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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.

Continue reading “How to restrict a user from sending or receiving any emails” »

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).

Thankfully, VMware can save you some hassle as it includes a tool to map VMware virtual hard disks directly to to the host computer without needing to boot a Virtual Machine at all. To use this tool simply go to File > Map or Disconnect Virtual Disks and click on the Map option, then point it to the .vmdk virtual disk file and select the drive letter to map it to. When you click Ok the drive will load which can take a few seconds and then you will have the disk available to use.

An Example Virtual Disk being Mounted for use

There are however a couple of important limitations to note:

• You can only mount partitions that are formatted FAT or NTFS (on Windows anyway), any non-FAT or NTFS partitions that exist in a Virtual Disk won’t be mounted.
• You can’t mount a Virtual Disk that is compressed, encrypted or set to have read-only permissions.
• To run the Virtual Machine that uses a mounted Virtual Disk, you must first disconnect the disk via the Map or Disconnect Virtual Disks menu.

Finally, here is a final warning that I have taken from the VMware Manual that is worth reading if you make use of snapshots (either linked or un-linked ones):

Caution VMware recommends that you leave the check box “Open file in read-only mode” selected in the Map a Virtual Disk dialog box. This setting prevents you from accidentally writing data to a virtual disk that might be the parent of a snapshot or linked clone. Writing to such a disk might make the snapshot or clone unusable.

Just been reading this guide over at http://msexchangegeek.com and think that anyone who is planning an Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 migration should give it a read as it includes some additional steps to take that aren’t included in Microsoft’s Exchange Deployment Tool such as moving the OAB generation to the new server aswell as upgrading the address lists from LDAP filters to OPATH and upgrading Email Address Policies.

So this week I’ve been taking a break from planning our Exchange 2010 migration and have been playing around with Cacti as currently we have very little data on things like network and server usage short of a couple of key websites being monitored by an external site to track uptime, but absolutely nothing to tell us if servers are being overloaded or that our internet connection is being saturated.

For those who haven’t heard of Cacti before, its an open-source PHP based frontend that can be used to graph pretty much any data source you can feed it with the most popular source being SNMP which pretty much any business class network enabled bit of electronics supports these days. Even if you only have quite a small network like ours, it can be very useful to actually visualise whats going on, and its a lot easier to show your boss a graph showing how your internet connection is maxed out and needs replacing/upgrading than any other way!

Rather than re-write an existing guide, the easiest and quickest way to get Cacti running is to follow this guide written by a very helpful Cacti user over on the Cacti Forums. Below are a few additional tips that should help you avoid some of the problems I ran into when setting up Cacti on a Windows 2003 server.

1. Dont use PHP 5.3, stick with 5.2 as 5.3 doesn’t yet include the SNMP module and so wont work with Cacti.
2. Do install Cygwin, its only an optional step but for the little extra work needed it will make patching Cacti with updates a lot easier (bug fixes only get released as .patch files so having Cygwin installed allows you to run the patch command just like on linux).
3. Dont install Apache unless you plan on using it in place of IIS, if you already host sites using IIS then there is no need to install Apache at all.
4. If you are using IIS make sure you install FastCGI before you install PHP, FastCGI is the recommended way to run PHP as of 5.2, its as simple as running the installer so there is no reason not to use it.
5. When you reach the IIS instructions, if you are using FastCGI the skip to step 8, dont miss this out as step 8 and onwards talks you through setting the file permissions correctly and Cacti will not work properly without them!
6. When setting the permissions I had to always use the Advanced > Find option to select the IUSR_ user as it could not be found when typing in the name as normal.
7. If you are polling other Windows based machines then make sure you increase the SNMP timeout value when adding the device, for some reason Windows takes longer to respond to SNMP queries, setting it to 5000 works fine for me.
8. By default SNMP isn’t enabled in Windows, see this Knowledgebase Article for how to enable it.
9. Finally, if once SNMP is enabled on a machine and it still isnt sending any SNMP data despite you being positive that it is setup Ok, try removing the SNMP feature and re-installing it. I’ve had this happen on a couple of Windows 2003 boxes and after reinstalling the SNMP service it has started working.