monkeydust.net
the ramblings of a crazed IT administrator
Managing Remote Desktop Sessions
Jun 14th
As anyone who uses Remote Desktop a lot will by now know all too well, managing all those connections can be a real pain, especially if you need to make a config change that would normally require you to edit each connection manually.
Thankfully Microsoft has realised how much of a nightmare is (and how much the existing MMC plugin sucks badly), and they have provided us with a *much* better solution that is really easy to use and allows for logical grouping of servers into groups (and subgroups).
Once setup you can set default RDP preferences at an application, group or server level which means you can change an option in one place and have it apply to all your connections.
You can find out a bit more about the tool over on the MSExchangeTeam blog or you can jump right in and get the download from Microsoft here.
Current Status: Melting, but wishing I was playing EVE Online
May 24th
So im sat here in the office melting away thanks to the one nice bit of weather we’re likely to get all summer trying not to sneeze thanks to my hayfever and the gardener outside cutting the grass and all I can think about (apart from whether anyone would notice if I moved my desk into the server room next to the air con units), is how long it will be before I can get home and get back to playing EVE Online.
Yes, im one of those masochistic wierdos who actually enjoys the game and loves its sandbox nature, the ability to do pretty much anything you like, even if all that entails is sitting around in space and shooting rocks (which is what I spend quite a bit of time doing).
Purpose of this post? None, but when space looks this nice how could you not want to play?
My New Best Friend – Introducing Spiceworks
May 17th
So for the last few months I’ve been looking for ways to improve our ability to monitor our network (both the Servers and Desktops), we already have external monitors for the really important, business critical things like our website and email but for the day to day tracking of our desktops and less important servers we dont really have anything apart from me sticking my head in the server room every morning to check for flashing red lights! I’ve also been motivated to find a solution for tracking our desktop PC’s too after seeing one of my colleagues spend (literally), a whole week building a giant Excel spreadsheet to track both hardware and software on all our Desktop PC’s. While I am quite happy with Cacti and its ability to graph pretty much anything, it isn’t really designed for much more than this and so isn’t much use for tracking all the things I want to.
This is where Spiceworks comes in, it is a free (but ad supported), program that is designed for SMB’s to monitor and track their desktop and server infrastructure. Unlike almost every other program I have tried so far it is actually designed to be simple to use, no messing around trying to decipher config files or setup SNMP polling or anything like that, simply download the one .exe and install it on a spare Windows server (or desktop), the installer will install a copy of Apache and Ruby on Rails and make all the needed config changes, all you need to do is make sure that nothing else is running on the port you choose (such as another webserver like IIS or Apache).
How to restrict a user from sending or receiving any emails
Mar 8th
I came across this interesting question over on technet last week:
Hi,
Is there a way to restrict Mailbox owner from sending internal and external mails?
Are there any restrictive permissions which can be set on the user object in AD which will deny the user from sending any mails from his mailbox. The user should be able to receive and read the mails from the mailbox.I have tried the option to set the sending limit of the user to 1 KB however i need to know if we can achieve this using permissions.
Mahendra
At first glance you may think that this is tricky to implement and requires messing around with permissions or server settings but as long as you are using Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 it is easy to implement (and more importantly, easy to manage!), and it is a great way to introduce how to work with Transport Rules.
How to Mount a VMware Virtual Disk in Windows
Feb 24th
Here is handy tool that is part of VMware Workstation, but isnt as well know as some features but can be a real timesaver!
Let’s say your working on a Virtual Machine however it is turned off but you quickly need to pull an important file from it to use or check something you would normally have to go through the process of booting the whole VM to get to the file which may not be desirable if it takes a while to boot the VM, or you dont have the spare RAM (maybe you already have another VM or two running).
