How to turn off comments in .Text

For me the GUI doesn't allow it so I simply used DbaMgr2K to edit the .Text SQL tables directly. I changed the Flag field in table blog_Config from 63 to 47. The value 16 is the binary switch to allow comments on or off.

Commenting turned off

As I'm currently being swamped with feedback spam for "On-line Casinos", I've temporarily turned off commenting. You can leave any comments you wish here.

Comment Spam

Got my first blog comment spam today. Shame I subscribe to this way of thinking. ;-)

How to change the default route in Cisco IOS

Type the following. Replace text with your own values:


telnet hostname
password
enable username
passwordconf t
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 gatewayip^Z
write mem
show ip route
exit

Do not move the Exchange groups!

Two groups (Exchange Enterprise Servers and Exchange Domain Servers) are created during Exchange "setup /domainprep".
One group (Exchange Services) is created during the installation of the Exchange ADC.

Do not move these groups from thier default location (Users) otherwise additional setup operations will fail and, more worringly, the Exchange SA will not start.

More details can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260914

Free eMail certificates

You can obtain them from here:
http://www.thawte.com/

Controlling how often the RUS runs

Apart from the schedule that is available to control the RUS, you can see the interval that the RUS uses by looking at the msExchPollInterval attribute on the domain or enterprise RUS service:
(Image lost due to Blog move)

Searching Multiple Public Folders in Outlook

Outlook does not support searching of multiple public folders from the advanced find index. This apparently is by design as the folders will not necessarily be consistant on all servers at all times. There are a couple of tools you can achieve to do this however.

Sharepoint will allow you to create a searchable index of public folders.

Lookout can index selected public folders from the Outlook client.

There is an interesting discussion of this here.

Changing the Display name in Active Directory

By using ADSIEdit you can change the display specifiers used to construct the users display name. The only usable ones I have found for the ADUC dialogue box are:
<%givenName> First name
<%sn> Surname
<%initials> Initials

givenName, sn and initials are all attribute names taken from the schema. It may be possible to use other attributes if you create users other than with ADUC. Anyone know?

How to customise Exchange email addresses

If you have a recipient policy that generates non-unique email addresses in Exchange 2003 then the recipient update service will add numeric characters to make it unique.  For example if you have this as your email address:
%1g.%s@thefoleyhouse.co.uk

You'll get the following addresses:
k.foley@thefoleyhouse.co.uk
k.foley2@thefoleyhouse.co.uk
k.foley3@thefoleyhouse.co.uk

To control this you might want to take a look at KB article 285136:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/285136

IMF Archive Manager

I knew this tool existed but lost track of it.  The tool allows you to examine mail that has been archived by the IMF filter that can be added to Exchange 2003.  Microsoft allow you to archive the mail but provide no easy tool to look at it.

Head on over here:
http://hellomate.typepad.com/exchange/2004/06/imf_archive_man.html

PFDavAdmin and Exchange Mixed Environments

I've had a large number of problems with mixed 5.5/200x environments and public folder replication.  It seems sometimes that the public folder permissions do not synch correctly.  This tool has helped me enormously.  You can find a link to it here:

http://hellomate.typepad.com/exchange/2003/10/the_pfdavadmin_.html

DNSer Configuration

I use DNSer to update my Dynamic IP address as I found that the modified firmware in my Linux based LinkSys router wasn't updating it regularly enough.  Here's my example DNSerSvc.ini file:

[Source]
Interval=600
URL=http://checkip.dyndns.org
User=test
Pass=test
Proxy=
ProxyPort=
Prefix=IP Address:
Count=1
Log=1

[Srv1]
URL=http://members.dyndns.org/nic/update?hostname=yourhostname.homedns.org&system=dyndns&myip=%s
User=yourusername
Pass=yourpasswordProxy=
ProxyPort=
MinInterval=600
MaxInterval=2160000
StatusOK=good
StatusOK1=nochg
StatusOK2=abuse

Replace the bits in red to get it working for you.

I use this with http://www.dyndns.org and DNSer can be found here:
http://www.access.si/DNSer/DNSer.htm

LCID or Codepage?

I was demoing how to change the displayname format in Windows 2003 AD when the question came up about what the code 0x409 meant.  It's the LCID for US English.  Here's a list of LCID numbers used in Windows XP - It shouldn't be that different in Windows Server 2003.

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/nlsweb/

99.99% Exchange Uptime at Microsoft

An interesting article on how Microsoft achieve 99.99% Exchange uptime on 7 node 2003 clusters.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a8cf167d-e23c-4a14-86cb-02d19ee3b8fe&displaylang=en
or click here.

How to upgrade an Exchange 2000 Cluster

Found a great article on how to upgrade an Exchange 2000/Windows 2000 cluster to Exchange 2003/Windows 2003.

http://blogs.msdn.com/exchange/archive/2004/05/07/127968.aspx

How to set Linux Proxy Settings

Many programs support the use of an environment variable, so setting this in '/.profile' for example can make programs work:
export http_proxy=http://192.168.0.2:8080

KDE has an option in the Control Centre to configure it:
Control Centre > Internet & Network > Proxy

Gnome uses the gconftool-2 command line for proxy settings:
gconftool-2 -s /system/http_proxy/use_http_proxy -t bool true
gconftool-2 -s /system/http_proxy/host -t string "192.168.0.2"
gconftool-2 -s /system/http_proxy/port -t int 8080

DTC and Exchange 200x Clusters

Found an interesting article here on why Exchange Clusters require a DTC (Distributed Transaction Coordinator).

Showing Security Page in Exchange 2000

To show the security page in Exchange 2000 admin create the following registry key:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\ExAdmin
DWord: ShowSecurityPage: 0x00000001

Felixstowe Broadband TV

Have you seen Felixstowe TV?  It's a broadband TV station for the local community that should be supported.