I’ve Made A Huge Mistake

Short post today but another good two posts from the Directory Services team on how to enable Userenv logging for troubleshooting Group Policy. This comes in handy if you do not do this all the time.

http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2008/11/11/understanding-how-to-read-a-userenv-log-part-1.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2008/11/11/understanding-how-to-read-a-userenv-log-part-2.aspx

If you are one of the people who still are on Exchange 2003 and have E-discovery compliance for your email, this hot fix is for you.

http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx/kb/971660

Goodness right. Some mail might not be getting journaled in some specific situations. Yikes! I know that’s not the thing I’d like to say to the judge who probably doesn’t understand technology let alone how journaling works in Exchange 2003. Anyways, apply this to your back end servers as quick as you can. That is the only one that “REQUIRES” it. But best practices states try to keep your CDO.dll file in the same version number, so go ahead and apply this to your front end servers too. If you run a BES server, that should get this updated to so you get the most updated CDO.dll file and is in line with Exchange.

Fresh from the Exchange team, they will now support Exchange 2003 to query against 2008 R2 DCs. This means that if you are on 2003 and plan on going to 2007 or 2010, you can upgrade your DCs to 2008 R2 and then raise your forest/domain levels to the latest and greatest of 2008 R2 after 2003 has been removed from your environment. This actually saved me 1 upgrade I now no longer have to do.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/11/30/453327.aspx

Do you like to have a checklist when doing upgrades to make sure you don’t miss anything? What about on a large project where many things are dependent on your specific environment. The Exchange team has a great website set up where you can get a fairly customized checklist for your environment by answering a few different questions.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/11/11/453172.aspx

Is your new Windows 7 computer having a hard time waking from sleep, kind of like you early in the morning? Do you have multiple processors or cores?  Does the hot keys not work?  Then this hotfix might be for you.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977307

Some people haven’t upgraded to Outlook 2010 Beta yet, can you believe them? Actually in the real world, many people are still on Outlook 2003. After you drop in Exchange 2010 into your environment, anyone that has Outlook 2003 can’t connect. What gives?

The problem is what gets us every time. The default settings. By default Exchange 2010 requires RPC connections to be encrypted. By default Outlook 2003 does not use RPC encryption. Whoops. How do we fix this?

Choice 1.) Disable Exchange 2010 requiring RPC connections to be encrypted. I really don’t like that choice.

Choice 2.) Either by GPO or Manually, update Outlook 2003 Profiles to use encryption as well as any new Outlook 2003 profiles rolling out, make sure they are configured to RPC encryption as well.

Choice 3.) Force people to upgrade to Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010.They get other benefits besides this for upgrading as well, DR, performance, Mail Tips, etc.

Note This could also be a problem for Outlook 2007 profiles if you disabled RPC encryption when rolling it out.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2006508

Microsoft has tried to make the world a better place by releasing application compatibility spreadsheet for Windows 7. This lists out for both 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows 7 if the application is compatible, needs a free update, paid update, etc.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=890e522e-e39e-4278-aebc-186f81e29173

There is also a web version that can be used to search for applications that aren’t in this spreadsheet.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/windows-7/en-us/default.aspx

I just saw this come out across the RSS feed.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977519

This lists out all the security Event IDs that are new and change for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. It is very comprehensive and should be a very handy reference indeed.

A useful little trick when installing/administrating something that has a potential to eat up storage (think file server, logs for a database) is the fear that the drive will fill up in space without you noticing and you’ll have to add new space immediately. What if this process of adding new space requires downtime or has to be approved? What do you do if you missed the drive space filling up over time and now the system is offline? The answer is a dummy file. I create a semi large dummy file that can be deleted in a pinch if the drive filled up to get everything up and running again on my file server. Think of it as some quick breathing room until you can get the situation under control.

fsutil file createnew dummy.file 10737418240

You can run this at the command line to create your blank large empty file. The last parameter is in bytes, that example is for a 10 GB file.

If you are running Windows 7 or Vista you may notice a tool that is near and dear to your heart has gone missing it would seem. Good old Telnet. Yes the password is sent in clear text using telnet but what if you want to just check to see if you can connect to a port on another computer. Then Telnet is what you need. To re-enable telnet it’s pretty easy.

1.) Go to Control Panel

2.) Click Programs and Features

3.) Turn Windows Features On and Off

4.) Scroll down to Telnet Client, check the box and hit Ok

5.) Wait for the dialog box to disappear and re run your telnet command.