RE: Terminal Services Forum
From: ExchList [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: OT: Terminal Services Forum Hey Folks: Does anyone know of a MS Terminal Services forum that I can go to? Google Terminal Server Forum and you will find several to select from. Names that pop into my head are Brian Madden, Doug Brown, Mark Minasi, MSTerminalServices.org, TechNet and I am sure there are many more. Webster ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
RE: GoExchange Response
Easy there David, I think you’re overlooking some pretty critical issues here. 1. The Online Nightly Maintenance certainly does SOME defragmentation internally and makes available some areas to be overwritten with new incoming data if all the moons are aligned properly, but it does not reduce the physical database size or optimizes indexes etc. 2. So if you have a database that is physically 100GB and yet it only contains say 60GB of actual data what does that tell you?This also means that you are unnecessarily backing up 40GB conversely if you do a restore it’s a 100GB restore rather than 60GB 3. NOTE: Archiving firms tell clients that they will reduce database size and increase optimization by moving data out of the db and into the archive. Its only after implementation that they tell clients oh yeah well to get the db smaller and optimized you have to run ESEutil /D to get actually reduce the physical db size. 4. NOTE2: Defragmentation alone is not the answer to database optimization, nor was it the answer to this client’s issue. As a matter of fact simply running ESEutil /d on its own repeatedly is a sure way to damage or kill your database. 5. NOTE3: Lucid8 has partnered with the leaders in Exchange Archiving systems such as Symantec, Zantaz and others in order to provide their clients with an automated maintenance and optimization solution for Exchange. 6. GOexchange delivers much more then defragmentation, i.e. it provides db maintenance defragmentation and optimization If you still think it’s possible to achieve these results by simply letting Exchange run and run, then go try it and you will soon learn the truth. Better yet, I challenge you to run our product in DEMO mode on a live Exchange server that’s been running for some time and hasn’t had any type of manual maintenance run, see what the results are and then talk to us. DC -- Responded to on 2008-01-23 11:43:00 by I have found this to be an interesting thread. Chasing down some of the quoted testimonials, I Googled “Steve McHargue Chief Information Officer Jackson Walker LLP” , which led me to an InformationWeek article which pretty much is another GOexchange and gives more details about the “issues” they were having. http://www.informationweek.com/software/messaging/166403975 “Jackson Walker had been using Veritas’ KVS product for archiving, but while KVS had extracted over 200 gigabytes of data from the Exchange Server, the databases themselves were not getting any smaller, and the number of errors and warnings were growing along with the time it took to backup and restore.” NO SH!T! They don’t get smaller unless you do an online defrag. Dave Lum - Systems Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] - (971)-222-1025 "When you step on the brakes your life is in your foot's hands" From: Tom Strader [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 6:54 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: GOexchange Response It's looking more like that's the consensus Rene'. Thanks for your time to look and respond. Tom From: René de Haas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 8:30 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: GoExchange Response Had a little look at their website and I agree don’t see much value added either.The thing that puzzles me with the comment below from a satisfied customer, how does doing offline defrags help you with achieving a high uptime since you need to stop services to run it? “Uptime and Availability: "After just one use of GOexchange, our information stores were reduced by 45-50% with thousands of errors, warnings, and inconsistencies corrected. Without GOexchange we would be unable to provide the current level of 99.999% uptime and availability to our customers."” Think I only needed to run it once and I’ve worked with exchange since version 5.5. Also they mention defragging the db. Doesn’t exchange do that by itself??? Unless they mean an offline defrag which MS even says only if necessary. From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 8:13 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: GoExchange Response If Dane Cue would like to join this forum (or another that is not vendor controlled) I’ll be happy to discuss each and every point. Otherwise, why bother? I’ve seen much of the material in that response before. I think a number of other MVPs would agree. He can call me “crazy” or “out in left field” or whatever he wants. And I can do the same. In most of this, he says the same thing that I and others said – just using different word that spin the answer differently. Several times he asserts that I mean something that I did not say. >From an insurance perspective – I absolutely agree – good backups are >important. I don’t know what other value-add they truly provide, other than >disaster recovery
