Well, I’ve been away with my friends at Firebrand again and guess what…MCSE Windows Server 2003!

• 70-293 Planning and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure
• 70-294 Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure
• 70-298 Designing Security for a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network

*** Unfortunately the Real Man Cycling challenge has been cancelled for this year due to planning issues - I’m disappointed but I hope to do it again next year *** 

I’m doing the Real Man Cycling Challenge in London on the 14th September. It’s a 34km ride through london in aid of The Prostate Cancer Charity, which is a really worthwile cause. If you’d like to sponsor me, head on over to http://www.justgiving.com/ sammcgeown and you can sponsor me there - you can even gift aid it if you pay tax!

I thought this would be fairly common knowledge by now, Exchange 2003 being quite mature in it’s 5th year, but it’s not something I’ve had a problem with before and therefore I’m going to write about it!

So a big email comes in; lets say it’s 8MB. Your Exchange 2003 server, set to it’s defaults for size restrictions, rejects the email. Why? Take a look at this Exchange TechNet article:

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 recently needed to upgrade one of our applications, and the new version requires an addition server instead of the application and SQL it requires a back end search, a front end web server and a SQL server. The specifications of the new server which are “required” to qualify for support are pretty high. The problem is that the actual processor usage is very light, and it is very hard to justify buying a whole new server that I know is going to be barely used.

“Nothing can come of nothing” - to quote King Lear, but it seems this is not always true. Marc Andre is giving away an album, and all he asks in return is that you mention it to your friends. I’ve not listened to it yet, but even if I hate it…it was free!

Thanks to Matt Hellyer for the tip off.

I noticed a post over at David Overton’s blog today that highlights a new release of Windows Search. Normally not that exciting, but it is if you’re using Outlook to open up another users mailbox.

I have quite a few mailboxes that are opened for historical reasons, people leave a company and I need access to their email. I don’t want to bloat my mailbox with all their email, it’s hard enough to find my own emails!

It seems that the nice people at Microsoft were looking out for us, lest the evil people in the world see how we categorise our email, and decided to strip away any category information from sent and received objects by default. Sure, I understand if you were categorising emails from someone as “sneaky git” or “numbnuts” then you might not be too happy about sending those out…but really it should be your choice right?

I’ve just upgraded my VMWare Server install to the latest version of the VMWare Server beta, which I have to say, is looking pretty good! One slight niggle that I had was that when I opened the VMWare Remote Console it would tell me that I could not connect, with the error:

Error opening the remote virtual machine SM-00109:8333\16:  The host name could not be resolved.

Clearly THAT’s a pain in the proverbial. A quick trawl through VMWare’s forums reveals two solutions, one that is clunky and stupid, the other that works. For brevity, the one that works is…