Literary Tattoos
This morning I came across a site that has simply entranced me for some odd reason - Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos. It’s definitely worth giving the site a brief read and possibly popping it into your RSS reader. A few that I really like so far are below.
Yosemite Firefall
I found a link to the image on Reddit and have no clue who took it. If you do please let me know so I can give credit where it is due. More info on the Yosemite Firefall is available here.
Changes
It’s been awhile since I posted any updates on what I’m doing with my life.
On the job front, I’ve got exactly 6 more working days left at Microsoft. I’m starting at Azaleos again on Monday February 8th, resuming my role as Director of Operations. Yes, this surprised me as well; it wasn’t something I was planning on. I’m looking forward to managing people instead of bits again.
—
I very recently discovered LibraryThing.com, a very cool site where I am slowly cataloging my books. If you’re an avid reader I highly recommend checking it out and adding me as a friend. I always like to see what other people are reading.
—
I’m considering going back to school and pursuing my degree with the unique difference that I plan to attend classes this time. Perhaps I’ll learn more obscure facts like how to use the semicolon properly, something I never knew and had to Google.
—
I’m still in the process of cleaning my home office. It’s quite a bit less cluttered than it used to be but not nearly as ship shape as it will be when I’m done. No worries though, at this rate it will be immaculate sometime in Q2 2011.
Daily Links: 1/21/2010
How to Configure Change Password for OWA 2003/2007/2010 Mixed Environments http://bit.ly/8avxgZ
Making sense of Exchange Logs using ExLogAnalyzer http://bit.ly/8zZHIn
How Much The Average American Can Save On Taxes By Having A Business http://bit.ly/88g00b
Choosing a disk configuration for your Exchange Server 2007 storage http://bit.ly/7rSi3z
Personal Marketing and Social Media http://bit.ly/5uPoYC
Microsoft to issue emergency IE patch Thursday http://bit.ly/8SwtEw
Data Privacy Day: 1/28/10 http://bit.ly/5IPhgW
Support for Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2000 ends on July 13, 2010 http://bit.ly/5YJFuE
I love the new Deployment Assistant http://bit.ly/4Y4Fql
Restricting email to the Internet on a per user AND per domain basis
I’ve had a number of clients ask me whether this was possible, especially the ‘restrict contractors to just certain domains’ part.
This is definitely worthwhile knowledge that you should run through in your Exchange 2010 lab. You do have a lab running Exchange 2010, right? (Not that I’m anyone to talk about it, I have a brand new PowerEdge sitting on the floor of my office waiting to be built right now)
You requested it… and we delivered it in Exchange 2010!
One of the most requested items in exchange 2007 was something like this…
…we have 5-12 external domains that we need to allow some users to send to, but prevent sending to all other domains…
Or like this…
…we need a way to allow everyone to send to the internet but restrict members of 'contract workers group' to just certain domains.
This blog post is meant to show how easy it now is to accomplish this oft heard request in Exchange 2010. Transport rules, introduced with Exchange 2007, provided a lot of new options for administration of mail resulting in even more requests for additional functionality. The rules now have new predicates and actions extending the possibilities of what can be done.
In particular, the predicates for address matching that were previously only available on the Edge role are now available for Hub role as well!
For more information about the new predicate and actions read the whole blog post @ You Had Me At EHLO… : Restricting email to the Internet on a per user AND per domain basis.
DPM 2010 Protecting Exchange 2010 DAG in a Single Site
Ctrl P – The Data Protection Manager Blog! : DPM 2010 Protecting Exchange 2010 DAG in a Single Site.
A very good blog post on using DPM to backup Exchange 2010 DAGs. They cover JBOD vs RAID for the DPM server itself, Point in Time recovery for lagged copies vs DPM and a few reasons why you should consider DPM.
