I ran into an issue where Outlook 2007 on Windows XP on Exchange 2007 wouldn't autoconfigure and specifically didn't work with Outlook Anywhere. In my case, the mutual authenticaiton piece was failing. Thanks to this site for helping my diagnose the issue. The problem is with SAN certs. For mutual authentication to work with Outlook Anywhere, the FQDN for the external hostname used must match the Issued To field of the cert and doesn't work if you use an external hostname specified in the Subject Alternative Field.
Time Query
Submitted by miked on Tue, 09/30/2008 - 06:16I was looking at how I would query the time on a number of remote computers. In our specific case, we just wanted to make sure that our domain controllers were some-what close (within a second) on their local time. We've been chasing issues with time keeping in our VMware environment. I've posted the source code for this simple C# script to query the time on all computers specified in a file. Enjoy!
Tracking Log Monitoring
Submitted by miked on Fri, 09/19/2008 - 07:16In my previous post, I mentioned I would post the source code for the script that I use to monitor the Exchange message tracking logs in an attempt to find hacked accounts. Attached to this post is the source code. In our environment I look for when the file grows to beyond a GB. At that point, the script will email me. This is run as a scheduled task (sorry, my coding skills don't allow me to make something that runs as a service) every 10 minutes. Enjoy!
LogParser for Finding Spam Senders
Submitted by miked on Thu, 09/18/2008 - 08:06I am the email administrator where I work and over the summer there has been an onslaught of phishing email specifically targeting our Windows Domain credentials. It's probably not a shock when I say that people fall for this and as such we run into times when compromised accounts are used to send spam out through our servers.
Blackberry Documentation typo
Submitted by miked on Wed, 09/17/2008 - 07:27I wanted to bring to your attention a typo in the Blackberry Quick Start Guide for Blackberry Enterprise Server. This guide says to set permissions on the Exchange 2007 server you should issue a set-mailboxserver . The first command should actually be get-mailboxserver.
Veritas Exchange 2007 Issue
Submitted by miked on Fri, 09/12/2008 - 11:04We use Veritas NetBackup for system backup and recovery at work. The last step in our Exchange 2007 migration was to test backup and recovery of our mailbox databases. I was running what I thought would be simple tests to see if could restore the successfully backed up mailbox database. I was employing the Exchange 2007 recovery storage group (RSG) like a good boy and I was getting errors to the effect that I had not set up the RSG. After several failed attempts I had chalked this up to a Veritas bug and contacted Symantec.
IMF on Authenticated Sessions
Submitted by miked on Tue, 09/09/2008 - 14:24One of my biggest gripes about Exchange 2003's Intelligent Message Filter was the inability to filter our own internal email senders' email. I found this article that explains how to let IMF check on authenticated sessions. I believe if I do this on the bridgehead server for my org, it will only filter things that leave the organization and will let our internal "spam" continue.
Welcome
Submitted by miked on Thu, 09/04/2008 - 10:43Welcome to the new home of my blog. I'm hoping to get in the habit of writing more often. Enjoy!
VMware ESX Bug
Submitted by miked on Thu, 09/04/2008 - 09:01When I came into work today I noticed that I wasn’t able to power up a newly created VM in our ESX 3.5 cluster. Within a couple minutes of searching I came across this blog post from Leo.
Exchange 2007 User Prep
Submitted by miked on Thu, 09/04/2008 - 09:00I have been working on figuring out how to move our 20,000 mailboxes to an Exchange 2007 environment. The following script is one of the first steps. This script goes through each mail-enabled user account and tags one of the extensionAttributes with a number 1-number of mail stores I will end up with.