Thirteen years ago, on 24 August 1991, I put on my dress blues and headed to the First Baptist Church in Decatur, Georgia to get married. Thanks for thirteen great years, Arlene. I love you!
Category Archives: Musings
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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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
The cost and price of safety
Ohio, Louisiana, and Michigan all offer state-sponsored motorcycle safety classes. Cost: $25, and they provide the motorcycle. They subsidize the substantial extra cost because it is in the public interest to promote motorcycle traffic safety.
Ohio requires a class to get your concealed weapon carry permit. Cost: $150. Wouldn’t you think that the state would have an interest in promoting gun safety? That’s ostensibly why they require the course, but why is it six times more expensive?
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Filed under Musings
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
Department of Unreadable Spam
I’m not surprised that this made it through the filter; heaven knows I can’t make head or tail of it:
Deary Easy- Buyer!
My name “Unroll E. Headdress”, and I work at Reasonable-ProgramTools LLC.
You are is very essential for me!
You spend your earnest money and your time at my representation,
and I happy to show you that our organization have finish upgrade of soft assortment.
Our organization like remind U that our company suggesting that this time We have more bigger 1899 toprated
software products for at low value with your personal Client allowance off a price.
Please spare some of your high price Time to our renewed Soft Store here:
With the best wishes,
Clients Service department, “Unroll E. Headdress”
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Filed under 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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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Cleaning up after classified email
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.
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Geek out: Exchange Server 2003 Technical Reference Guide
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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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Microsoft support for VERITAS Storage Foundation
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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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
RSS feeds from public folders
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.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
It’s NAP time
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”).
Filed under General Stuff, Musings
“Working with Exchange Server” Entourage white paper released
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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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Transparency revisited: Mark Cuban’s blog
A lot of people have been talking about this Business Week article, “Blogging With the Boss’ Blessing“; it discusses the idea that businesses gain mindshare by revealing more details of their internal operations, or becoming more “transparent”. As Doc Searls points out, Mark Cuban is setting the bar for business transparency with his blog. It’s no surprise that folks like Scoble are noticing and commenting on the fact that Cuban is completely transparent, but there’s one interesting aspect of Cuban’s blog that I haven’t seen widely mentioned: where are his posts about HDNet? HD programming is a nascent market segment, and HDNet is doing some big deals (including rebroadcasting NBC’s Summer Olympics coverage). Could it be that his good business sense prevents him from airing his dirty laundry in an area that’s still highly competitive? Maybe he’s more interested in the Mavs (always a possibility!), or maybe he thinks no one’s interested in HDNet except for a few geeks. I don’t know, so I asked him.
Update: Wow, that was fast: an almost-instant response from Mark. Short and to the point: “Not much new or interesting to say about HDNet… we get the best programming we can, we play it…” Fair enough. Thanks, Mark.
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Filed under HDTV and Home Theater, Musings
Reporter’s guide to finding people
Duff Wilson of the Seattle Times has a nifty guide on how to find information on people: “Who is John Doe, and where to get the paper on him“. It’s missing a lot of commercial services, but it’s still interesting.
MSDN Product Feedback Center
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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