MattRVBC

Hi Guys, Quick question, I'm preparing to upgrade from Exchange 2003 to 2007 and have come across an issue reported by the Best Proactive Analyser tool. The tool reports findings of active directory connectors on both domain controllers which must be decommissioned before exchange 2007 can be installed. After reviewing the following article from our friends at MS (One or more Active Directory Connector servers were found) the recommended action is to "Remove All ADC Service Components" which I'm reluctant to do considering that the connectors are on domain controllers. Has anyone been here before? Thanks Matt

RAID 5 was purely an example of disk striping that I'm familiar with and was using this to compare the advantages with RAID6. Apologies for any inconvenience, this didn't obviously read as I hoped.

Utter nonsense. Modern versions of IIS are no more or less vulnerable than any other web server. Microsoft don't use Apache either but some their peering services do. IIS combined with a windows OS is not great in terms or security especially in a public facing environment (you should see the results of penn tests). In terms of your "Utter Nonsense" comment neither did I say Apache was any better than IIS in terms of vulnerabilities. This was purely to point out a fact that Microsoft do use Apache servers in some instances as well as there own product and that there are alternatives to Microsoft products available. Sorry for offending a Microsoft fan club member.

NO! Exposing a DC to the public\internet is not a good idea. This leaves the host vulnerable to exploit and attack and with the high number of Microsoft vulnerabilities and exploits available I wound strongly suggest you re-consider. I suspect that the vendor would require a web service to run thus allowing for potential MITM and SQL Injection attacks. IIS is very vulnerable, even Microsoft use Apache! Also take into consideration data protection and what would happen if sensitive\personal data when missing from the DC? Matt

OK, for example ping from a host to a server in a certain area (via a switch or router) to determine what response times you are getting from the ICMP request. Do the same test on another host passing traffic via a different switch\router and compare the response times. If one is higher than the other then this would suggest an issue with a switch or router. If both repose times are pretty high and your certain our are passing traffic through different switches\routers then I will look into performing some packet sniffing using wire shark to identify what tyope of traffic is swamping your network. IF you are a VLAN site then perform the same test on the various VLANS and compare the results. You can ping external sites (BBC - Homepage) although is suspect that there will be some proxy server, filtering system or load balancing in place which may have an effect on the results. Other possible causes could be a high amount of broadcast traffic or even a broadcast storm which is putting heavy load on your network. Wireshark will identify this for you if this is the case.

Hi Luke, This is one of the solutions I'm considering along with some others. I was looking for comments from users to try and gage there reactions and reviews of the solution they currently have in place. At the moment I have around 10 months to go on my current license so will investigate further come renewal. Thanks Matt

Slightly confused here, speedtest.net will show you internet speeds from the gateway and the selected speed test server. IF it is your network generally that is running slow then i suggest performing some test internally to see where the issues are. Test your ping repose times from various places and see what response times you are getting back, if these are quite high then investigate using a packet sniffer (https://www.wireshark.org/download.html) to see what traffic is present. If your running on a single subnet then there is a possibility of allot of broadcast traffic or even a broadcast storm, again use the above packet sniffer will tell you what traffic is is in transport. Hope this helps Matt

I mainly use a RAID1 mirror set for the OS (all be in not 600GB although that would leave lots and lots of disk space for heavy Microsoft patches) and RAID5 for data storage etc. allowing me to configure a hot-spare to speed up the disk replacement process. The advantage of RAID5 is that you have the distributed parity unlike RAID4 which is one of the main reasons why I use 5. Not really used RAID6 although the same concept applies but will allow for 2 disk failures from what I remember.

Hi Guys, I'm looking at replacing my AV solution due to endless issues which have resulted in allot of time being wasted. Ideally the solution needs to cover client AV, Firewall and device control and be centrally managed (the usual). If any of you guys are using a solution that covers the above then please let me know you thoughts\views. Thanks Matt

I did investigate this briefly a few months ago and decided against it in the end. The main reason being the fact that this would be a public facing proxy which would be potentially accessible to anyone on the internet therefore wide open to potential attack and exploit.

