It's All About The Pentiums

Weird Al Yankovic cracks me up.

What's you password

Me: What's the admin password for XP
Client: I don't know.
Me: Any guesses?
Client: I have no idea.

Now 95% of the time password is blank so it's easy, but that 5% can be a real problem. Here's a nice little video on youtube about cracking a password in XP.

MSN Toolbar and Windows Desktop Search have gotten a divorce... and I'm glad

I just notices that the MSN toolbar and Windows Desktop search are no longer a bundled product. I can now have my desktop search without having to deal with the MSN toolbar. Yippee! For those who don't use a desktop search tool or are using Google's I would suggest you try the Windows Desktop Search tool. I have it setup to index my entire drive. I can find anything now. Here's the download link.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/desktopsearch/downloads/default.mspx#A1

SonicWALL is killing my Exchange BPA Update

I've done this enough times to know that when something doesn't work right the first time you figure out a work around or just try it again. If it happens again you need to go after root cause. Well in this weeks installment of "What's my SonicWALL blocking" we join our firewall as it prevents Exchange Best Practice Analyzer from updating. Symptoms are that the BPA gets to the end of it's update and just sits.... and sits.... and sits. When you kill the update it corrupts the XML config file and you have to uninstall & reinstall Exchange BPA. To allow updates to complete you need to TEMPORARILY disable prevention of Signature 3182 (Internet Explorer Nested OBJECT Tag Memory Corruption) on the SonicWALL. Run the Exchange BPA update and it should complete. You will also see a ton of Threats logged in the SonicWALL. After the update is complete I would recommend that your re-enable the prevention of 3182 after you do the update so your protected if you actually run across this threat.

Class, repeat after me.... I will not upgrade my system

There are so many reasons why you should rebuild a computer rather that upgrade it from a prior version of Windows. If you think about it you could have a computer that was originally built with Windows 95 that is now running XP through a series of upgrades. Can you upgrade from 98 to 2000?? I can't remember.... Anyway, when you upgrade you carry with you all the junk that you installed with your last operating system. That also includes all the problems you were having. One issue that took me a bit to figure out was why I had a workstation that you could not connect to the event viewer or regedit remotely. After working through all the troubleshooting steps that MSFT has me do I finally hit Q892192 and that solved the problem.
There is a reason you have a garage sale before you move. You just don't need to take all that stuff to your next house.

SBS 2003 SP1 won't sync AD during a Swing Migration

I was working through a Windows 2000 to SBS 2003 SP1 swing migration this weekend and when we did the dcpromo on the temp server is just would not sync AD. After digging around google for a while I found a troubleshooting guide for RPC Endpont Mapper problems. Running thought this guide showed that a bunch of ports were shutdown on the server. What???? So I checked windows firewall and sure enough it was locked down as tight as can be. Now I'm glad MSFT is securing their servers, but if I run dcpromo on a server it should open the required ports to allow it to work as a domain controller. This was a SBS 2003 SP1 server so I don't know if it is the same with a standard Windows 2003 server.

SonicWALL TZ170 and Exchange MS06-019

Those of you using a SonicWALL TZ170 with intrusion Prevention Service may be having issues receiving mail right now. Seems that SonicWALL released a signature at 13:39 today that is trying to combat the Exchange security flaw. Well they fixed it. They managed to shutdown all smtp traffic. You will see an error like this in your log file.

IPS Prevention Alert: SMTP Exchange Meeting Request Attempt, SID: 3233, Priority: Medium

Normally you can just disable this one alert and things would be fine, but it seems that you have to disable IPS completely to get mail flowing.

I'm on hold with SonicWALL right now..........

Exchange Message Limits

In today's world the default size restrictions that Exchange imposes on messages cause more trouble than they are worth. I'm not saying the limits should be removed, just reworked a little. Here's a great article to help you remember the EIGHT different locations that restrictions are configured.

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Set-Size-Limits-Messages.html

Offer your customers a backup mail service

Matthew Huynh posted a nice little how to on setting up a backup mail server for your clients on your server. It's a nice value add that I think we may start offering to our clients.

In addition to RBL's

One other helpful thing to prevent an open relay is to test using one of these free open Relay test sites

http://www.abuse.net/relay.html

http://www.ordb.org/ Be careful with this one because if you fail the open relay test they will add you to their black list.

Exchange store.exe is taking all my memory

Not really. MSFT has changed the way the memory usage is reported, so you need to make a little tweak to your monitoring. http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=867628