RE: GoExchange Response
Michael, thanks for the post, however, I thought it best to jump in and add some additional information and hopefully provide value here. 1. You are correct that we are talking about planned vs. unplanned downtime and that the # 1 thing that all Exchange administrators should strive to avoid is UNPLANNED DOWNTIME since it’s so very disruptive and costly to the organization. 2. While GOexchange certainly leverages ESEutil, ISinteg and other MS API’s it provides much more than a GUI to the MS utilities. Additionally GOexchange provides pre and post maintenance backup integration, notification etc to provide a set-it-and-forget-it maintenance solution. 3. BTW, Just to be clear we don’t recommend maintenance take place once a week (EverySunday), more like once every 6-8 weeks. Thanks DC GOexchange Response 2008-01-23 08:38:00 They are talking about an off-line defrag. GOexchange is basically a GUI wrapper around offline defrags and isinteg. They consider downtime only in regards to “unscheduled downtime”. So, if they have scheduled 24 hours of downtime every Sunday – that doesn’t count. Regards, Michael B. Smith MCSE/Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com From: René de Haas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 8:30 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: GoExchange Response Had a little look at their website and I agree don’t see much value added either.The thing that puzzles me with the comment below from a satisfied customer, how does doing offline defrags help you with achieving a high uptime since you need to stop services to run it? “Uptime and Availability: "After just one use of GOexchange, our information stores were reduced by 45-50% with thousands of errors, warnings, and inconsistencies corrected. Without GOexchange we would be unable to provide the current level of 99.999% uptime and availability to our customers."” Think I only needed to run it once and I’ve worked with exchange since version 5.5. Also they mention defragging the db. Doesn’t exchange do that by itself??? Unless they mean an offline defrag which MS even says only if necessary. From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 8:13 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: GoExchange Response If Dane Cue would like to join this forum (or another that is not vendor controlled) I’ll be happy to discuss each and every point. Otherwise, why bother? I’ve seen much of the material in that response before. I think a number of other MVPs would agree. He can call me “crazy” or “out in left field” or whatever he wants. And I can do the same. In most of this, he says the same thing that I and others said – just using different word that spin the answer differently. Several times he asserts that I mean something that I did not say. >From an insurance perspective – I absolutely agree – good backups are >important. I don’t know what other value-add they truly provide, other than >disaster recovery. I can provide documentation to back up my statements. I can provide a quote from one of the key developers for ESE that says you don’t do these things on a regular basis. To wit: …I'm glad you'd never recommend a tool that would recommend offline defrag as standard maintenance! :) I generally don't recommend regular offline defrags myself, believing if that becomes necessary it is an issue that should be fixed in ESE or whatever app (Exch/AD) is using ESE. Lucid8 has a vested interest in selling their product. I respect that. They do provide some value-add with reporting. But that is all that I see. And I don’t approve of their marketing. I personally think that it is misleading. Regards, Michael B. Smith MCSE/Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com From: Tom Strader [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 12:48 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: GoExchange Response List, I have a response from Lucid8 concerning their GoExchange product and the questions that were posted a week or so back. I've tried to post the response here but the Lyris server says its too large so if anyone want to read their response, please email me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] and I'll forward it to you. It is in DOCX format. Sincerely, Tom Strader Server Systems Administrator NC Blumenthal Performing Arts Center 704.379.1285 Office | 704.444.2098 Fax http://www.linkedin.com/in/tstrader "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." *** The information in this e-mail is confidential and intended solely for the individual or entity to whom it is addressed. If you have received this e-mail in error please notify the sender by return e-mail delete this e-mail and refrain from any disclosure or action based on the information. *** ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://ww
Re: GoExchange Response
