s123

What exactly is the problem that you're getting with send/receive? Is it outlook you are using with Exchange? If so what version? If you're using Outlook then so long as the client can resolve the name of the Exchange server and access the various websites that Exchange creates (the autodiscover site and the one it uses to distribute the offline address book) then it should be fine. To check your external DNS is working, you can run this command: nslookup -q=mx yourdomain.com This should return the MX records for your domain, check that the IP address is correct i.e. not your old server and it should be either your new server or just your public IP which should then port forward to your Exchange Server. All depends on exactly what the problem is though you're getting with clients. Steve.

I used to use Ethanol when teachers wrote on the board with permanant markers rather than dry wipe ones, never did any harm at all. That should work for the paint too, any alcohol based cleaner would in fact, the boards are pretty resilient things.

The thing with SQL server is that you connect to the server first, then tell it which database you want to access rather than access where you just open the database file and start playing with it. A good website for showing what it looks like is here: ConnectionStrings.com - Forgot that connection string? Get it here! This wil tell you what the connection strings look like for each version of SQL server, this page is for 2008: SQL Server 2008 Connection String Samples - ConnectionStrings.com SQL server is quite a bit more complicated than Access as it allows you to set proper security on the database etc, also are you trying to access the database remotely? If so you will need to enable the TCP/IP protocol in the SQL server configuration manager before you are able to connect to the SQL server. Hope this helps a bit, quite hard explaining SQL server in a single post :-) Let me know if there's more info you need.

It wouldn't have been the certificate issue as that didn't affect updating from the internet, just from the enterprise console, but Sophos does have some problems upgrading very old versions of it's software sometimes so maybe that's what the problem was. If some credentials work and others don't, you can confirm which ones you're meant to be using by emailing [email protected]

You should always have the firewall turned on and just make exceptions for the things you need, the Windows 2008 firewall has nice pre-built in exceptions for things like AD Domain Services, so leave it on and just allow the minumum through that you can. Turning off firewalls is just asking for trouble, especially with malware such as Conficker running around. Ideally you should have it on the clients too, with file and print sharing (between clients) disabled, this stops so much malware from spreading but most people just blanket allow file sharing to all machines regardless of whether they actually need it, which is why so many people were burned so bad with conficker. This is coming from a lot of experience (I work for an AV vendor) sorting out Conficker/Sality etc and it may be more of a pain to set up initially and get your rules just right, but you'll be sitting nice and smug when the bloke down the road gets a file infector or conficker all over his network and yours is all nice and safe :-) Steve.

There were no reported problems with updates yesterday from Sophos, are you still having issues? Usually when updates fail on machines updating directly from Sophos clearing the following out helps: Remove contents of: C:\Program Files\Sophos\AutoUpdate\Cache C:\Program Files\Sophos\AutoUpdate\Data\Warehouse Delete the file: C:\Program Files\Sophos\AutoUpdate\Data\status.xml Run another update and it should then work, the problem comes if something is corrupted in the local cache on the machine as this is one of the ways it decides what it needs to download, if that data is stuffed, so is the update. Removing the above files makes it download everything again fresh. Steve.

Latest version of MSDE is SP4, this has the product version 8.00.2039 You really shouldn't be using this though if you can get away with it, SQL 2005 Express at least as it gives you much better performance, support from MS if you need it (MSDE is well out of support) and larger database support (4Gb up from 2Gb in MSDE) For a full list of SQL Server versions, see here: How to identify your SQL Server version and edition Remember MSDE is essentially the Express version of SQL Server 2000 so shares the same version numbers. Steve.

Yep, you'll need to use either IMAP or POP3 to access Exchange as Mail doesn't currently support MAPI. You need to remember though that IMAP or POP3 has to be enabled on the individual mailboxes that you want to access from Mail rather than just being a global setting in Exchange. You will also need to ensure that the IMAP and POP3 services are enabled and running (as this is not the case by default. You can run the following powershell commands to get this going: Enable IMAP/POP3 services: Set-Service MSExchangePop3 -StartupType automatic Start-Service MSExchangePop3 Set-Service MSExchangeImap4 -StartupType automatic Start-Service MSExchangeImap4 Turn on IMAP/POP3 Access for a Mailbox: Set-CASMailbox -Identity mailboxname -PopEnabled $true Set-CASMailbox -Identity mailboxname -IMAPEnabled $true You can obviously then script this if it's something that you need to be doing often. Steve.