Microsoft

We have a Bonded ADSL solution for our servers to provide the necessary upstream transfer speeds for the applications we host. We have bonded ADSL because our exchange still doesn’t support SDSL, and a leased line is overkill. Theoretically, we should have 28.1 Mbps download and 3.2Mbps upload - what I am actually seeing is about 1.7Mbps down and 1.9Mbps up. I have tested this on various servers, over various times and file sizes, there is no doubt that the performance is POOR.

Outlook Web access is a fantastic tool for our company, providing on-the-go

access to people’s mailboxes - which is of course secured by SSL and uses Forms

Based Authentication. Internally, we have an intranet portal that allows us to

access the various systems - one of which is OWA. One of the stipulations for

this internal portal is that it is all Single Sign On using NTLM authentication

• integrated authentication. This is where the problem lies because enabling OWA

with Forms Based Authentication over SSL disables Integrated Authentication. So

We were integrating a 3rd party product’s web parts with MOSS the other day and came accross an interesting problem. In site editing mode, all the drop down menus would appear for a flash and then go blank. The actual admin pages we were trying to get to would work if you entered them into the browser directly, but that isn’t an easy way to manage the site!

If you’ve logged onto the properties for your IIS install and found that the ASP.NET tab has mysteriously disappered, you can try a couple of things.

Firstly, try re-registering ASP.NET with IIS using the ASPNET_REGIIS.exe located in the .NET installation folder:

When the Dell engineer said “they’ve asked if you can reinstall the OS” my heart sank. Not because I felt like he was weasling out of work - unusually they were very helpful. Not because installing XP is a hard task, I’ve done it over 100 times on all sorts of hardware.

<p>
  <font size="2"><strong>n:\></strong> <em>Aefdisk 1 /delall /formatfat /pri:1024:6 /ext:0:7</em></font>
</p>

<p>
  <font size="2">Woah woah woah! What&rsquo;s all that?! The command runs &ldquo;Aefdisk&rdquo; on&nbsp;hard disk &ldquo;1&Prime;&nbsp;with the &ldquo;/delall&rdquo; flag, which deletes any exisiting partitions, &ldquo;/formatfat&rdquo; which formats the&nbsp;next partition FAT. &ldquo;/PRI&rdquo; is a primary partition, &ldquo;:1024&Prime; is the partition size, &ldquo;:6&Prime; is the&nbsp;hex partition&nbsp;type which in this case is FAT16 >32mb. &ldquo;/ext&rdquo; is an extended partition, &ldquo;:0&Prime; tells it to use all remaining space on the drive, &ldquo;:7&Prime; is the partition type which is NTFS.</font>
</p>

Recently I found the need to retrieve the key from an existing Exchange Server for a reinstall - the software is legally licensed but the key was somehow lost. A trawl through my registry revealed that the key is stored in an obscure place:

I’ve just removed a domain controller (DC) from my root domain, the very first server not only in the domain, but the forest. The roles were migrating to a newer server, far more up to the job, but it isn’t a job to be taken lightly. If you mess up the root domain, you’ve potentially got problems all the way down your domain hierarchy.

Originally published Wednesday, May 30th, 2007