NOTE: This is reposted from my Response to Don in the Syaadmin forum, however since he posted here as well I thought it best to repost for all involved. Don, thanks for the message, let’s address each of your points. 1. I find it interesting that you make a statement about "real" Exchange admins. Care to clarify that statement a bit more? a. You are certainly entitled to your opinion; however, making such a swaggering statement of differentiation regarding “real” vs. what “wannabe” Exchange admins is pretty brazen and insulting don’t you think? b. I would agree that Exchange admins have a varying degree of knowledge, however, that doesn’t give anyone with “supposedly” more knowledge the right to disregard or label everyone else as a non-real Exchange Admin. 2. Exchange is coming up on its 12th birthday this coming April 2008 and from your statement it sounds like you have been working with it since its introduction. a. Being that you have been in that game this long, I am sure that you have a good grasp of Exchange. i. I do find it interesting that you’ve had little need to utilize the MS utilities in all that time, but hey I will take you at your word, you were there I was not. ii. Although, if one has had little need to use any item, be that a product, process or utility (in this case the MS utilities) how can one say they have a deep understanding of the item in question? 3. I’ll agree that your statements are extremely broad, care to clarify these broad statements? a. You say “I know enough about your product” Really? Enlighten us with your knowledge of the product Don. While you’re at it, tell me, how did you come by this knowledge of GOexchange? b. What do you mean exactly when you say “your product increases the risk of making things worse...” Get specific please, let’s see what you are basing your statement on here. 4. You as the question of “where would I find value in your product” Well lets start by saying that GOexchange is a PROACTIVE maintenance and optimization tool, vs. a reactive solution, tool or process. a. As I am sure you know being Proactive is taking steps to avoid or minimize a negative action and being Reactive is dealing with the problem after its taken place. b. While we agree that being able to react to a negative action, i.e. restoring from backup or repairing a corrupted data base is invaluable, I would hope that we can all agree the act of avoiding or minimizing the negative action altogether is more desirable, regardless of the issue at hand i.e. i. Most people go to the Dr. or Dentist for a checkup every so often as part of their personal preventative maintenance. While this takes precious time out of their valuable day, however, it’s the right and mart thing to do when you consider the alternative of going in on an emergency basis only which is much more costly. ii. The same scenario hold true for car owners, i.e. sheesh what a pain to have your car go in for maintenance, I mean I am busy. Sure you can ignore it, maybe you will get lucky, then again maybe you will be stranded on the side of the road when the engine completely seizes, brakes, electrical or some other part goes south. The end result is it ends up costing you more time; energy, aggravation and resources then it would have if you would have taken care. iii.Look at the New Orleans/Katrina disaster. Much if not all of the damage and suffering could have been avoided had the government officials been proactive in many ways. The levees were known to be insufficient for decades. Everyone talked about shoring them up but it was deemed unnecessary or too costly a project.In hindsight the cost to shore up the levees and protest the people of New Orleans would have been a fraction of the post disaster cleanup cost and that doesn’t measure the human suffering. c. Ok so now back to Exchange… As stated before much has changed with Exchange since its first release and its underlying database structure has evolved into an incredibly resilient and much more reliable system. Microsoft has built mechanisms to protect the JET database from many types of corruption, but certain conditions can still cause the ESE engine and databases to fail. That being said…. i. The majority of organizations know innately that the e-mail system is business-critical. In a content-driven business ecosystem, it is their primary means of employee and business communications. Yet, few organizations can quantify the cost of lost business and productivity caused by Unplanned E-Mail Server Downtime. ii. When it comes to your messaging systems, an ounce of prevention, or in this case implementing a preventative maintenance solution, is worth a pound of cure (aka Disaster Recovery)—which of course means, unplanned downtime, angry users and executives, cancelled p
Exchange 2007 Smart host was an external vendor now gone.
Just inherited this and am new to Exchange 2007... Exchange 2007 with a smart host configured. The smart host resided with an external vendor. That vendor is now gone and of course outbound mail is failing. Can you point me to a solution that either removes the smart host entirely or configs a replacement smarthost? Thanks in advance. ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
RE: Exchange 2007 Smart host was an external vendor now gone.
