This week’s interesting collection of links!
Everyone that manages email has most likely run into the following problem once before.
Someone has requested that you create a group so everyone can email them for a specific project that they are working on. You create the group and say “You’re all set”. They go to select the new group from the address list and the group isn’t there. Duh, you forgot to update the offline address list.
There are two ways you can do this, one is using the MMC and the other is using PowerShell. Now I have made it my goal to completely manage Exchange 2007 from the command line. I used to do everything else from the command line, but I was still going to the MMC to update the Offline Address Lists. So today I got sick of waiting for the MMC, so I looked up the cmdlet and found out it was quite simple.
The command that you want is Update-OfflineAddressBook. Now how simple is that. Here are some usage examples:
Update-OfflineAddressBook –Identity “Default Offline Address Book”
or
Update-OfflineAddressBook –Identity “California Address Book” –DomainController “ca.testing.com”
Links:
This week's collection of interesting links!
Mike from the Active Directory Services Team has posted a good article about deploying Legal Notices and keeping the formatting.
You can read it here.
Microsoft released the SharePoint Capacity Planning tool. This is an update for System Center Capacity Planning Tool. SSCP 2007 already supported Exchange 2007 and it lets you export the topology to Visio or hardware configuration to Excel. It also allows you to model server performance and end-user response time.
The SharePoint tool gives you the same information except it's information is related to SharePoint.
You need to have SSCP 2007 installed to use the SharePoint Capacity Planning tool.
Information Links
Download Links
This seems quite interesting when you have multiple companies using the same Exchange server.
View the White Paper here.
Summary
This white paper provides the information that you need in order to
configure Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with multiple address lists so
different groups of users can have their own address list and secure
those address lists so that groups of users can only see their specific
address list.
Much of the information in this white paper originally appeared as individual Help topics in the Exchange Server 2007 Help.
In this white paper, we have consolidated the information that you need
to deploy and manage segregated address lists in one central location.
We have also provided sample scripts, which can be modified to fit your
environment, to help automate the provisioning of virtual organizations
and users.
While building a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 server, you can't specify the location of the Microsoft SQL Embedded Edition (MSEE) databases. As any good admin would do, I wanted to separate my data from my system files. So I set out to move the databases that SharePoint uses. Here is the step by step I used to move them.
- Download and install the Microsoft SQL Server Native Client and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Command Line Query Utility from here.
- Open up services.msc and stop the following services:
- Windows SharePoint Services Administration
- Windows SharePoint Services Search
- Windows SharePoint Services Timer
- Windows SharePoint Services Tracing
- Windows SharePoint Services VSS Writer
- Open a command prompt and go to the following location:
- C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\binn
- Enter the following command
- To get the list of your SharePoint databases enter the following commands
- select name from sys.databases
- go
- You can now move any of the databases that start with SharePoint_ or with WSS_. You start moving the databases by typing the following command to detach the database:
- exec sp_detach_db "<sharepoint_database_name>"
- Open up Windows Explorer and browse to the following location:
- %SystemRoot%\sysmsi\ssee\mssql.2005\mssql\Data
- Copy both the .mdf and .ldf files for the database you just detached from SQL to your desired location.
- Now attach the database by entering the following command at the command prompt.
- exec sp_attach_db @dbname = N'<Database_Name>', @filename1 =
N'<New_Location>\<Database_Name>.mdf', @filename2 =
N'<New_Location>\<Database_Name>_Log.ldf'
- Repeat steps 6 through 9 for each database you want to move.
- Type Exit to close the SQL Command Line Utility.
- Start the following services:
- Windows SharePoint Services Administration
- Windows SharePoint Services Search
- Windows SharePoint Services Timer
- Windows SharePoint Services Tracing
- Windows SharePoint Services VSS Writer
- Verify you can now access your SharePoint sites.
Man I love PowerShell! Not only does it help me managing the systems at work, it comes in handy at home too!
While doing my taxes for the State of Michigan, I needed to find out how many days I lived in my new house. I was thinking that it would suck to try to calculate that accurately. Then I got to thinking, I can do that in PowerShell! Is there anything that PowerShell can't do?
I fired up PowerShell and typed the following at the command line.
PS C:\> $house = [System.DateTime] "6/17/2007" - [System.DateTime] "12/31/2007"
PS C:\> $house.TotalDays
-197
Hmmm. I lived in my house for 197 days. It doesn't seem that long. However, my house isn't as nice as Joe's house!
Cool new tool by Microsoft to help you troubleshoot IPsec.
Get it here.
Overview
Microsoft IPsec Diagnostic Tool checks for common network
problems on the host machine and if found, suggests repair commands.
Further, it collects IPsec policy information on the system and parses
the IPsec logs to deduce why a failure might have happened. Beyond
IPsec, it offers trace collection for VPN, NAP client, Windows
Firewall, Group policy updates, Wireless and System events. The
Diagnostic Report generated by the tool is conclusive and is derived
from the system logs collected by the tool during its analysis phase.
These logs are self sufficient to diagnose any network related issues.
For further assistance, the logs would require to be shared with
Network Administrators or Microsoft support.
The Performance team put together a good post about Windows Server 2008 Upgrade Paths, Resource Limits and Registry Values.
Check it out here.
It has been a while since I last posted up here something relevant. I have been super busy and promise to start posting on a regular basis. Some of the things that have been keeping me busy are....
- Changing Jobs. I am no longer a SMB consultant. I am now a network administrator for a defense contractor.
- I bought a house in June. I know that isn't recent, but it keeps me busy.
- I started a technology company with a really good friend, and have been working really hard to get things going
- And of course, general family and friend engagements.
I hope to start posting this weekend as it is a holiday weekend. So stay tuned.
Pricing isn't that bad for 2008.
Quick Shot:
- Windows Server 2008 Standard: $999 (with five Client Access Licenses, or CALs)
- Windows Server 2008 Enterprise: $3,999 (with 25 CALs)
- Windows Server 2008 Datacenter: $2,999 (per processor)
- Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems: $2,999 (per processor)
- Windows Web Server 2008: $469
- Windows Server 2008 Standard without Hyper-V: $971 (with five CALs)
- Windows Server 2008 Enterprise without Hyper-V: $3,971 (with 25 CALs)
- Windows Server 2008 Datacenter without Hyper-V: $2,971 (per processor)
Link
Great post by the exchange team!
Read it here!
Exchange Server 2007 uses new transport logs file formats that are easy to parse with one of our favorite Swiss Army knife tools, "Log Parser". Log Parser (also referred to as LP in the rest of this blog post) is commonly used for analyzing IIS log files or Windows Event logs. This first post will get you started on how to use Log Parser in the context of analyzing Exchange 2007 transport logs. The second part will lead you in-depth on how extract the essence of the log as it provides a lot of valuable information.