Category Archives: Musings

Ordinarily I wouldn’t post this announcement here, but I’m going to break tradition and do so because I’m one of the conference co-chairs. As such, I have to help find speakers, so I want this call for papers to go out far and wide.

Windows IT Pro is now accepting session proposals for the Oct-Nov. 2005 Windows Connections conference. We’re heading to San Diego October 30 to November 2, 2005, for the premier Windows technical conference, and we’d like to hear from you!

If you’re interested in speaking on Exchange-related topics at the show, send your abstracts to paul@robichaux.net by February 18. We want proposals for regular 75-minute sessions, as well as 1/2 day and full day pre-conference and post-conference sessions.

Note that we have a limited number of speaking slots, and all participants must be able to present a minimum of three 75-minute sessions. There are three basic requirements:

• Send a minimum of 3 session proposals (4 or 5 is ideal for discussion purposes)
• Include a biographical statement with your session proposals
• Include any additional pre- or post-con session proposals, if applicable

Please adhere to the February 18 deadline as we need to make speaker and session selections right away. (We plan to have a conference brochure ready to distribute at TechEd in June.)

Here’s a very cool trick: Glen Scales wrote a script that finds all of your mailbox and public folder stores, then queries their servers’ event logs to find event ID 1221s indicating how much white space is available. This is a slick solution to the vexing problem of monitoring how much white space is lurking in your databases.

Rui J.M. Silva posted a cool script on his blog for migrating distribution list objects between Exchange organizations. The script is meant to be run against an Exchange 5.5 directory, from which it extracts the DLs with ldifde. It then extracts the 5.5 directory with csvde, matches the display and account names, and outputs a file that can imported using ldifde. The last step actually imports the DLs as universal distribution groups. If you want the DLs to be populated, you must already be using the ADC so that user accounts are synchronized, but the script is still a nice bit of work.

As has been widely reported elsewhere, MS has released the public beta of their new anti-spyware tool. Go get it and try it out; I’ve been running a test build for a while now and have been very impressed with it.

I’ve been using the Google toolbar for a long time, but no more. Now I’m using the MSN toolbar instead. Why? Six simple reasons, five of which are security-related:

1. The MSN toolbar doesn’t index the browser cache or history file. That means that it won’t find cached information like credit card or online banking statements.
2. Every user on a multi-user machine has a separate set of index processes and files.
3. The MSN toolbar never sends any data back to Microsoft. Google’s toolbar, of course, sends tons of data back to Google, although they’re up-front about it.
4. Index files are obfuscated, raising the bar for casual snoopers (of course, snooping requires admin privileges in the first place 🙂
5. MSN never automatically downloads updates. You can ask it to do so, but you don’t have to.
6. It searches Outlook.

This is a pretty good deal: 50% off new licenses of Trend’s ScanMail suite if you’re migrating from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003. You have to have more than 1,000 seats, and you have to have proof of migration (evidenced by a current SA license or Exchange 2003 CALs purchased after 6/15/04), and the offer is only good until 12/31/04.

Microsoft today released a hotfix for the Windows 2003 SMTP stack that provides tarpitting for SMTP. (If you don’t already know what tarpitting is, check this explanation). The idea is that you install software that intentionally slows down SMTP throughput for bogus requests. This helps make it uneconomical for spammers to ply their trade. The hotfix requires you to install a package and set a registry key, then you’re done. Highly recommended.

What do you call a hotfix that doesn’t actually fix the problem it’s supposed to cure?

I vote for notfix, but I welcome your suggestions. The best suggestion posted as a comment here by December 15th wins… uh… something cool. Yeah, that’s it– your choice of a signed copy of one of my books or a $25 donation to the charity of your choice. Get those creative juices flowing.

So, here’s a question for Ed and any other Lotus-Knowledgeable readers out there. What’s the best way to start learning about Workplace Messaging? So far I’ve learned some peripheral facts, like that it has outrageous system requirements (quad 2GHz procs + 2 GB of RAM), that it’s licensed per-processor (so you need 4 server licenses for that 4-proc machine), and that every initial license includes 12 months of maintenance. However, I haven’t found a clear, comprehensive source of getting-started information, apart from this tutorial. That’s probably just because I don’t know where on IBM’s gargantuan web site to look, hence this post. If you do know, please share.

Update: I just spoke to a friendly IBM sales rep who made it very clear that Workplace products are not licensed per-server or per-CPU, but per-user. My earlier post was based on something I saw at vowe.net. Caveat lector.