Disregard I figured it out. And I only received 21 OOOs. Cheers. -Original Message- From: Stephan Barr [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2008 7:24 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Exchange 2007 Smart host was an external vendor now gone. Just inherited this and am new to Exchange 2007... Exchange 2007 with a smart host configured. The smart host resided with an external vendor. That vendor is now gone and of course outbound mail is failing. Can you point me to a solution that either removes the smart host entirely or configs a replacement smarthost? Thanks in advance. ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
RE: Managing Public Folders permissions
Bob, You can absolutely do that. I have done it and it worked just like it was supposed to. You can also you PFDAVAdmin to do the same thing and it works on the users' mailbox folders as well. Davis McCoy Network Engineer Kennedy Covington 214 N. Tryon St 47th Floor Charlotte, NC 28202 v. 704-350-4599 f. 704-353-3699 From: Bob Peitzke [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 8:19 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Managing Public Folders permissions I have a request to add a couple of new people to a huge list of existing public folders with a fairly deep hierarchy, so they can add/modify/delete messages in them. I found an article explaining that you can do this in ESM, via All Tasks on the parent folder > Manage Settings > Modify client permissions, then perhaps choosing "Add users". Has anyone done this on an E2K3 server? Does it work? Is it safe? Certainly I would try it out on a test folder tree before using it on the live folders full of valuable messages, but I'd like some feedback before even trying it out. If there's a better / safer way, I'm all ears. Grateful for any suggestions. Bob Peitzke Senior IT Manager Colony Advisors, LLC Century City, CA, USA Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For further information about Kennedy Covington, please visit our website at http://www.kennedycovington.com IRS CIRCULAR 230 NOTICE: In order to comply with certain IRS regulations regarding tax advice, we inform you that, unless expressly stated otherwise, any tax advice contained in this communication (including any attachments) is not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used, for purposes of (i) avoiding penalties under the Internal Revenue Code or (ii) promoting, marketing or recommending to another party any transaction or matter addressed herein. For more information about this Notice, please visit http://www.kennedycovington.com/disclaimer.html PRIVILEGE AND CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This communication (including any attachment) is being sent by or on behalf of a lawyer or law firm and may contain confidential or legally privileged information. The sender does not intend to waive any privilege, including the attorney-client privilege, that may attach to this communication. If you are not the intended recipient, you are not authorized to intercept, read, print, retain, copy, forward, or disseminate this communication. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately by email and delete this communication and all copies. ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
RE: How to pinpoint source of high traffic volume
You can download (can remember the exact name of the product) Foglight or Searchlight for Exchange. It can suck up all the transaction logs/tracking logs on a server and give you a quick overview of who's sending what. Then again, Crystal Reports can do the same thing for you, if you have someone that can set it all up. There were some templates for early Exchange, 4.0 or 5.0, that were given away for free, but I'm not sure for E2k, E2k3 or E2k7. John H. Matteson, Jr. Systems Administrator/ITT Systems FOB Orgun-E Afghanistan DSN - 318 431 8001 VoSIP - (308) 431 - Iridium - 717.633.3823 Roshain - 079 - 736 - 3832 "A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes." Woodrow Wilson -Original Message- From: Bob Peitzke [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 11:08 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: How to pinpoint source of high traffic volume I didn't see anything stuck in any of the message queues. Msg limits - global: 100 MB; connector: no "allowed sizes" limit; SMTP virtual server: no limit. This is in our Paris office. I don't know of any Mac users there. It's back to normal now, so no panic. But it made me realize that I need a better way to analyze traffic surges. - Bob From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 9:41 AM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: How to pinpoint source of high traffic volume Look at the message queues. If you see nothing there - hmmm. Do you have Mac users with Entourage? Do you have a message size limit? Regards, Michael B. Smith MCSE/Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com From: Bob Peitzke [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 12:32 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: How to pinpoint source of high traffic volume This morning I noticed one of our Exchange 2000 servers has an abnormally high number of log files, and seems to be filling one about every 5 - 10 minutes. Since no mailboxes have grown, I figure it must be outbound traffic, as if a PC is acting as a spam zombie. Relaying is restricted to three specific hosts within subnet. There must be a way to pinpoint the source of the traffic, right? Turn up some logging? I'm looking for it, but would appreciate advice from someone who works in this area more often than I do. Grateful for any advice. Bob Peitzke Senior IT Manager Colony Advisors, LLC Century City, CA, USA Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja~
