After patching a box or installing new software in an environment it is important to ensure your environment returns to a stable state. Most of the time, this sheet or something similar should be used when testing changes or updates. To ensure an change or update doesn't affect your production environment it is always recommended to use a development lab environment before rolling any changes into production. Please feel free to add additional information to this spreadsheet. &nbs... [More]

Don’t you hate when you have large distribution groups in your environment with enabled and disabled accounts as members and when you send email messages to the account NDRs are sent throughout the environment. As may or may not know, there are options in Exchange on how to handle NDRs for distribution groups. My issue is with the options provided by Exchange, for example enabling certain features against a DG could remove valid NDRs or create a lot of false positives. To combat this probl... [More]

Here is a quick guide of how to unregister and register a mailbox for Auto Accept.   Note: The cscripts are found on the Exchange server under Program Files\Exchsrvr\Agents\AutoAccept     Unregister the mailboxes   The first thing we need to do is get a list of the AAA mailboxes. To get this list we will run the command below that will output the list to a text file.   cscript registermailbox.vbs /f:name of test file /t:domain\AAA account   ... [More]

                Many times I have found it needful to be able to find what adapters are loaded on a server, whether they are not showing up in device manager, I wanted to validate whether network teaming was enabled, I wanted to see if some firewall miniport driver was installed, I wanted to see if the local Antivirus added anything, or any other reason. Here are some steps I have found helpful when validating what Networ... [More]

I always find that my customers hit a stumbling block when it comes to the flexibility of move public folders. There are a lot of good articles on the internet that helps admins move public folders and I cover some of those options in this blog however, in large environments I couldn’t find any posts that provided the flexibility needed for replication of PFs. In light of this need, I created a script that allows admins to modify the PFs that want to migrate with the ability to choose whic... [More]

If you are looking for an unbiased view of Windows Virtual PC, don’t read this!  I love(d) Virtual PC 2007 (henceforth VPC2K7) and was very excited to hear about a new version because there are some things that I wanted to see fixed (like the addition of USB support and 64-bit guest OS support).  When Windows Virtual PC released (henceforth WVPC), I was excited about some of the enhancements but very, very disappointed with what was lost.  Here’s a brief look at what w... [More]

We know that we can set domain password policies through a group policy tied to the domain NC head.  We know that up until 2008, this policy becomes the singular effective password policy for all domain user accounts.  This means that even if we create a group policy and tie it to an OU lower down in the structure, say an Admins OU, this will not affect domain user policy - even for thos admin accounts in that OU.  So, natively, we can’t set one policy for our users and... [More]