Real Life Exchange 2010 Disaster Recovery
Last Thursday night I had the distinct privilege of participating in a real life Exchange 2010 disaster recovery scenario. Roughly 41,000 mailboxes on 22 databases had the DAG ripped out from underneath them accidentally. When I say ‘ripped out from underneath them’ I mean literally that; everything was removed, including all the cluster resources and mailbox servers. As far as AD was concerned these servers didn’t even exist. All we had left was the .edb files, catalog indexes and log files. The solution? Database portability.
Even though this was essentially a test environment, there were a number of live mailboxes that simply had to be recovered and we wanted to recover them all. The steps we took were rather straightforward;
1 | Find some live mailbox servers that had the spare capacity to mount 22 databases. Split the list of databases to be mounted among them.
2 | For each mailbox server, copy over the database and log directories so we had the data to use.
3 | Perform a soft recovery with eseutil /r on each database/log set to commit any uncommitted log files and ensure we could actually mount the data later in the process.
4 | Create the new mailbox databases: new-mailboxdatabase -name <name> -server <server> -EdbFilePath <path to recovery folder, e.g. c:\RecoverDBs\RecoverDB1\<name of original edb>.edb> -LogFilePath <path to logs, e.g. c:\RecoverDBs\RecoverLogs1>
Pro Tip: Use a new name for the database. If the old database was named DAG1-DB001, you might use DAG1-RecoveryDB001.
5 | Set the newly created databases to allow file restore: set-mailboxdatabase <db name> -AllowFileRestore:$true
6 | Copy in the database, logs and catalog data to the correct folders (those specified in step 4)
7 | Mount the databases one at a time: mount-database <DatabaseName>
8 | Once the database is mounted we can now re-home all the users with mail data there: get-mailbox -database <OriginalDatabaseName> | ?{$_.ObjectClass -NotMatch ‘(SystemAttendantMailbox|ExOldDbSystemMailbox)’} | set-mailbox -database <RecoveryDatabaseName>
9 | If you’re running with multiple copies then keep in mind that you’ve only got one live copy of the new database. You can either add a copy of the new database or do what we did and move them to databases on your new DAG that (hopefully) has multiple copies already. If you choose to go the route of moving them to existing healthy databases the command is: get-mailbox -database <RecoveryDatabaseName> | new-moverequest -TargetDatabase <HealthyDatabaseName>
Comments and/or questions are welcome in the comments. I just wrote this from memory so if I missed anything along the way please let me know.
Goodbye Posterous
I like to try new things and back in October I decided to try moving my blog off of WordPress. Initially I tried Tumblr, which was decent but didn’t have all the features I was looking for. Then I found Posterous and was generally pretty happy with having my blog there. It was free, fast, stable and had all the features I wanted initially. Then I started having issues; e-mailing a picture would result in 3 or 4 identical posts with only 1 post having a good copy of the picture. I also experienced occasional timeout issues when hitting my site but can’t really complain about that as it’s free.
I figured if I was moving back to WordPress I would take the opportunity to move everything over to jerephil.com, a domain name I registered about a year ago. I’ve been using jerephil as a username for the past two years or so and I have yet to find a site where the username is taken. So everything, except some of the posts I made on Posterous, is now located here. The important ones are done and I’ll be moving the pictures across as time allows.
ISA 2006 SP1 Configuration with Exchange 2010
ISA 2006 SP1 Configuration with Exchange 2010
While ISA 2006 SP1 includes a Client Access Web Publishing Wizard for both Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007, the wizard does not have any knowledge of Exchange 2010. Exchange 2010 includes the following changes with respect to its URLs and virtual directories:
- Exchange 2010 Client Access Servers (CAS) no longer utilize the /exchweb virtual directory.
- Exchange 2010 CAS no longer utilizes the /unifiedmessaging virtual directory.
- Exchange 2010 CAS provides a new solution for managing end user configuration (e.g. Unified Messaging settings), end user self-service (e.g. message tracking), and organization-specific activities (e.g. records discovery), known as the Exchange Control Panel. This service is provided via the /ecp virtual directory and is accessible directly or through Outlook Web Access.
