I had a customer request to disable ActiveSync for all Exchange 2007 users and only allow active sync when an administrator enables the feature for a specific user. Below are the steps I developed to determine the devices that are enabled and how to disable ActiveSync for accounts with no devices paired with the mailbox. To automate the process, all you need to do is create a scheduled task on one of the Exchange servers to run daily. Happy Exchanging!!!! 1. We want to run this command to get ... [More]

A Nifty Trick to Backing-up AD Integrated DNS Zones Purpose                 A few years ago I had a customer that lost their DNS databases that were stored in AD. They asked me if there was any way to recover this data without performing an authoritative restore. That got me thinking of what we could use native to DNS that could provide backups and restores that would be affected by Active Directory as little as pos... [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]

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]

                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]

                It is often needful to take a long and persistent network capture to collect data from a server or set of servers. Often you are looking for a problem and cannot predict its occurrence. In these cases it can sometime be difficult to find the right methods to capture this data without over whelming you servers. I will attempt to give suggestions on how to best do this to get the data needed. My preferred me... [More]

Using and Installing the Telnet Client                 Telnet is one of the greatest network troubleshooting tools available to us. Unfortunately the telnet client is not installed inherently anymore in Server 2008, Vista, or windows 7. You can however still install and enable this feature. (See "Telnet Client Not Included")   What is the Telnet Client?          &... [More]