Microsoft Exchange and Remote Desktop Services Specialists

SEMblog

Microsoft Exchange Server and
Blackberry Enterprise Server news, views and fixes.

Massive SBS Server and Network Cleanup

Something I have been doing frequently for the last 18 months of so is cleanups of SBS 2003 servers and their associated networks. I have a number of clients in the IT Support industry who ask me to clean up their client's servers. Two of them get a new client and the first thing they do is ask me to look at it and make recommendations. In many cases it is minor cleanups or ensuring that everyth... [More]

Testing Antivirus Exclusions

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).aspxExchange 2003: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823166/Exchange 2000: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328841/ However if y... [More]

Detecting Vista in Login Scripts #2

Last year I wrote about how I was caught out with detecting Vista in login scripts (http://blog.sembee.co.uk/archive/2007/01/06/31.aspx). Following the release of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, I was caught out again as the version number has changed. In my login scripts I use the output of the command "ver" to detect the operating system. With Windows Vista RTM it was 6.0.6000. With Window... [More]

One morning you find that there is spam in the queues, your server has been blacklisted etc...

One of the worst experiences for an Exchange administrator is to come in one morning and find that either email is being blocked, the queues are long or the users are getting NDRs saying that the server is blacklisted. This seems to result in confusion amongst administrators who then go looking for advice only to get conflicting answers on what the problem might be. I am going to try and clear u... [More]

Detecting Vista in Login Scripts

On my technical site amset.info I have an article on how to detect the operating system in a login script. The method that I use is to dump the results of ver out to a text file, then find the version number in those results. Here is a code snippet based on what is on that page, for detecting Windows XP. (http://www.amset.info/loginscripts/os-id.asp)  ver >"%userprofile%"\ver.txt &... [More]