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Monthly Archives: December 2006
Transformers!!!
When I heard that Michael Bay was tapped to be the director of the forthcoming live-action/CGI Transformers movie, I was skeptical. However, earlier today my co-worker Ryan pointed me to Yahoo’s exclusive trailer. All I have to say is, I … Continue reading
Posted in Recreation
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A break from the technical stuff: Transformers!!
Even on a professional blog, man cannot live by technical insights alone. When I heard that Michael Bay was tapped to be the director of the forthcoming live-action/CGI Transformers movie, I was skeptical. However, earlier today my co-worker Ryan pointed … Continue reading
Posted in 3Sharp
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Surviving the all-nighter
Every now and then, the IT professional gets to put in time beyond the normal working hours. Even more occasionally (we hope), we get the joy of pulling an all-nighter. Systems admins, network admins, and mail admins are no strangers … Continue reading
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Using PowerShell to find the average size in a group of files
Today I wanted to find out the average size of a group of files. To make it more challenging, I wanted to find the average size of a group of files that existed co-mingled in a directory with several other … Continue reading
Posted in 3Sharp, PowerShell
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Made it through the storm
Although Redmond (and the 3Sharp offices) lost power last Thursday night, we had power again by Saturday and were able to get back up and running Saturday afternoon, with only one minor glitch that was straightened out this morning. To … Continue reading
Posted in 3Sharp, Exchange
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Virtual Labs from Microsoft
Okay, now this is a great idea: create a series of hands-on labs for people to use to get familiar with your product offerings, with a special focus on upcoming versions and new, cool functionality. Like, oh, say, Exchange 2007. … Continue reading
CAL 9000^H^H^H^H2007
There’s a lot of flap and confusion over the changes to Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007 licensing. Although I am not a Microsoft Licensing specialist, let me attempt to condense together all of the information floating around various sources and … Continue reading
Posted in 3Sharp, Exchange
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GRYNX Greylist redux
Back in November, I posted about a free greylist transport sink that works with Exchange 2003, Exchange 2000, and the IIS SMTP service. I’ve been using it steadily at home and have continued to be impressed by it, especially when … Continue reading
Posted in 3Sharp, Exchange
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Software IP PBX for Windows
The other day I noticed an interesting ad in my latest issue of Windows IT Pro magazine: a free Windows IP PBX. It can work with a SIP-based VoIP service, or use a PSTN-to-VoIP gateway to interact with traditional phone … Continue reading
Am I Exchange 2007 compatible or not?
This post is directly prompted by an email I received from Paul letting me know about a utility he’d learned about from other Exchange MVPs. So thanks to Paul, Jim, and Jeff! When Microsoft first announced that Exchange 2007 would … Continue reading
Posted in 3Sharp, Exchange
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$true-thiness
Microsoft’s Evan Dodds has a post on why you need to use the tokens $true and $false in PowerShell scripts instead of the strings “true” and “false”. Share this post:ShareFacebookDiggRedditEmailStumbleUpon
Posted in 3Sharp, PowerShell
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Microsoft-Novell and the IP risk factor
ZDnet’s John Carroll posts what I think is the most cogent analysis of the Microsoft-Novell deal I’ve seen yet. I don’t normally read ZDnet blogs for their thoughtful analysis — most of the time, they strike me as unabashed rabble-rousing … Continue reading
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A grab bag of small goodies
Exchange MVP Jim McBee gives some tips on tuning the Exchange 2003 IMF. Doug points out some tools for mounting .ISO images (and includes ones that work under Vista). Finally, the Exchange team blog is giving the standard Exchange 2007 … Continue reading
Posted in 3Sharp, Exchange
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Another PowerShell one-liner
Today I needed to evenly split 40,000 files between 5 directories. The math is simple — 8,000 files in each directory — but the way I’d have normally handled a one-off task like this is by using Windows Explorer to … Continue reading
Posted in 3Sharp, PowerShell
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The Federal Excise Tax is dead
For the past 108 years, American telephone owners have been paying the Federal Excise Tax, meant to help finance the Spanish-American War. That’s right. A tax enacted in 1898 is still on your phone bill, but not for much longer. … Continue reading
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Farewell, OS/2 (and a look back at BBSes, FidoNet, and Window NT 3.1)
IBM’s OS/2 operating system is heading rapidly for the end of its standard support lifetime at Deceber 31, 2006. IBM is urging customers to transition to the WebSphere platform. I personally never used OS/2 much, but I have a lot … Continue reading
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SPF Wizard due for an overhaul
The folks over at openspf.org have been working on a revamp of their website. This afternoon, they flipped the switch to move to the new version of the site. All of the previous content is now found at http://old.openspf.org/. This … Continue reading
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Boy, I wasn’t kidding…
…in my last post when I said this was the year of the outage. About the time Steph and I tried to get the domain controller back online, we had a completely unrelated bit of breakage take down the blog … Continue reading
Posted in Computers, Spirituality
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Exchange 2007 and Forefront Security for Exchange Server RTM
Both Exchange Server 2007 and Forefront Security for Exchange Server have been released to manufacturing. This is excellent news; I’m very much looking forward to getting my hands on the release bits. Share this post:ShareFacebookDiggRedditEmailStumbleUpon
Posted in 3Sharp, Exchange
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Community Server 2.1 SP2 is now available
Wow! Telligent is on a roll! Community Server 2.1 Service Pack 2 is now available for download. This SP fixes bugs, increases security, and provides feature enhancements. Some of the notable fixes include: UI and help text fixes and improvements … Continue reading
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Watched logs never update
As a former UNIX admin, there are definitely days where I miss some of the simple but powerful tools I had available to do my day-to-day jobs. One of those jobs, troubleshooting, usually involves a lot of logfile watching. On … Continue reading
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DNS gotchas and tips
This recent post by Exchange MVP Bharat Suneja talks about the proper relationship between MX records and CNAME records in DNS. His post kicked off related thoughts on the subject of DNS which come from my years working as a … Continue reading
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Cingular and Windows Mobile drama
Updated 12/5 1817 PST: Happy resolution, read on through below! Back in September, my wife and I came to the end of our existing AT&T Wireless (now “Cingular Blue”) contract. We’d been seeing increasing problems with our service, so we … Continue reading
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A new download to brighten your Tuesday
At one point in time, Windows came with the optional Network Monitor component. While it had its quirks and had a bit of a learning curve, it was useful, free, and ubiquitous whenever I needed to perform network traffic captures. … Continue reading
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