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Monday, April 28, 2008 11:33 AM

Exchange ESE, Failed Backups, the Checkpoint Depth, and You

A question came up recently on a mailing list I hang around. A poster wrote: "I'm looking for a concise explanation of when/how the transaction logs are committed. Specifically, is there another way to force logs to be committed other than the...
Posted by michael | 2 comment(s)
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Monday, April 14, 2008 8:31 AM

Live from Redmond - it's Geeks Argue!

I and 4,000 MVPs from around the world have accumulated in Seattle/Redmond this week. Where do we all go? To the bar, of course! Last night, a few Exchange MVPs and the odd PowerShell MVP were sitting around discussing stuff I can't talk about here...
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Friday, April 11, 2008 6:16 AM

Why Pay More? Try ImageX

Even though I get pretty hot under-the-collar sometimes when Microsoft removes for-free functionality (Exchange backups on Windows Server 2008, for example), there are some great tools that Microsoft provides for-free that are just as good as their for...
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Thursday, April 10, 2008 7:19 AM

Perfmon tip on scaling

Recently on a mailing list, several folks expressed some confusion about the scaling that Perfmon (Performance Monitor) does in its graphs and how it affects the data. The answer is: it doesn't. The scaling is used only to make the graph fit in the...
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Tuesday, April 08, 2008 5:28 AM

Business cards....

So, "The Essential Exchange" is my front-end to my consulting business. I admit that marketing is not my strong suit. So far, I'm supporting myself on writing and people using my services from the communities I help support. But this week...
Posted by michael | 1 comment(s)
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Saturday, March 29, 2008 8:08 AM

Exchange Server 2007 and Domain Controllers - A Summary

Over three years ago, I wrote my most popular (in terms of number of times it has been read) blog post ever: " Exchange Server 2003 and Domain Controllers - A Summary ." Since it was written in January of 2005, Exchange Server 2003 service pack...
Posted by michael | 3 comment(s)
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008 10:24 AM

Suppressing Non-Delivery Reports (NDRs)

Once the spammers find your domain, which usually only takes a few weeks after it has come online, you'll start seeing lots of error messages being returned to your Exchange Server - for email that was never sent from your server! This is commonly...
Posted by michael | 1 comment(s)
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Monday, March 10, 2008 3:49 PM

Microsoft Enters Collaboration Hosting Arena

In a move that was likely a surprise to no-one, last week Microsoft announced its offering for hosted Exchange 2007, hosted SharePoint (MOSS 2007, not WSS 3.0), and hosted LiveMeeting. This was the next logical progression from the Microsoft Office Live...
Posted by michael | 1 comment(s)
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Friday, March 07, 2008 9:23 AM

Exchange 2007 Disk Performance/Partition Alignment - A Little Quickie

A perennial recommendation to squeeze the utmost in performance from your Exchange 2007 (and Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003...) disk spindles has been to align the partition boundaries of the disks to a 8 KB boundary - since Exchange will always read...
Posted by michael | 2 comment(s)
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Friday, February 29, 2008 8:10 AM

Finding Services Using non-System Accounts With PowerShell

In March of 2006, I authored this blog post, Finding Services Using non-System Accounts , with the script being written in VBscript. Two years later, most of my environment is now in PowerShell. So, I've decided to update that post with the PowerShell...
Posted by michael | 2 comment(s)
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Monday, February 25, 2008 7:47 AM

The (Very) Basics of SSL for Exchange/Windows

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. As the Secure part of the name implies, the purpose behind SSL is to secure communications between a client browser (such as Internet Explorer or FireFox) and the server service with which the browser is communicating...
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Friday, February 22, 2008 9:52 AM

Local\Administrators vs. Builtin\Administrators - Exchange Server on a DC

Originally published in January of 2005, my blog post Exchange Server 2003 and Domain Controllers - A Summary has been the most searched-out article on my blog. While, with the release of Exchange Server 2007, the post is beginning to show it's age...
Posted by michael | 1 comment(s)
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Thursday, February 14, 2008 11:49 AM

Windows 2003/SBS 2003 Restart Problems

I've been working with an increasing number of small business clients the last few months, as I work to grow my personal consulting business; along with a greater variety of enterprise clients. A very common problem - servers don't reboot. In...
Posted by michael | 3 comment(s)
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Monday, February 04, 2008 11:32 AM

Renaming and Rebooting a Computer with PowerShell

Some things are just very easy in PowerShell. It's great! Here is a true quickie - rename and reboot a computer system (including a remote computer!): function renameAndReboot([string]$computer, [string]$newname) { $comp = gwmi win32_computersystem...
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008 6:39 AM

WSUS and Windows Vista SP1

Windows Vista service pack 1 is due "any time now". Various on-line blogs and articles are saying anywhere from February 1 to February 15, although Microsoft could wait all the way until the end of March and still meet their "Q1 2008"...
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