As I was updating to the latest Wordpress (2.8.6) I noticed that the About page still showed my old setup. I moved to a shiny 'new build' flat a year or so ago and unfortunately my old Compaq 9000 Rack Cabinet wouldn't have fitted up the stair case :/ so I bought a nice flat pack 28u Rack Cabinet and set about virtualising all my legacy stuff. VM Hosts Using the 2 S411 cases I already had I installed; 2x ASUS P5B-VM 2x Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 8x Corsair 4GB DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 2x Hiper 880W 85% Efficient PSU 4x Adaptec 1430SA 4Port PCI Express SATA II RAID Card 16x Western ...

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 ...

Just as I've finished consolidating all my Physical machines to HyperV guests Microsoft have announced Windows HyperV Server which is a free download. With the release of the HyperV Linux Componants I'm going to start moving some workloads away from my old ESX 2.5 servers and see if HyperV Synthetic devices work as well as ESX devices do. Not that I knew it at the time but Microsoft have also updated their Support policies to include Exchange Server SP1 when virtualized. The other good news is that there are reports that we'll have System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (final ...

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 ...

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 ...