If you have used Google to look for IT solutions you will be unable to avoid Experts Exchange. However many IT professionals avoid their answers because they are in the mistaken belief that they need to pay for access.
As a previous user of Experts Exchange, including expert of the year for three years in a row, I never paid them a penny, even before I started clocking up the large number of points.
However, Experts Exchange do not help themselves or their reputation in the IT community by hiding the free signup page away. I know this has been raised with the management team of EE in the past, but they seem to ignore it.
If you follow the public sign up links you will not see the free link - all it is pushing you to is the paid options. Even the free trial requires a credit card to sign up.
In some ways you can understand why, EE is a business and they want the subscriptions which pay for the servers, developers etc.
So how do you get free access?
At the time of writing if you choose "Think you're an expert" in the lower right corner, you can then choose another link to get to the free signup - which requires a username and email address.
However to make things easier here is the link to the free sign up page:
http://semb.ee
Sign up, save the password and then you don't have to worry about it again.
If you want the advert free site (I actually forgot what it looked like with the ads) then you need to get 10,000 points. That is five, 500 point questions. (EE has a point multiplier which means a question which costs 500 points earns 2000 to the expert who answers it) and then you need 3000 a month to maintain the premium access.
There is an awful lot of information in the site, I contributed in excess of 10,000 answers personally. It would be a shame to not get access to them just because of the way that Experts Exchange decides to sell themselves, when there is a free option available.
As you should be aware, certain directories on an Exchange server should be excluded from scanning by antivirus products.
These are Microsoft's recommendations on which directories those should be:
Exchange 2007: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332342(EXCHG.80).aspx
Exchange 2003: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823166/
Exchange 2000: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328841/
However if you have setup the AV software as per the recommendations, how do you know that it is working, or more importantly it is not scanning things you have told it to exclude?
The best way to do this is to use the EICAR test file. This is a standard file that all AV vendors support that can be used to simulate alerts.
You can download the file from here: http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm
Simply copy the file in to the same directories as your Exchange databases or whatever else you have asked the AV product to exclude. If it is ever detected then the AV product is scanning things that it shouldn't be.
If you have set the product to exclude file types instead (For example edb files) then change the extension to edb. If the AV product has been configured correctly and is following that configuration then it should ignore it.
Of course the problem will be putting the file in place initially, particularly if you have already deployed the AV software. In that case setup a directory exclusion on a special directory for the purpose and create the EICAR file there instead. After copying the file to the relevant location, delete the exclusion.
If you are using Exchange 2003 then you may have experienced the greylisting bug.
This is the issue where messages disappear from the queues only to reappear as Non Delivery Reports when the server or the SMTP Server Service is restarted.
At last, Microsoft have released an update for this problem which is described here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950757/
You can also download the hotfix from that page.
Hopefully Microsoft will push this out via Automatic Updates/WSUS soon so that more Exchange 2003 servers will not suffer from this problem.
At last Microsoft have released an official method to maange Exchange 2003 from Windows Vista. No more copying DLLs around and generally hoping for the best.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3403d74e-8942-421b-8738-b3664559e46f&DisplayLang=en
Although using Terminal Services to connect to the Exchange server is still the best way to do it, and is what I continue to do.
I hinted in my Exchange 2007 SAN certificate posting (http://blog.sembee.co.uk/archive/2008/05/30/78.aspx) that I had written an article on how to setup Exchange 2007 with a single name certificate. After cleaning it up I have now published the article. However it isn't here, as it contains screenshots which the blog seems to struggle with - you will find it on my company technical site: http://exchange.sembee.info/2007/install/singlenamessl.asp
Do note that if you are using Unified Messaging that you cannot use a single name certificate. Also note the hard requirements of SRV record support at your public DNS provider (ie your domain name registrar) and Outlook 2007 SP1.
