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 ...

psFetch is my latest project and is a Powershell cmdlet that communicates with various Repositories on the Internet to find what you are looking for and easily download and install them to your machine. The cmdlet itself is written in C# and utilises a centralised LAMP backend as a repository and director. Upon install psFetch will create a custom shortcut on your desktop which includes the psFetch cmdlet as one of the default set of commands available without having to use add-pssnapin each time. Everytime you add a cmdlet or script they will be added to your console profile and ...

This post has no real merit its just that the Error message caused me to actually laugh out loud: [caption id="attachment_159" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="An error with no description occured"][/caption] ...

Well I'm back from my trip to New York and I've brought back a couple of things. With the most tracks HOPE has ever had I was truly spoilt for choice but I spent most of my time [when I wasn't showing our US friends how drinking should be done] visiting talks that had potential datacenter impact. Kevin Figueroa, Marco Figueroa and Anthony L. Williams reminded me that VLAN's and other layer 2 stuff is still vulnerable to many attacks. Most are just Denial of Service stuff that would be detected almost instantly and very easily fixed (although not easily preventable) but the cross VLAN ...

Considering how bleeding edge the majority of my projects are I'm a little behind the curve on this one but I've finally managed to move all my Windows Servers across to Windows Server 2008. This includes the Domain Controllers, Web Servers and most critically the Exchange servers. This post is going to be cut into the following sections: Exchange 2007 Prerequisites on Windows Server 2008 Cross Forest Migration of Exchange 2007 Mailboxes and User Accounts Creating SSL Certificates for use with Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2008 Exchange 2007 Prerequisites on Windows Server ...

Working in a Data Center brings with it various challenges that you wouldn't normally find in most other jobs; we come across demanding solutions, ingenious 'hacks', impressive software and outright weird errors. Once we've crossed a particular hurdle then we need to go about disseminating this new found information to the other SysAdmins. So far the best way I've found of doing this is to take a VM image, break it in the same way that we encountered and then make it available for deployment to the VM infrastructure (minus of course the malicious payload if it was part of a botnet). ...

A few weeks ago I 'inherited' a frontend anti-spam solution that was getting crushed under the weight of the Christmas run-up. Emails were taking up to a week to arrive at the back-end system and a lot of spam was getting through too. The solution consisted of two machines each with Dual Core 2.13Ghz Intel's, 2Gb of RAM & SATA disks behind a hardware load balancer. Unfortunately the combination of having to use swap due to the volume of incoming mail coupled with BackScatter attacks [the BackScatter attacks would of course require the original mail and the NDA to be written to disk for ...

The new version of Fedora is upon us, Rejoice! Feature List Where to get it Update - 22/11/2007 In little under 2 weeks I've seeded nearly 40Gb! Ubuntu 7.10 has only seeded 33Gb and has been out for twice as long. Read into that what you will! ...

Yesterday I had a nasty case of Y-splitter failure (in future I'm just going to upgrade the PSU rather than go though this again) which caused all four of the 320Gb disks of a RAID5 array to suddenly disappear. Windows didn't like that and hung, VMware Virtual Center disliked it even more. Once I recovered the machine (ohhh AD was in a mess!) VMVC refused to launch and spewed some messages to the console. The sole purpose for this entry is to list the event log errors and list the solution so hopefully some one else out there won't be in the dark. The errors always happen in batches as ...

WARNING: I am not a programmer, I don't claim to be so it is quite likely that the code you will find here will horrify you! As part of my drive to monitor as much as possible of my systems I realised that creating an intermediate daemon for WMI would allow me to access some of the WMI properties that wouldn't normally be exposed via SNMP and graph them with MRTG. I'm not going to cover WMI in any great detail so if you'd like to do a bit more reading I would recommend reading through the Microsoft Knowledge Base article on WMI. As the title suggests the Windows Daemon has been ...