technical solutions and commentary

At products change from version to version, the tunning recommendations will typically change as well. If you are deploying Exchange Server 2003 be sure you are following the current tuning guidelines and not using guidlines from Exchange 2000. As well guidelines for running Exchange 2003 on a Windows 2000 SP4 server may have different tweaks than Exchange 2003 on a Windows 2003 server.

Guidelines for Optimizing memory for Exchange Server 2003 running on Windows Server 2003 or SBS 2003 can be found in this KB How to optimize memory usage in Exchange Server 2003

Here are some additional Knowledge Base articles dedicated to this issue:

“Using the /Userva Switch on Windows Server 2003-based computer that are running Exchange Server”

“The “HeapDecommitFreeBlockThreshold” registry key”

“CPU and Memory Scalability for Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003”

“How to troubleshoot virtual memory fragmentation in Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server”

If you are planning an in-place upgrade from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003, the Exchange Server 2003 deployment guide recommends that certain manual tuning performed for Exchange 2000 be removed before upgrading to Exchnage 2003.

See the section Removing Exchange 2000 Tuning Parameters contained in the chapter Upgrading from Exchange 2000 Server to Exchange Server 2003 of the Exchange Server Deployment Guide.

Some other printed resources:

MBSA 2.0 may not be able to remotely scan your workstations on the network if they have the XP SP2 firewall enabled. This is known to be an issue on a SBS networks and may affect a non SBS network as well. You may see an error such as this:

The use of DCOM for remote scanning through Windows Firewall on all versions of Windows XP may require a post-SP2 hotfix as described in Microsoft Knowledgebase article 895200, "Availability of the Windows XP COM+ Hotfix Rollup Package 9".

Microsoft Product Support provides this hotfix free to allow scanning through the XP SP2 firewall. Here is the KB for your reference: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895200

There is an issue with CA Secure Content Manager v1.1 with blocking zip files containing password protected files, such as excel or word files. In order to fix this issue, locate and open, in a text editor such as notepad, the SCM INI file named “eCCGlobalSettings.ini”. It should be located in %installdirectory%\eTrust SCM\db\eCCGlobalSettings.ini

Make the following change to the entry under the section
?ALL?.
"AVEncryptedAchievedAreInfected”

Modify the entry to "AVEncryptedArchievedAreInfected".

Notice that the entry needs to be archieved not achieved. Stop and restart the SCM services.

Microsoft has a web site http://www.securityguidance.com where you can download the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool (MSAT). It’s a questionnaire that you fill out and the tool provides an evaluation report for your security practices. It allows you yo compare your organization with others in your same industry segment. To complete this you’ll likely need some input from management and from IT to get an accurate report. It’s a pretty good tool for how quick it is to fill out.

Microsoft has some good resources for SMB on microsoft.com. Microsoft defines Small business 1-24 employees/end-users and Medium business as 25-500 employees/end-users.

The MidSize Business Home page is focused toward business persons. It has information on business solutions such as Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Etc. Essentially it’s a jumping off point to other Microsoft.com areas on industry or particular software solutions… a “one stop” page for SMB business people to find other MS resources that they waould be interested in.

The Midsize Business IT Center is focused toward IT staff and IT consultants which operate in the SMB space. There are a lot of “pre-packaged solutions” or “perscriptive guidance” papers which will help the IT generalist and even an IT specialist deploy Microsoft solutions in the best way for the business, based upon size and function. The solutions have been developed with the feedback from customers, the input from product teams, and field testing/solution validation from Microsoft Partners. I would recommend any IT person working in the SMB area take a look at this site and seriously consider using these solutions in a deployment. The solutions are designed so they can be mixed and matched and areas can be skipped easily if they don’t apply to the business.

I had the privledge of providing feedback to the product group field during the partner field validation phase of the “IT Solution for Small and Medium Business” during the early formation of this group. I provided them feed back to the solutuon of what I thought worked, what I felt was how something was typically done in the field and so forth. I also recieved a follow phone call and email asking for more information of what I thought of it. After that experience, it’s something I think they are taking seriously in getting solid solutions for SMB into the field through this site.

The new Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (ver 2.0) has been released! I have not been able to install the 2.0 release version yet, but I was a beta tester of ver 2 and thought it is a good product. There was a lot of feedback in the beta testers groups as well that will really improve MBSA ver 3 as well if Microsoft takes even half of the suggestions and implements them. Check it out here.

On June 28th Microsoft released Update Rollup 1 for Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4). More info can be found in Microsoft Security Advisory (891861)

With all the chatter in the Blog space and PodCast space about Google’s patent and how it determines site ranks, I thought I would see what patents Google, Inc. holds with the USPTO. Here’s a link to the results using the search term “Google, Inc”. Patent registrations are usually pretty dry reading, but if you can get through them you can usually learn alot.

And speaking of learning a lot from patents, here is a side note that doesn’t relate to technology… Several magazines had evaluated popular diets a few months ago. The conlcusion I found to be most common among them was that Weight Watchers was the most effective in helping people lose wieght and keep it off. Here is the patent filing for how they calculate food in take for the diet.

I stumbled upon a site that focuses on Terminal Services and related technologies for the technically advanced network administrator. http://dev.remotenetworktechnology.com/ There is great info there on TS command line tools, troubleshooting, customizing, and even VNC and VMWare stuff. Here is info on all the customizations available in the “.rdp” config file.

For Exchange Server computers which are at the same time Active Directory Domain Controllers or Global Catalog servers - do not set the /3GB switch in boot.ini. Also the recommended practice is having dedicated Active Directory Domain Controllers or Global Catalog servers.

See KB 815372
See KB 823440

** You do not have to use the /3GB switch on Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003-based computers. **

Source: http://msmvps.com/bradley/archive/2005/06/25/55763.aspx