Large tokens can wreak havoc on an organization.  For an Exchange environment, it can be devastating. Some common problems that will occur include: Event 2020, “The server was unable to allocate from the system paged pool because the pool is empty” in the application event log Event 333, “An I/O operation initiated by the Registry failed unrecoverably. The Registry could not read in or write out or flush one of the files that contain the system's image of the Registry... [More]

Recently a question came up in the newsgroups about what the difference is between the set of partitions on a domain controller and the set of partitions on a global catalog server.  I wanted to take the opportunity to include the answer here and expand upon it slightly. The question specifically was, “In a multi-domain environment, what is the main difference between the partitions on a domain controller that is also a global catalog server, versus other domain controllers that are ... [More]

In this post I cover the steps on how to enable Send As permissions for a security group that is mail-enabled. Since you want to limit the amount of security groups your users are members of, we will walk through the steps of allowing the members of a mail enabled security group to have Send As permissions for the group. Note: You need to make the group a security group to allow members send as permission using the steps below but, in most cases mail-enabled groups should be distribution gro... [More]

Setting up a Solid NLB Cluster Purpose                 I often run across failing NLB clusters, and administrator with many questions. Like with many technologies, I find NLB to best be kept simple, it does not require some grand configuration, and whitepapers only intending to explain all you options, often mislead you into configuring things wrong, or more detailed than is needed. In this article, I intend to shar... [More]

Did you ever want to get mailbox item size in Exchange 2003 based off users in a specific OU and not based off the mailbox server the users reside on? If so you’re in luck :). What I have done is add some code in a VBScript that will gather all the users in an OU and compare those users against a list of mailbox servers that are specified in the script. Most of the script’s content was taken from this site: http://www.computerhope.com/htmcolor.htm . Since the script is comparing user... [More]

Tackling IPSEC Purpose                 IPSEC is one of the most useful and sometimes most confusing protocols in modern technology. It seems that to understand IPSEC and its appliance you have to teach you mind to think in a different way than it is used to. Where normally we just look at making a network connection as a ping, with IPSEC we really have to delve into Winsocks and the direction of network packets with... [More]

Well, we’ve made it through the debug logs for normal mode and merge mode and now it is on to replace mode and time to answer our original question, “In replace mode, when does the user configuration portion of policies which apply to the computer object get applied.  Is it applied when the computer starts up?  Or is it applied when a user logs on?” This post is part 3 of a 3 part series where we are examining the debug output for each policy processing mode: Loopback Policy Proce... [More]