Month: October 2006

Microsoft released a little addin for Outlook which you can use to forward junk mail not caught by the builtin filter to them for analysis (and hopefully improving the filter): "The Junk E-mail Reporting Tool submits e-mail to Microsoft when you explicitly choose to do so. If you receive a junk e-mail and want to report it to us for analysis, first select the e-mail in Outlook and then click the junk e-mail button on your tool bar. You will see a pop-up window asking whether you want to report the selected e-mail to Microsoft and its affiliates. When you … Continue reading Outlook Junk Mail Reporting Tool

October 2006 has 5 Sundays, and this leads to a bug in Exchange 2003 manifesting itself where user's meetings are moved a day ahead. The hotfix (and a bit of info) is available here. Share this post: email it! | digg it! | bookmark it! | live it!

Here's a simple trick that I've used countless times for enabling remote desktop on an XP or 2003 machine remotely. Windows 2000 requires a service to be installed, so this won't help there. Just connect to the remote machine with regedit (or use reg.exe from the command line if you want), browse to  HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server, and set or create fDenyTSConnections (a DWORD) to 0. Share this post: email it! | digg it! | bookmark it! | live it!

A few months ago I posted an article with steps to configure Windows IAS and Cisco IOS for authentication to Active Directory via RADIUS. I wanted to follow up on that with a quick overview of how to setup a PIX for management access authentication via Windows IAS and Active Directory. All of the steps for configuring IAS are identical, so I’m not going to cover that again. Remember that if you have a failover pair to add the standby partner to IAS as well. This example was built on a PIX 7.1 box, it will work on 7.X and … Continue reading How to Authenticate against Active Directory from a Cisco PIX

Cisco has a very cool tool which they call the output interpreter (requires CCO login). I haven’t used it in a while, but when I went to use it the other day, I discovered that it has been significantly improved since my last visit. It now links every single command in the device’s configuration to the relevant documentation, as well as provides security recommendations and numerous other useful pieces of information depending on what you give it. Giving it the output of sh tech (aka show tech-support) includes just about everything about the switch/router/etc, so that’s definitely the way to … Continue reading Cisco Output Interpreter Tool

Backup Exec (10.1 at least) has an annoying (and undocumented) bug when it comes to restoring to an Exchange 2003 Recovery Storage Group. When you go to restore a mail store to a recovery storage group, BE goes along for a couple minutes and then fails with error "V-79-57344-65280 – Unable to restore the selected Microsoft Exchange database 'MailStoreNameHere' because it is currently mounted. Use the Exchange System Manager to dismount it, and then retry the job.". The whole point of the recovery storage group is to restore user data without dismounting the production store, so this doesn't make a … Continue reading Backup Exec Exchange 2003 Bug Workaround

Another one from the questions I answer all the time on the newsgroups – what do I do when a domain controller is permanently failed and needs to be removed from Active Directory? The first thing to do is to make sure the DC is really gone – wipe it. You don’t want it coming back up after all this for whatever reason. The second thing is don’t just delete the DC from AD Users & Computers or AD Sites & Services. There are a bunch of things under the hood that have to take place first. Microsoft has several … Continue reading Manually Removing a Domain Controller from Active Directory