Blacklist providers to trust II

Almost two years ago I have posted a comment regarding Blacklist providers that I use and I trust… Well I would like to update this post by adding or commenting that now I use only two providers that sucessfuly eliminate or reduce spam that is coming to my mail servers …

I currently use:
zen.spamhaus.org provided by http://www.spamhaus.org
bl.spamcop.net
 provided by http://www.spamcop.net

As you should decide to use or not to use blocklist providers on your mail servers I am adding interesting article from august 2009 to better understand how this providers work: http://www.allspammedup.com/2009/08/understanding-blocklist-providers/

I wish you luck in fighting spam! 🙂

TestExchangeConnectivity.com is getting ready…

For all you with any problems or concerns regarding Microsoft Exchange connectivity… You can test your Exchange server services like ActiveSync, Exchange Web services or Outlook connectivity by using: https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/ – fresh and new 🙂

EHLO team r0x! http://msexchangeteam.com/

Windows server 2008 R2 Active Directory – Recycle Bin Feature

Sometimes you delete user from AD and it could cause a big headache 🙂

Well… No more. Windows server 2008 R2 Beta – which is by the way already publicly available has a new functional level for AD that allows you to activate so called Recycle Bin Feature
In this demo you will se my AD server with a domain called demoadps.local on which I will enable this feature. As I mentioned before – functional level should be Windows server 2008 R2.

Watch the video

First of all you need to enable the feature by typing a Powershell cmdlet/command:

Enable-ADOptionalFeature ‘Recycle Bin Feature’ -Scope Forest -Target ‘domain.local

after that you can check for deleted items by typing:

Get-ADObject -SearchBase “CN=Deleted Objects,DC=domain,DC=local” -ldapFilter “(objectClass=*)” -includeDeletedObjects | FT ObjectGUID,Name -A

This will show you the deleted objects which you can restore by entering:

Restore-ADObject -Identity 6ff46162-15c2-4d42-8e15-2fcac5c8422e

** domain.local should be changed with your domain name
6ff46162-15c2-4d42-8e15-2fcac5c8422e should be changed with a ID that matches your deleted object…

To make it simplier I have recorded a video tutorial to do that…

Hyper-V server 2008 R2 beta is available!!! (with Hyper-V v2.0)

Here it comes powerfull and with new so desperately awaited features… Hyper-V 2.0…

http://www.virtualization.info/2009/01/microsoft-releases-hyper-v-20-and.html

http://edge.technet.com/Media/Demo-Hyper-V-Server-and-Live-Migration/

http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/downloads.mspx

Take a look / give it a try!

PS. take a look at new redesigned Microsoft Virtualization site… Where you can find all information about all MS virtualization products …:

http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/default.mspx

0X8004010F weekend – Windows server 2008, Exchange 2007 SP1

This weekend I was playing crawler… I know almost all internet sites describing the problems around 0X8004010F – damn error regarding Offline address book distribution…

But nowhere I have encountered the problem describing this error code in combination with Windows Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 SP1 with rollup 5.

Well… As I figured out it apparently does not work – if you want OAB to be distributed by Web-based distribution…

You get this error in your Outlook 2007 SP1 clients (on Windows XP and on Windows Vista)

As I can see there is somekind of permission problem becoues OAB virtual directory points to:

C:Program FilesMicrosoftExchange ServerClientAccessOAB

This directory has NO NTFS permissions for Auhtenticated users… but in IIS there is on this folder a parameter: Pass-through authentication – but as I know it can not work becouse your credentials are not covered in NTFS permissions of that folder.

But it does not work even if you give NTFS permissions to authenticated users… (you are still prompted for username and password in Outlook…)

Maybe I am missing something but weekend is almost over and my users need to use Exchange and RPC over HTTP(s) feature in their Outlooks tomorow… What I did is that I disabled Web-based distribution of Offline address book and I left only Public folder distribution. It took a couple of minutes for autodiscover.xml to update and Outlooks to get new parameters about Offline address book distribution.

Everything works correctly now…

Comments / suggestions appriaciated…

PS.
Hey all you Exchangegurus!
I think you will find this link useful: https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/