Category Archives: General Stuff

I recently posted about LANL’s email troubles, and that inspired me to write a column about the same topic. Of course, not all of us have classified data actually on our servers.

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Wow. 400+ pages of extremely detailed information about Exchange internals. Microsoft says that this guide is “not for beginning administrators”, which means they might as well be posting a big red “READ ME FIRST” on the cover. Most folks don’t like to think of themselves as beginners. Ever wonder which ESM operations use MAPI and which use DAV? Want to know how ESM decides to use DNS or WINS to find the server you want to manage? Curious about exactly what’s in the link state table? This guide will tell you all that, and a bunch more besides. Highly recommended. Here’s a taste:

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Man, am I glad to see this: an official statement on MS’ support position for VERITAS Storage Foundation. The bottom line is very simple:

To be very clear: Microsoft will provide support for Microsoft Exchange issues if you run Exchange on a VERITAS Storage Foundation platform. However, Microsoft will only troubleshoot and attempt to resolve Exchange-specific issues up to the point that the source of the problem can be reasonably attributed to an issue or incompatibility with VERITAS software. This same principle also applies to other third party products.

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Thanks to fellow MVP Glen Scales, it’s now trivial to create an RSS feed from a public folder. This is very, very cool. Why? Well, for starters, we keep a public folder of security bulletins and alerts from various sources– presto! it’s an RSS feed. Many of my cow orkers who don’t pay attention to public folders nonetheless will read anything that shows up in their aggregator.

No, not that kind of NAP: in this case, Network Access Protection (NAP) Is Microsoft’s name for the network quarantine feature they’re shipping in Windows Server 2003 R2. The NAP white paper makes for an interesting read, but the NAP FAQ might be a better place to start. In brief, NAP works by allowing administrators to set policies (like “system must have version X of antivirus product Y”) or (“system must have patches A, B, and C from Windows Update”).

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Microsoft’s released a white paper on how to make Entourage work with Exchange. That’s good. Unfortunately, some of the guidance in the troubleshooting section is frustratingly generic. For example, check this note: “In an Active Directory or network infrastructure that is heavily secured, Entourage 2004 Exchange clients can experience difficulty in locating the Active Directory global access server and authenticating the user account. Environments where the servers are locked down and the required ports are closed will experience these problems, and Entourage auto-configure might not work.” So, it might not work, but you’re not going to tell me why it might not work, nor what to do about it.

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This is really cool: a new web-based engine for tracking product bugs and feedback for Microsoft products. It will eventually replace BetaPlace (and not a moment too soon IMHO). You and I can now report bugs, not to mention being able to find existing bugs and “vote” for them to raise their priority/visibility. This doesn’t have any direct impact on Exchange, yet, but it’s safe to bet that when Exchange Edge Services hits beta that this will be the feedback mechanism for it.

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Over at the real Exchange blog, Neil posted a note about a cool web-based tool for reviewing messages archived by the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter. Written by Daryl Maunder, the tool is simple to install (create a new IIS virtual directory on your Exchange server, copy the tool files to it, and voila!) and works well. In the comments to that post, the tireless KC Lemson noted another filter, this one a C# tool written by James Webster of the Exchange team. Both work well; I currently prefer Webster’s tool because it shows both the message and the contents of the P2 recipient data, using a sort of preview pane arrangement; I also like the fact that it’s open-source. Maunder’s web-based tool is cool too because you can access it from other machines on your LAN (or via VPN). Either tool is an improvement over the minimal functionality the IMF itself provides for reviewing archived messages– try them both and see which you prefer. (Note to both authors: please, please implement a way to select multiple messages for action– that would be a big help.)

This week’s column was on the very cool OWAAdmin tool. I neglected to mention that Tosh Meston, one of the developers on the OWA team, mentioned it in his blog– sorry, Tosh.

This tool, which you can install on any Microsoft IIS server that runs version 1.1 of the Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP.NET, lets you remotely administer your OWA servers from anywhere in the organization. Although OWA offers quite a few features, the process of controlling OWA servers has always been a hassle because it depends on the creation of registry keys or values. Every Windows administrator knows how to do that, I know; the problem arises when you want to make configuration changes to multiple machines. Doing so manually is a bother and is even harder when you factor in common security settings that restrict or prevent remote registry access. You can always create your own Administrative Template file and attach it to a Group Policy Object (GPO), but only if you have the proper permissions in Active Directory (AD). Exchange administrators are often dependent on some other person or group to make directory changes.

You might consider this an error from the book, but it’s really more of an omission: I never mentioned that you can use PFDAVAdmin to view, modify, and set public folder permissions, including fixing the “invalid windows handle ID” error that we all know and love. The MS Exchange Blog has a good overview piece, and I made PFDAVAdmin the topic of this week’s UPDATE column,