September 2007 Archives

Introducing Major Change

Almost all projects experience change at some point and certainly all computer networks face changes, often on a daily basis, with the introduction of new security patches, drivers and other end user requests to infrastructure that enhance business productivity.

When change occurs, you need to record the information relating to the change, to help you to monitor and control the effect of that change on the project and on your network.

Major Change can help you maintain control, by giving you a way of recording all of the change information, in a clear and structured format.

Major Change helps you to record the:

Nature of the change being requested, such as a reboot of a server due to a new security patch being applied Impact of the change should it be approved Change approval details, and status of the approval
Change implementation schedule and date Current status of all changes.

http://www.majorchange.com

Powered by www.itgroove.net

I've been looking for something like this and now found it :)

http://www.codeplex.com/CKS

A sharepoint based community, forum, townhall - whatever, I'll be deploying it, somewhere, soon.

Don't mind me, just needed to store some valuable links for various Windows Eventlog parsers, etc.

X-Ways Forensics can convert EVT files to HTML, as tables with columns such as RecordNo DateGenerated TimeGenerated DateWritten TimeWritten EventID EventType LenEventData EventSource ComputerName
SID Strings.

That can e.g. be imported in MS Excel.

( http://www.x-ways.net/forensics/ )

Free: http://www.dmares.com/maresware/df.htm#EVENTLOG

Microsoft's Log Parser tool:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=890cd06b-abf8-4c25-91b2-f8d975cf8c07&displaylang=en

Thanks Larry!

Ok, this isn't about WSS 2.0 - just a simple statement that if you wanted to be able to search documents in a document library in WSS 2.0, you need a full Microsoft SQL Server database behind it, not MSDE.

Jump to WSS 3.0...

I'm too lazy to write my own and am storing this for myself really, to remember. But, here is the borrowed reference (http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-305250.html)

WSS 3.0 has a basic search feature that will allow users to search for content. This is a big change from previous WSS versions, which required WSS to be configured to run on SQL Server 2000, using its Full-Text Indexing engine. Another important change is that WSS 3.0 will search in subsites, while the previous version of WSS only searched in the current site. The following list summarizes the search functionality in WSS, when combined with SQL Server:

Finds information of any type, stored in the current site, or a subsite. Provides free-text searching in documents, files, and all list content. SharePoint will create a special Windows SharePoint Services Search (MSSearch.exe) in Windows 2003. This service must be running before WSS can use it for indexing and searching. The steps to configure WSS to use this search feature are described in the following Try It Out.

.......

And of course you can search in MOSS 2007 - in many more wonderful ways as it must have a real SQL server behind it.

5.7.1 is the hardest to troubleshoot I find (take my experience with a grain of salt). In fact, most times I see this particular one, it is that the server you were trying to deliver to, had problems. I’ve seen…

1. The server was in a midservice startup and rejected, temporarily, any new connections, throwing back a 5.7.1 until it was finished starting up
2. They are having bigger problems, and rejected for any number of reasons
3. I *believe* that sometimes, some mailservers use this as their default response when they are rejecting the sender server (AIDPs). The 5.7.1 response is kind of a lie, and in fact, they are rejecting because AIDP is on a black list (doubtful) on an untrusted subnet (like Shaw) or perhaps even a bogus PTR record

So, check the domain (aidp) for dnsstuff.com test, health on mxtoolbox.com and from the Exchange Server, telnet to their mail server (find out which one via nslookup) and see if it rejects your SMTP connection (won’t stay open or show a greeting) or perhaps it spits back saying it doesn’t like your reverse lookup match.

More...

5.7.1: Possible causes:

1)General access denied, sender access denied - the sender of the message does not have the privileges required to complete delivery.

2)You are trying to relay your mail through another SMTP server and it does not permit you to relay.

3)The recipient might have mailbox delivery restrictions enabled. For example, a recipient's mailbox delivery restriction was set to receive from a distribution group only and non-members' e-mail will be rejected with this error.

4)For Exchange Server 2003, a distribution group can be configured to restrict mail delivery from unauthenticated users. Mail that is sent by using an unauthenticated SMTP session are rejected.

Thanks Louis.

http://www.imgburn.com/

Just a reminder for myself.

Exchange 2003 Enterprise allows up to 4 storage groups, with up to 5 databases within (db's share the transaction logs of their storage group).

However, there is a '5th' storage group...

You can create up to four additional storage groups as needed for a maximum of five storage groups per server (with one of the storage groups, called the recovery storage group, being reserved for database recovery operations).

Don't mind me, just bookmarking something. :)

Found an Inexpensive Exchange SMTP Disclaimer Apphttp://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/Ninja-Disclaimers/

Haven't had an opportunity to try it yet but I seem to get asked for this all the time. .... like anyone reads the disclaimer. :)

I've seen these before, as recently as a coworkers (Hi Louis) desktop so it was worth documenting.

Issue 1:
1. When connecting to OWA (Exchange Webmail), when composing a new message, a red x appears in the body area of the message, as though it wasn't accepting an activex control or otherwise. Popup blockers were not to blame.

... Had to choose options in OWA and download and install the S/MIME control. Now, creating a standard email should not requiring a tool needed for signing or encrypting an email but ... whatever ... it worked, first time

Issue 2:
2. After getting the above control working, then IE7 would crash completely when I clicked send after composing a message (Come on Microsoft, you can do better than this by now!?).

... had to install a patch on the Exchange Server (2003) in order to stop this problem from happening (did not require a reboot for those of you wondering). The Patch

Argh, this keeps happening to my dad (and me on occasion).

Vista just decides (seemingly, pretty sure I'm not doing the keystroke combo) to change the keyboard language from the default setting of US English to Canadian French (thus I get e's with accents, etc. - seriously, those are as lame as Poutine! :)

Anyways, the fix is the Left ALT+Shift...

Alternatively, to see this changing happening, go into the control panel and choose Regional and Language Options. Then Keyboards and Languages and press the Change Keyboards button. I found the most useful was to have the language bar "docked in the taskbar" and the checkbox for "show text labels on the lanaguage bar" checked.

Dad, are you reading this? :)