Hi Guys, I have a Dell PowerEdge 2850 with a Perc4e controller running 2 disk arrays (RAID1 and RAI5). This morning one of the disks attached to the RAID1 array was flashing green then orange (2 lights for each drive, top light being a solid green and the bottom flashing green and orange). OpenManage shows that Array Disk 0:1 is Degraded which wasn't really an issue at all and can be simply fixed. However, after powering down the server and booting into the raid configuration for the Perc4E controller all disks show as on-line without any errors which caused some slight confusion. Could this be a predicted failure? Thanks Matt

I have had endless issues with WSUS although at the moment this seems to be working quite well. In this instance it sounds like the WSUS sever cannot retrieve the updates/synchronise with windows update. This first thing I would check is connectivity to windows update, are you connecting via a proxy? If so then try bypassing the proxy directly through your firewall (http 80 and https 443 ports required) and see if this resolves your issue. Depending on your proxy/firewall check your logs to see if any traffic is being blocked either by firewall/proxy rules or any IPS you may have running. Hope this helps, let me know how you get on. Cheers Matt

Hi Guys, With exchange 2003 coming to end of life I'm looking at upgrading to exchange 2007 as I have all the licences purchased etc. after reading and advice I have received I will need to run both 2003 and 2007 side by side and up the domain and forest levels to a minimum of 2003. I have some exchange experience but I'm not 100% confident with completing an upgrade. Could anyone point me in the right direction of a good practice guide or share any pointers on the best way to achieve the upgrade. Cheers Matt

I have 2 server 2003 domain controllers which have an issue with the task scheduler service becoming disabled after being manually changed to enabled. Initially I presumed this was down to group policy being applied which is not the case (Moved all servers into there own OU and block policy inheritance). According to RSOP the only policy affecting Task Scheduler service is the "Domain Controllers Baseline Policy" of which does not have any configuration options for the task scheduler. I have trolled through the logs and all I can see is the service start and then service stop events. Nothing indicating why this has been stopped. All suggestion welcomed???? Cheers Matt

Patch save are pretty good!

This was an issue Kaspersky enterprise and with the device control, it seems that when running under policy and this functionality is disabled you cannot access any removable media. Issue with corrupt local database.

Im still having problems with this, the issue seems to be PC related as the same issue applies to various profiles.

Hi Guys, Sorry for the long period of time in getting back to you. Since I last posted I have a new machine which did work fine for sometime however I'm now back with the annoying "Initiating Remote Connection" issues again on Windows 7 Professional SP1. Tried various things and still no Joy! on the plus side it works on mac! Matt

I suspect group policy as recennt changes have been made to system services within group policy. Although there is nothing that seems to stand out!

Confused! When trying to open any USB sticks or external HDD's windows 7 is producing the following error. You don't currently have permissions to access this folder. Cant set security or taker ownership of removable media and therefore don't understand why this is happening.........

Thanks Guys, The issue I ave is a little strange, Im using RSAT on my Windows 7 PC which I use to apply GPO. The problem being is that system services seem to have different permissions set on the client as supposed to the GPO which I cant figure out. At the moment the permissions on the client are set the everyone which leaves me vulnerable to service escalation attacks. Any suggestions welcome. Thanks Matt

Hi All, Is anyone aware of any Group Policy issues with Windows 7 on a 2003 domain? I ave read mixed stories relating to this subject and I currently have several machines across our network that have some parts of a GPO applied but not others (Windows service permissions being the major one). For some reason the settings within the applied GPO don't match the workstation which only seems to be apparent on Windows 7 and not XP Pro. After reading this TechNet article it seems that you can create windows 7 policies with either Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7 + RSAT and them export them and import them into a 2003 domain\environment? has anyone else come across this issues end exported policies? Cheers Matt

Personally I would wait for 8.1 which addresses the navigation problems which the majority of windows users are missing. Will probably suit your users more if they have the traditional start menu that has always been present in previous releases. If not then claims shell is available for windows 8 which works well.

Admin only, after our annual security compliance audit's both Bios passwords and local admin passwords vary between departments\directorates.

Lansweeper is excellent, i have used the for years for inventories and audits and it is brilliant, i think the costs only come into play when you use the premium tools however we do pay a superscription and it is worth every penny. I don't think it is actually that expensive if i recall.