applications run at and requires “admin” approval before they launch. Let me put it this way: have you seen the MAC commercial called Security with the security officer that is intercepting the PC/MAC communication? Vista is a lot like that out of the box. I think it is a good step for Security, but if you have not seen the video check it out at http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

I would encourage you to enable the DEP which was on for only Windows Programs/Services on my machine. If you have the hardware that supports it I would enable it for all applications as it helps protect you from buffer overflows or overruns which is a frequently used technique to get viruses and other junk on your computer. Make sure you understand the implications first, but if you can, I’d recommend you enable it. To learn more, check out the Security Now! Podcast episode number 78 titled DEP in Depth.

Software Troubles:
I did have some problems getting some older software installed from my old XP machine, but some things just took a little extra effort that any power user could overcome. Office 2003 even gave me a few fits if the CD was not in the drive when it needed to install something. I was most disappointed that iTunes was not formally supported for Vista. Did Apple not test with the very public betas that were released? I think 1 month after the public launch and 3 months after the release to manufactures (RTM) they would have had more than enough time to get their software ready to go. Moving iTunes and my music was the biggest headache and took me 2+ hours. iTunes v7.0.2.16 will work under Vista, but it will take a few trips to the Apple support site, a special file permissions tool from Apple and some searching on Google. Before you even start, make an extra copy of your iTunes folder! If I was not already so locked into my iPod/iTunes I might give the Zune a shot based on this experience alone! Apple you really disappointed me here!

The only other problem I had was issues installing my pilot logbook software called Logbook Pro. It is not formally supported under Vista but after trying the install a few different ways I did get it to load. I hope they have a formal Vista version soon, but their XP release was very stable! It seems to work pretty well in Vista with only the install process giving me fits initially.

Overall:
I like the changes that Microsoft has made. I would not upgrade an old computer, but I think it works on a new system purchase just fine. The OS has been very stable and outside of software problems that exist only because there is not formal Vista version available I have been pretty impressed. I like the enhancements and UI changes that Microsoft made and the software stuff will work itself out as Vista gets a larger install base. Overall I give it 3 out of 4 stars for the OS itself.