I’ve been fiddling with Exchange ActiveSync lately, and I’m actually pretty impressed with it– it’s a neat feature. If you’re not familiar with it, it basically sends periodic notifications of new mail to your Windows Mobile device; when the device receives the AUTD message, it wakes up and pulls new messages from your Exchange server. This gives you more-or-less continuous access to the contents of your mailbox.
Category Archives: General Stuff
Controlling Always-Up-To-Date timing
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Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98 Threat Mitigation Guide released
At long last, Microsoft’s released a document that describes what you can do to mitigate threats to your network from Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 machines: the Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98 Threat Mitigation Guide.
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Another Exchange SURBL filter
I just got a note from Martijn Jongen mentioning that he has a SURBL filter for Exchange.
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New IMF hotfix for 15-character names
This is a pretty rare problem, but still: if you’re running the Exchange IMF on a machine with a 15-character NetBIOS name, the IMF won’t actually filter the inbound messages. This is kind of a silly bug.
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Preset the language for OMA users
Imagine that you have a bunch of OMA users who don’t use English as their native language. Wouldn’t it be nice to set the default OMA language that they see when they log on, without making them learn enough English to navigate OMA’s interface and set it themselves?
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Configuring per-server IMF gateway settings
I hate it when this happens! I just sent off a Troubleshooter column question for the December issue on how to create separate settings on separate IMF servers. My answer involved multiple forests and was fairly ugly. I then decided to relax and do a little blog surfing. Lo and behold, It turns out that (courtesy of Evan’s blog) there’s a much more elegant solution to this problem.
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What’s in a SID?
Larry Osterman has a terrific post up today on the guts of Windows security identifiers, or SIDs. A small taste:
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Order in the port: Port Reporter Parser released
Port Reporter is a nifty tool from Microsoft that you can use to log TCP and UDP activity on Windows machines; it logs port activity on ports that you specify to a text file. It’s extremely useful for monitoring traffic from specified machines or services, and it has a variety of useful features that I won’t enumerate– go download it already.
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VERITAS buys KVS
Well, this is interesting: VERITAS buys KVS for $225 million in cash. Considering VERITAS’ failure to turn their own archiving product for Windows into a real competitor for KVS, this is an interesting move.
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E-mail free Fridays
Jeremy Burton has a good idea: declare Friday as an “email-free day” in his department. This story, which I first saw in the WSJ, has grown legs as people debate whether this is a good idea or not. I think the stimulus that led to Burton’s edict is something we can all identify with: he wondered how much time his folks were wasting on email.
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Barracuda Spam Firewall: first look
I’ve been testing the Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall 300 for the last couple of weeks. So far, I’m very pleased with it; it has done an effective job of filtering spam and virus messages. The best thing is that it incorporates rate control along with other more conventional filtering (including Bayesian and header analysis); this saved me from a huge comment-spam attack last week (see the big blue spike on the “daily mail statistics” graph in the picture below). The unit was very easy to set up and install, and it has worked without interruption since I installed it.
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Commercial support for SURBL in Exchange
So, last week I wrote a column about SURBL. This week’s column, which went out today, is about the regexfilter, a free filter that– among its many other tricks– happens to support SURBL. No sooner did it go out than I got two press releases from Jeff Chan of SURBL.org.
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Too many bees
I don’t really have anything more to add to this Reuters story (except that we’ve been reading Beekeepers</a to the boys…):
An estimated 120,000 bees held residents of the apartment building and nearby homes hostage in Santa Ana, California after the children pelted their 500 pound (227 kg) hive with rocks on Thursday, Santa Ana Fire Captain Steve Horner said.
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Free SPF filter
I just finished a lengthy article on Microsoft’s Sender ID specification; it should hit print in November. One of the points I had to address was the sad fact that Exchange itself currently doesn’t support either SPF or Sender ID. This makes it hard to aggressively advocate that people deploy a Microsoft standard that isn’t currently supported by their own products.
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Passwords vs passphrases, redux
So, Robert Hensing started it off by saying something simple: “you should NOT be using passwords of any kind” on your Windows network. Instead, he recommends that you use passphrases. Good advice… or is it?
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