punker

Thanks Roguespear thats some good info! I'll definitely be taking a closer look at that stuff.

Hi there fellow server junkies. B) The company I work for is wanting to bring email in house to help eliminate points of failure from our email provider. Exchange is at the top of our email server software list currently and I was wondering what other companies are doing for physical setups. The proposed method from a consultant we talked to was to setup Exchange internally (on our domain and on the inside of our network) and have another server to host the mail services, antispam, antivirus, antiphishing etc running on IIS running outside the network. To me that sounds stupid, one because I hate IIS and 2 because when were trying to eliminate points of failure we're having email running off of 2 boxes instead of one. Anyone have any info they could lend me? Or M$ Exchange good or bad experiences? Thx. Dan

Thx for the suggestions. My spreadsheet just keeps gettin bigger. I will be testing out MS Exchange 2007, I do have x64 hardware too. Dont know how much that will help out a mail server (i guess the database it will) but we'll see.

Thx. I'll take a look.

Hey fellow IT admins. Need some suggestions. We currently outsource our email services but lately have been thinking about bringing email in house to eliminate our frequent providers errors. We currently have about 500 email accounts in about 7 domains. What are some of the best email softwares that are time tested? I know M$ Exchange is an option but its also quite pricy and I may be wrong on this but it looks quite cumbersome as well. Some of my requirements are a web interface and AD integration. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated as I really dont like webpage reviews for the fact that a lot are bias because some company is funding the operation. Thx. Dan

Hi everybody. Im looking for a tool and am hoping someone can point me in the right direction. We outsource our email but have the email sent here first so we can run filters on it and relay it back. But every now and then we get complaints that emails arent going through for like an hour. With about 10 000 emails a day going through our server and just the odd individual email slow down im wondering if there might be a tool around for monitoring emails on when they come in and when they go out. Maybe something that will parse the log files for me or something. Just without any monitoring its hard to pin point if its our email providers problem or our own. Any help? Thx. Dan

Good day to all network admins and enthusiasts alike. We have recently upgraded our servers to R2 and are using DFS to synchronize (for backup purposes) our branch offices. From what I can see everything looks good. But I need a sure fire way to compare the backed up folder and the actual working folder to make sure absolutely everything is getting synchronized then backed up properly. Ideally I would like to see what is synchronizing at any given time as we have it trickling data slowly through the day and faster through the night. I would also like to see what has and hasnt been synchronized. I would have assumed that M$ would have come up with such tools but they're DFS Management health report do not get so detailed. Any one run into this issue? And/or have any good suggestions? Thx. Dan

for the last few months ive been experiencing the same needs. Something to centrally manage network performance, monitor disk memory cpu eventlogs on servers. I dont have a PIX. The best solution ive found so far is WhatsUP Gold. Not free of course, runs about 2000$. They have a cheaper version WhatsUP Pro but they are stopping the production of Gold and moving all features over to Pro around November December. Looks very nice and very helpful. You can get the same stuff for free with a little scripting using Perfmon and WMI scripting. But... im not a programmer (yet). If your into good books Active Directory Cook Book is freakin sweet. Hope this helps.

Thx, i'll give'em a go.

Just wondering what the best Network Monitoring Applications are. Theres a lot out there and I hate trying half a million demo softwares so im hoping you guys might be able to help me out. We have 28 sites across Canada and im looking for a software that will alert me of latency issues before the lines go down and just report general bandwidth info and monitoring. Any ideas?? Thx.

Ok, so instead of relying on DHCP to properly hand that DNS info down, what you guys are saying is to manually enter it into the hosts file on each PC?

alright thx, i'll give it a go.

