the ramblings of a crazed IT administrator
Windows Server
Managing Remote Desktop Sessions
11 year ago
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.
My New Best Friend – Introducing Spiceworks
12 years ago
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
02 years ago
by Nick
in Exchange Server
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.
Handy Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 Guide
32 years ago
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.
Setting up Cacti SNMP Monitoring on a Windows 2003 Server
22 years ago
by Nick
in Windows Server
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!
