One of the tools available from Microsoft free is Exmerge.  It allows individual mailboxes to be individually exported to PST files, which can then either be re-imported back into Exchange or simply opened in Outlook.  Exmerge is available from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=429163ec-dcdf-47dc-96da-1c12d67327d5&displaylang=en

Extract and save to the Exchsrv/bin directory, and when the appropriate mailboxes have been selected, destinations set save the configuration.  This will create an exmerge.ini file.

This can then be scripted in a batch file and run as a scheduled task.  I create a folder on the local disk of the Exchange server (although this can be done to a mapped drive) for each day I want the backup to run.

My exmon.bat file reads:

D:\exchsrvr\bin\exmerge.exe -F C:\scripts\exmon\exmerge.ini -B

Which runs the exmerge.exe, with the options specified in scripts\exmon\exmerge.ini and runs the script as a batch job using the -B switch.

To clean the folder prior to running, I have a separate batch file that runs earlier on the same day that runs

del /F /Q /S z:\Exchange\exmon\*.*

Subsequently to back up the PST files to a separate server I use the excellent BackupPC running on a Debian server.  Installation instructions for Debian are here: http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/backuppc.htm

The BackupPC box is confugured to access the SMB share that the PST’s are stored in, as well as additional file shares on the server.  BackupPC supports incremental backups and backups via a variety of methods (including SSH and rsync, as well as SMB).

It’s also possible to archive off historic backups for off-site using the archive functions within BackupPC.  As a free solution for backing up mailboxes and beiong able to recover easily (with version control) this is very effective…

The solution was to kill the process in Task Manager (inetinfo.exe).  We found it immediately re-spawned and worked…

http://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?FamilyID=9b9f2925-cbc9-44da-b2c9-ffdbc46b0b17&displaylang=en

First upload the image you wish to include to a web server and make a note of the full path. ie, http://www.yourdomain.com/images/companylogo.jpg.

Then create a new signature in Outlook and ensure the path of the image on the signature points to your webserver. You can find the raw signature files in “C:\documents and settings\username.domain\application data\microsoft\signatures” on Office 2007/XP.

You can then edit the raw signature in Notepad.This is an ideal opportunity to tidy up the messy html created by Outlook when designing the signature in the first place. Find the image src and edit to point to the full path of the hosted image

Send an email with the signature embedded to the users email address and open the email within OWA (in IE). Copy the signature then go into Options -> Email Signatures and paste in the signature.

#rpm -Uvh http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/yum/stable/fc10/pptp-release-current.noarch.rpm

# yum –enablerepo=pptp-stable install pptpconfig

# pptpconfig

….enter the details of your PPTP account and connect.  Add additional routes if required

I had a quick glance at the pfSense/OpenVPN docs to see whether there was anything I could specify in pfSense and they stated that the machines needed to use the pfSense as the default gateway – this was unacceptable for our purposes here (one of the devices in question is the Asterisk VoIP server on the network which needs to use the other Internet connection for it’s external traffic). There is an easy solution to this however by simply adding a static route back to the IP range issued to DHCP clients via the pfSense’s internal IP.

This looks something like this:

Effectively any internal machines that need to be visible over the VPN need to have an appropriate return path configured. The DHCP scope I have used for VPN clients is 10.0.200.0/24.
For linux machines on the network, the route can be added on a temporary basis (ie. until reboot) by entering the following command on the host:

route add -net 10.0.200.0/24 gw 10.204.6.1

or permanently by adding an entry into the /etc/sysconfig/static-routes (on Centos as per http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Deployment_Guide/s1-networkscripts-static-routes.html)

On Windows hosts this can be achieved by adding a persistent route:

route add -p 10.0.200.0 mask 255.255.255.0 10.204.6.1

eg.

username@domainname.com

However, in many cases the standardised email address format is slightly different – for example:

firstname.lastname@domainname.com

This is actually really easy to edit in the Exchange System Manager using a few variables:

%g  = Given Name (First name).
%3g = means first 3 letters of Given Name
%s  = Surname (Last name).
%3s = means first 3 letters of sn.
%d  = displayname.
%m  = Exchange alias.

Once this has been edited, just right click on the Policy and click Update this Policy now.

First of all, ping the remote host, then run an

arp -a

at the command line.  This will give you the MAC details.  The catch is that this only works on the same subnet – when trying to do this on a remote subnet (on the other side of a router, etc) you won’t get a response…there is a solution for this though, as long as the remote host you want to determine the MAC for is a Windows host.

NBTscan is a tool that can do this (and is available from the repositories on most linux distros (or at least on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora, and is  also downloadable for Windows )

http://www.techcentral.ie/article.aspx?id=12375

I can’t believe that there are many people out there who haven’t yet patched their DNS servers……but it’s worth checking on the Doxpara site (http://www.doxpara.com/)

…that is, of course unless you’re DNS has been hijacked and you are being sent to a spoofed doxpara site

Still bad news for those running Mac DNS servers as Apple still haven’t released a patch, although apparently the Bind team have stated that the BSD version of the patch can be ported….

Further info here:

http://xforce.iss.net/xforce/xfdb/35575

Recently for a specific user, the user received the error on their Vista laptop:

“Your user profile was not loaded correctly! You have been logged on with a temporary profile.

Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off. Please see the event log for details or contact your administrator.”

When logging onto a different laptop, the profile loaded correctly.  which meant the issue was on the users laptop, rather than an issue with the profile.

Task #1 is to back up the data on the profile to a separate location.  Particularly any files on the Desktop that you are desperate to preserve.  Next, a quick registry edit removing the reference to the roaming profile for the user; find the entry for the corresponding users SID in the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Remove the key for this SID only (you should see the path to the profile within the key to give it away).

On deleting the key, just reboot and it should pull down the profile as usual.  In the event of the new profile overwriting the server copy, then simply copy the backup data (you’d be well advised to just copy docs and manually recreate settings such as Exchange profiles).