- Exchange 2010 CAS does not render data from legacy mailboxes. Instead, depending on the protocol and/or client, Exchange 2010 CAS will either proxy, redirect, or provide direct access to the appropriate version of Exchange (Exchange 2003 Front-End, Exchange 2007 CAS, or Exchange 2003/2007 Mailbox). Redirected clients access their information via a new namespace, legacy.contoso.com. For more information, please see the post entitled, Transitioning Client Access to Exchange 2010.
As a result of these changes, certain modifications must be made to the rules created by the Client Access Web Publishing Wizard to support Exchange 2010. This article, the final one in my upgrade series, will discuss how to configure ISA 2006 SP1 as part of your deployment of Exchange 2010 in your existing Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 environments so that you may successfully allow your clients to connect to both Exchange versions.
Note: For more information on the detailed steps required to support coexistence process see my first blog article in the series, TechNet, or within the Deployment Assistant.
While this article will not cover every scenario possible (e.g. specifics on each authentication solution), it will provide basic steps that you can follow to ensure you have a successful deployment.
Hit the via link to read the whole article. Personally I’m a big fan of Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 but for those who still have ISA 2006 for some odd reason this article should prove helpful.
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Archiving and Retention
Archiving and Retention
As the volume of e-mail continues to grow within organizations, the need to systematically archive this information has become a growing priority. Archiving can provide users a better e-mail experience by making space in a user’s mailbox, which can result in improved performance. Archiving also helps the organization to address compliance and legal electronic discovery requirements by making e-mail easy to manage and search. To address these needs, Exchange Server 2010 now features new archiving capabilities that combine with other enhanced mailbox management features, including advanced, multi-mailbox search, legal hold and granular retention polices to provide a comprehensive solution. Easy-to-use and deploy, this built-in functionality helps organizations reduce reliance on separate archiving solutions and simplify legal and compliance processes.
Functional Descriptions
Personal Archive: An additional mailbox associated with a user’s primary mailbox. It appears alongside the primary mailbox folders in Outlook. The user has direct access to e-mail within the archive just as they do to their primary mailbox. Users can drag and drop PST files into the Personal Archive, for easy online access – and efficient discovery by the organization. Users can also move e-mail items from the primary archive to the Personal Archive automatically, using Retention Polices, to reduce the size and improve the performance of the primary mailbox. In addition, users can search both their Personal Archive and primary mailbox simultaneously using Outlook.
Retention policies: These apply retention settings to specific items or folders in a mailbox. Policies are configured by the Exchange Administrator and are displayed inside each e-mail, with a header that states the applied policy and delete date. These headers make it easier for end users to identify when an e-mail is set to expire and apply a new expiration policy if the e-mail should be retained for a longer full stop. Administrators can also set a default policy that can move messages from the primary mailbox to the Archive automatically.
Multi-Mailbox Search: Multi-mailbox searches of mailbox items, including e-mail, attachments, calendar items, tasks, and contacts as well as IRM-protected files. Multi-mailbox search works simultaneously across both primary mailboxes and Personal Archives with an easy-to-use control panel. This enables authorised HR, legal and compliance users to perform searches without reliance on IT. For legal discovery purposes, mail located through a search can be copied and moved to a specified mailbox or external store, as defined by the administrator, for further investigation. Advanced filtering capabilities include: sender, receiver, expiry policy, message size, sent/receive date, cc/bcc, and regular expressions.
Legal Hold: Immediate preservation of a user’s deleted and edited mailbox items (e-mail, appointments, tasks, etc.) from both their primary mailbox and Personal Archive. Litigation Hold can be set on individual mailboxes or across the enterprise and includes an option that automatically alerts users that a hold has been placed on their mailbox.
I tried to post the link to this as a comment on someone’s blog but it stripped it out so I decided to post it here so they have an idea of what I was talking about.
