Category Archives: General Stuff

At the 2002 MEC, John and I were both presenting multiple sessions, and we had a little friendly competition to see who did better. (I honestly don’t remember the results; I just remember how psyched he was at successfully evading the wrath of the demo gods). This year, he has a crushing four sessions, all deeply technical (BPR310 is “Office Developer: Programming XML Solutions”, BPR311 is “Office Developer: Programming Word XML Solutions”, BPRC14 is “Building High Performance InfoPath Solutions”, while I have but one (MSG381,”Designing a High Availability Exchange 2003 Solution”) , so I have somewhat of an advantage. Both of us have some hard work to do to catch the top guns from last year’s TechEd, though.

This sounds cool: a get-together for developers at the San Diego Automotive Museum. The big draw: remote-control racing, with trophies. I won’t be there, since it’s before I arrive, but I definitely think John should go.

Ed’s at it again. Rather than waste my time with a long rebuttal, let me just say this: I generally prefer to spend my time explaining technical things that help people understand Exchange better rather than pointing out shortcomings in competing products. I could go on at length about what’s wrong with Notes and Domino, but why bother? So, it bothers me when Ed takes an explanatory technical article and twists it around in an attempt to make his competitive point, but hey, he’s preaching to a choir of Notes admins, so I shouldn’t be surprised.
Well, OK, just one rebuttal point: since the column was on geoclustering, I didn’t mention the many software replication products [e.g. DoubleTake] that are being used to provide geographically distributed DR without geoclustering; I also didn’t mention ballpark hot dogs, ‘57 Chevrolet Bel Air coupes, or lots of other things that don’t relate to geoclustering. Ed’s guilty of claiming that there’s no other way to solve the problem, which isn’t what I said. These replication products have their own limitations, as does Domino replication, but they’re not germane to a column on geoclustering, so I didn’t mention them.
Update: edited to fix a typo and to turn comments back on. Ecto sometimes randomly changes the “allow comments” and “format line breaks” flags between posts, and I don’t always catch it.

I’ve been using Office 2004 for Mac OS X for the last six months or so. It’s awesome. Don’t take my word for it; go get the 30-day “test drive” version and see for yourself.

It’s fun to see people asking for help cracking Yahoo passwords, but enough’s enough. I’ve closed comments on that article. (Side note: I seemed to get more than my fair share of people with Indian names asking for cracking services… odd.)

I’m starting a topic for Entourage 2004 troubleshooting issues and FAQs, since I’m getting several dozen hits a day from Google on “Entourage 2004” and “Entourage 2004 Exchange”. First, remember that there’s an active Microsoft presence in the Entourage newsgroup, where some of this material is drawn from.

• If you’re using Exchange 5.5, you can’t use Entourage 2004 in Exchange mode. Exchange mode requires WebDAV, which is only supported by Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003. You can still use IMAP for mail, but you won’t be able to sync calendar and contact data with the server.
• If you don’t know what server name to put into the “Public folder server” field, try the name of your Outlook Web Access server with “/public/” on the end of it.
• If your OWA requires you to use https:// to get to it, you’ll need to check the “DAV service requires secure connection (SSL)” checkbox on the Advanced tab of the Exchange account properties dialog.
• Entourage 2004 can act as a delegate, but you have to use Outlook for Windows to set up delegate access. I plan to write an article explaining how to do this (in my spare time… bwahahaha).
• If you send a meeting invitation from Outlook, and it arrives as an .ics file in Entourage, the “Accept” and “Decline” buttons may not appear. This is because of a bug in Outlook, and the Entourage team knows about it already.
• Only the basic Contacts and Calendar folders are supported– Entourage doesn’t allow you to create subfolders of those folders, or to put contacts and calendar items in other folders elsewhere.
• You can’t adjust server-side settings (including the “out of office” state or server-based rules) from Entourage; you’ll need to use Outlook or OWA.

If there’s a specific question you want answered, feel free to leave a comment here and I’ll try to help you.

The fine folks over at SearchExchange (in collaboration with MS Press) have excerpted chapter 13 from Secure Messaging with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003— that just happens to be the Outlook security chapter. Their excerpt, “20 Tips on Securing Outlook in 20 Minutes“, is well worth reading. It includes information on how to set up Outlook to use Windows Rights Management (including info on how to create your own RM templates), as well as information on controlling S/MIME through GPO templates, and how to set up and use RPC-over-HTTPs. f you like the chapter, buy the whole thing!

Long-time Exchange developer Larry Osterman had a great blog entry today titled “Remember the Giblets”. An excerpt:

“Giblets” are the pieces of software that you include in your product that you don’t always remember.  Like zlib, or LHA, or MSXML, or the C runtime library. Whenever you ship code, you need to consider what your response strategy is when a security hole occurs in your giblets.  Do you even have a strategy?  Are you monitoring all the security mailing lists (bugtraq, ntbugtraq) daily?  Are you signed up for security announcements from the creator of your giblets?  Are you prepared to offer a security update for your product when a problem is found in one of your giblets?  How do your customers know what giblets your application includes?

As administrators, how much do you know about the giblets on your servers? Are you paying attention to them, or only to the big chunks (like Exchange or SQL Server)?

I’m speaking today at Enterprise Messaging Decisions 2004. This is actually my first day trip in a while. When I lived in Huntsville, it was possible to fly out at 0530 or 0630, change planes in Atlanta, and make it to pretty much anywhere by noon– enough time for a meeting or presentation– and then get home again around 11pm. In Toledo, that’s just not happening because of Delta’s flight schedule ex Cincinnati. So, since EMD is in Chicago, I’m going to drive– should be fun. Here’s the slide deck.

There’s a new Windows worm: W32.sasser. It exploits a vulnerability in the Local Security Authority (LSASS.exe) service; the vuln was fixed by the MS04-011 patch. The original MS bulletin and patch were issued on 4/13, and the MS alert on Sasser was released on 5/1, so you can see the gap between patch and exploit is getting shorter. I’m sure all of you out there have already patched your systems, but tell a friend: install patches when they’re released.
Anecdote: on Saturday, 5/1, Delta Airlines had a little dispatch problem that resulted in all their flights out of Atlanta being grounded for almost seven hours. The problem appears to have been with the airport computers used to calculate weight and balance according to FAA specs. One passenger on an affected flight reports that the flight crew attributed the delay to the “Mayday virus”. I wonder what the real cause was?
Update: this WSJ article‘s last paragraph mentions Delta, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase as companies affected; it also says that a Delta spokesman wouldn’t say whether Sasser was to blame.

Well, it’s only two weeks late, but hey, who’s counting? (Besides the speaker manager at Microsoft, of course!) The first draft of my deck for MSG381, Designing High-Availability Exchange Solutions, is now available here. If you’re coming to TechEd, the session is Thursday at 8:30– stop by and say hello!
Update: Andy Webb was kind enough to point out a bad link, which is now fixed.

It doesn’t matter how secure your server is if it’s on fire. The other Scoble has two good posts that describe the current state of the art in fire-suppression systems: here and here. This is actually something I talk about in Chapter 5 (physical &operational security), even though most of us are stuck with whatever physical plant is already in the building. Interestingly, one commenter mentioned pre-action sprinkler systems, which use water but which aren’t activated without both heat and smoke alarms. (And hey, the inert suppression gas of choice is Inergen, not “Innergen”.)