Although proper SSL certificates from providers such as Digicert and Verisign have become much cheaper nowadays there are still many occasions when you might prefer to just use a self signed certificate. One of the most common occurences of this is with SBS server, to provide SSL secured web services such as OWA and RPC over HTTP. However the certificate warning you get everytime you open the web site is annoying and maybe confusing for less experienced users. In older versions of IE you could just install the certificate after viewing it but with the improved security in IE7 and IE8 this no longer works. Whilst putting the URL in your "Trusted Sites" list will let you view and import the certificate you will find it is still not properly trusted. The solution is to provide your users with the correct certificate file to install, but its not obvious where you get this from....

A few months ago we took over the IT support for an insurance firm in the City, but with the contract we inherited a problem the previous IT company couldn't resolve. Part of the firm's business still ran on a ten year SCO Unix server which was barely clinging to life and hadn't been backed up for three years. They still had a support contract with the original suppliers of the SCO system but they had quoted over £10k to migrate their data to the current platform. The system was running on borrowed time and every reboot could have been its last so we had to come up with a solution.

Being one for detail I'm amazed every time I receive emails from different users from the same organisation but with differing signatures.  Most of these emails come from small to medium businesses with some really slick marketing in general, in fact one could relate it to somebody wearing a very sharp evening suit with a pair of white sport socks! 

Microsoft seem to have omitted this essential feature which has prompted a host of third party applications available in the market place.  My preference is a product from Exclaimer called Mail utilities for Exchange that simply requires installation on your exchange server.  Not only can it standardise the signatures across your organisation but individual groups can be created to alert the recipients of important company information from differing departments as it integrates with the active directory.  A console can also be created for non technical administrative staff in order to manage the signatures, so there's absolutely no need to get dressed in the dark again!

 

Now you can configure SBS email notification without enabling the SBS health monitoring feature in few simple steps.

Before starting this procedure you need to know why you are doing this:

If you configure default notifications in the Health Monitor of your SBS management console, every time you open or reboot the server, the successful alert will be sent too. So to avoid this situation you need to follow these few steps

We recently installed two LES10 Internet connections at two sites in the South East for a logistics company. Our customer hosts websites and  therefore it was important that downtime was kept to zero.

We installed two Cisco ASA units at each site as an active/standby failover pairs. These firewalls would listen on a different default gateway to the old Internet connections which were still operational. After intial testing all we had to do was to change the default gateways on the approximately 30 servers and modify the DHCP configuration which the desktop PCS would pick up after their current leased expired. One or two desktop PCs had their NICs set with a static IP address but is was easy enough to change to DHCP as users reported problems. Everything appeared to be running nicely with no disruption. We then turned off the old Internet connection making the old default gateway unobtainable.

Soon after we got a support call from the payroll department, they could not access timekeeping data from a device which few people new anything about. We did not have any login information so we called the manufacturer: all we got was a voice mail.  We left a message but no one called us back. In the meantime no one was going to get paid because there was no up to date time keeping information. The payroll department were using PCs on a different subnet to the time keeping device and therefore it could not respond because it was trying to reply through a non existent default gateway.

Whilst checking our client's backups I've come across several common problems so I thought I would share the solutions.

Errors: Could not access portions of directory System State\COM+ Class Registration Database. 
You may not have permission to open the file, or the directory may be missing or damaged. 
Please contact the owner or administrator. "

Error: Could not access portions of directory System State\Registry. 
You may not have permission to open the file, or the directory may be missing or damaged. 
Please contact the owner or administrator. 

Error 0x80042316

Error returned while creating the volume shadow copy:0x8007000e.

Error returned while creating the volume shadow copy:Not enough storage is available to complete this operation.

Error: The device reported an error on a request to write data to media.

Error reported: Invalid command.

Error: D: is not a valid drive or you do not have access.

Error: WATSONSVR\Microsoft Information Store\First Storage Group is not a valid drive or you do not have access.

Error: Event 8001 8019 NTbackup error occurred periodically in event viewer.  These errors may occur if your Exchange Server 2003 database files are located on the same drive as the Windows Server 2003 operating system.

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We have been using Asterisk for the last four years; it facilitates our distributed model of operation, effectively bridging the gap between traditional PSTN and VoIP. Asterisk enables us to bring important customer calls into our head office via trustworthy ISDN technology whilst at the same time linking branch offices and remote users via VoIP. If we cannot make an outbound call with our SIP and IAX2 trunks, we simply fall back to ISDN.

Many organisations use Asterisk in conjunction with the Trixbox CE distribution to give an excellent administration front-end with FreePBX and good presence management with Hudlite. FreePBX has a poorly documented feature which allows you to separate devices from users. Therefore as users move through our distributed network, they associate themselves with a device by logging in. Calls can transparently be connected with the user rather than using traditional extensions which do not move. Unfortunately Hudlite does not currently support users and devices, forcing us to stay with device only calls if we wish to retain its features.

 We really did not want to make this choice, we wanted rich presence management, integration with messaging, mobility of users and full logging via a searchable database. We therefore decided to look at Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). OCS has come on a long way in the last four years and with OCS 2007 R2 just round the corner and the excellent desktop and PDA client, Communicator 2007, it has a promising future.

We'd recently taken over the IT support for a small 10 user network in the Aldgate area and just completed our network healthcheck report. Amongst the recommendations was to review the UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) setup. Of course, in line with somebody's law, they had a major power outage before all our recommendations were implemented....

We recently had an enquiry from a client who has around 150 Linux servers in about 20 data centres scattered around the UK. They have a perfectly effective backup solution but were interested in improving their Disaster Recovery, in particular how to speed up recovery of a server in the event of hardware failure. In particular they wanted a solution that would allow them to take complete system images that when required could be quickly restored to a replacement server. Not only that but it had to be doable remotely and by a non-Linux technician following a simple sheet of instructions.