Month: August 2006

It’s easy enough to search the web for various instructions on how to do an offline defrag of your Exchange database. With SBS, an online defrag occurs every morning. However, that does not actually reduce the size of the .edb/.stm files. Performing an offline defrag is recommended, for example, after you have finished deleting a lot of old emails or purging old mailboxes. Here are the four basic steps I follow: 1. BackupYou can never have enough backups. I will first use NTBackup to create a full backup of the Exchange database. I will usually do the backup to a file … Continue reading Defragging Exchange in 4 easy steps!

I was totally blown away when I saw the clip of the Ukele player playing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. Now comes a juggler doing his thing to another Beatle’s song, “Golden Slumbers/Carry that Weight” — trust me, you will not be disappointed!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTtTSD7-Asw Enjoy!

In horse racing, they talk about winning the Triple Crown — one horse winning the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont and the Preakness in the same year. Likewise, in baseball, they talk about a batter wining the Triple Crown — one person who, at the end of the season, leads the league in most home runs, the hightest batting average, and the most runs batted in (RBI’s). In many ways, three (3) is a lucky number. In the Small Business Server (SBS) world, we often recommend to SBS newbies to take the time and go through the process of installing SBS a minimum of three times. Why is … Continue reading SBS and the Triple Crown

[Editor’s note] I have received several private responses on this post, many saying that deleting successful events may not be a good thing. Here’s one of the best examples why:  Let’s say you saw 10 unsuccessful events of someone trying to logon as Administrator, followed by a successful event of an Administraot logging on. What’s your conclusion? You would conclude that someone just hacked in on the 11th attempt. However, if you were filtering out or deleting all of the successful events, you would miss the fact that this hacker was eventually successful. Nonetheless, many people continually ask how to eliminate the successful events. I will leave this post up, if for no … Continue reading Tired of all those "Success Audit" event entries?

None of my SBS sites use the POP3 connector any longer, having migrated them to SMTP even before SBS2003 was released. However, there are still a lot of sites that continue to use it. What surprised me was that I always thought that you were pressing the POP3 connector service once you had more than 10-15 POP3 mailboxes. But I was recently told of sites with 40 to 50 POP3 mailboxes! So, the question came up: if you are migrating your SBS2003 server over to new hardware, can you copy and migrate over your POP3 connector user info? And the answer is …. Yes! … Continue reading Backing up/moving your POP3 connector settings

In the SBS 2003 Public Newsgroup, and probably most other newsgroups, we often walk a thin line when it comes to recommending 3rd party solutions and products. There are those who love Trend, and those who hate it. Same goes for anything Symantec, or Dell, or HP, or any other HW/SW vendor. One of the solutions that is constantly recommended is Jeff Middleton’s SBS Swing Migration. His process is perfect whether you are on SBS2003 and need to migrate to new hardware, or if you are on an older version of SBS, and wants to upgrade to SBS 2003 and implement new server hardware at the same time. … Continue reading Why use SBS Swing Migration?

At our local Tampa Bay SBS user group meeting, we were talking about what to do when you lose remote connection to your server, and the server needs to be rebooted. The common situation would be that you are using RWW to apply updates to your server, and one of the updates automatically restarts IIS. Say bye-bye to your RWW connection to your server. So one suggestion, which I really like, is that just prior to starting your update process, go to the command line of your server, and use the ‘at’ (scheduling) command and schedule a forced reboot for some 20 … Continue reading Protect yourself when updating your server remotely