Timewise it takes about 30 seconds some days to 15minutes others, now on our WAN sites tend to lean towards 8-10 minutes on average. I havent manually entered the info into lmhosts, but we do have DNS setup correctly and have AD running on the network setup properly, so it should be handed down however good old M$ never seems to surprise me. We are running Win2k3 on our DC.

try putting them on the same ip range. Like your one computer is 192.168.1.2, make your other one 192.168.1.3 instead of 192.168.2.2

Alright its known fact that XP Pro SP2 and possibly other versions(of XP) have slow domain logon times. Ive read and tried all kinds of stuff. Ive check my DNS, ive done the GPO setting 'Always wait for a network connection', and other solutions i cant quite think of right now. There about 500 computers on our network divided into 28 sites across Canada. We are slow rolling out XP because the first site we did has these mass logon times compared to our previous win2k. Has anyone else struggled with this and come to any conclusion?

We use SAV CE 9.03.1000, it works really good. Can use Symantec System Console to view nodes versions, it also shows node name and whose logged in which comes in handy if your into RDP or Netmeeting. Ive been playing with Kaspersky as it is rated top antivirus(for desktop not corporate use) but seems to take up more resources.

probably easiest to setup a simple IIS mail server, or exchange(if you feel adventurous) there are lots of documents on setting up both. Also setup a dhcp server on the server, and a dns server. This can all be setup on one server box, provided it is just a small network. Google most of this stuff will return tons of results. And yes T1 is plenty for a small network.

Normally I can use barts network boot disk to boot up then map a drive, then i ghost over the network, but now that the DC is running win2k3 i cant. Ive tried changing some security settings in policies but still no luck. Anyone got any ideas??

Ok, I get access denied when trying to view the event viewer of a remote computer when i try to manage it. Windows 2000 computers work fine, but cant do it with xp sp2(dont know about sp1 though). I have found some articles that say go to group policy enable administration ports and open these and that port. And ive done it, and it still doesnt work. I have also found people(when i googled) that have no luck when trying microsofts crap solution. Any know how i can manage a remote pc??

thx, i'll give it a try.

I'll trade you problems, i cant seem to get my install to autologon at all. Any auto logon pros out there, need some help in here. Heres my .sif. [Data] MsDosInitiated="0" AutoPartition=1 UnattendedInstall="Yes" [unattended] UnattendMode = FullUnattended UnattendSwitch = Yes OemPreinstall = Yes OemSkipEula = Yes FileSystem = * Repartition = Yes WaitForReboot = No TargetPath = "\Windows" DriverSigningPolicy = Ignore NonDriverSigningPolicy = Ignore Hibernation = No [GuiUnattended] EncryptedAdminPassword=Yes AdminPassword=**** AutoLogonCount=1 TimeZone=35 OEMSkipRegional=1 OemSkipWelcome=1 AutoLogon=Yes [shell] DefaultThemesOff = Yes DefaultStartPanelOff = Yes [userData] ProductKey = "***" FullName = "Admin" OrgName = "Contrans Corp." [branding] BrandIEUsingUnattended=Yes Home_Page=http://www.contrans.ca [RegionalSettings] Language = 1009 [identification] JoinWorkgroup=WORKGROUP [Networking] InstallDefaultComponents=Yes [GuiRunOnce] %systemdrive%\install\appinstl.cmd Thx a billion in advance to anyone who can bring light to this situation.

ya, i thought about that. It wouldnt completely solve the problem but it would minimize it because then the regular user could do admin tasks only on that computer, but would still be able to see other users profiles on that local computer. But still better than seeing users profiles on any computer. Big problem is that they always have full local admin priveleges. Maybe if there is some setting to not allow local admin to read other users profiles, but will let domain admins read them. hrmm.... there must be other net admins out there who run into this problem. Anyone??

I have an issue on my network. Currently if a computer goes down or off the network, i have to talk the user through putting in the admin login and password in order to go in and do admin stuff. But once they have the admin login and password the could potentially go to anyones computer and login with it and retrieve other users files. I havent had any problems yet, but now im rolling out XP and i really want to solve this issue. I need the user to be able to login and be able to perfom admin functions, but not have access to other domain users profiles. Any ideas?

thx, i'll give it a go

hey, im hoping theres some more experienced group policy pros than I am. Im trying to find how I can centrally turn off the language bar using group policy as well as make the xp search revert to the classic search gui. Any ideas anyone?