Microsoft have continued the trend of going x64 all the way and 2008 R2 is 64bit only. The first thing we need to do is install the pre-requisites via a privileged PowerShell; Import-Module ServerManager Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS,ADLDS -Restart Once the machine has restarted you will need to ensure you set the machine name and a DNS suffix. Assuming the checks all work you can click install and off you go; Once all is installed the next step is to prepare a config bundle / auth package (I can't quite remember what Microsoft call ...

With my new Exchange 2010 environment working quite happily it was time to remove the old 2007 stuff from the setup. This is extremely easy to do but I haven't posted anything in a while so I thought I'd document the process. To start just load up the Programs and Features section of Control Panel, choose Exchange and select Uninstall. The first screen is utterly pointless At the next screen you need to deselect the options you no longer require. Ideally as I'm Uninstalling and not Modifying the installation I'd have thought you'd select that which you want to ...

With Exchange 2010 available on MSDN I decided to take the risk and jump straight into a migration as the only thing as fun as a well planned migration is shooting from the hip on full auto. Exchange 2010 cannot co-exist with Exchange 2007 unless it is SP2. The Exchange 2007 SP2 install was exceptionally pain free (It was so easy I may not sleep properly tonight) and with that done it was time to start preparing my new Exchange 2010 server. A base copy of Windows Server 2008 (non R2) will have the following pre-requisites; .Net 3.5 (SP1) PowerShell 2.0 Office 2007 System ...

One of the common issues that appears when integrating a hybrid vision of Hosted Exchange with someones existing infrastructure (so not really Hosted Exchange at all!) is synchronising credentials between the Exchange Server and the local machines or for the more tech savvy the 'hackiness' of having disparate forests. Cross Forest trusts are a possibility and merging one with the other (i.e having the Hosted Exchange solution bound to the existing domain) is another but there are many issues with that (mostly political). What I intend to do is utilise the 'Branch office' concept that ...

Recently I've been looking at CleverSafe's Storage Cloud product and as part of the research I noticed that a small scale DSNet provides more than enough IOPs for small scale mailbox installations. I took a selection of decommissioned mid-range [Pentium Dual Core / SATA I Disks etc] Workstations to which I installed CentOS 5.0 and the CleverSafe software. 4 IDE SliceStores and an Accesser provides enough IOP throughput for around 50 mailboxes. Ramping this up to 6 SATA SliceStores and there is enough IOP throughput for 70 mailboxes. We're obviously not talking about large scale ...

When I heard the news that McColo had been pulled I wondered if we'd actually see a drop in Hostile traffic and Spam. Turns out that there has been a massive drop in Spam levels coming through some of the filters I have dotted around the place. C&C or Spam Hosts? I wrote a little script to see what percentages of machines that had made incoming connections that were then classified as spam were still alive. The majority of hosts were still contactable in some way shape or form but weren't listening on known SMTP ports, some were alive and actively listening on SMTP ...

We already know that disabling IPv6 on a 2008 & Exchange 2007 server breaks things but what if we go IPv6 only? IPv6 Only Domain Controllers: The installation didn't cause any trouble but after initially logging on and running a DCDiag we see this: It turns out that the install of the DNS Server had set the NIC's properties to be ::1 but the DNS Server was only listening on the Static Site Local address FEC0::2 and its self assigned Link Local. This of course caused all DNS reliant checks to fail and cause a whole world of pain.           Changing the ...

Recently I encountered a situation where a vanilla install of Postfix had been targeted by what appeared to be a Spam Botnet. Bizarrely this server was what you could call an 'Edge Server' but it didn't have any AntiVirus or AntiSpam to be honest it was pretty useless. There were three issues to clear up. First there were 2,435,239 emails from the Botnet destined for a domain that was no longer hosted on the 'backend' server. Secondly none of this email was being Spam checked and finally the massive queues meant that the 568,372 legitimate emails stuck in the queue were being delayed by ...

In the previous post on this subject I mentioned that I've been working on a little project regarding the EdgeTransport.exe.config file. With the advent of PowerShell I decided to look into writing my own Cmdlets and the EdgeTransport file seemed like a good place to start. To get started you'll need to download the Cmdlet from here. Once download you will need to extract it somewhere (in this example I just dropped it in C:\) and then install it by running the following command: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\InstallUtil.exe C:\NAMOS-HiddenTransportConfig.dll You ...

Whilst there are a lot of features in Exchange 2007 that can be configured and tweaked using the GUI and Powershell I have on several occasions (bare in mind I work in Managed hosting so these occasions are not all for the same installation) needed to 'play' with the settings in EdgeTransport.exe.config file [which should be located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Bin\]. EdgeTransport.exe.config appears to be XML which is extremely useful for something else I'll be releasing sometime soon and it also makes comprehension a breeze. Unfortunately whilst you can easily understand ...