technical solutions and commentary

When you open NLB (Network Load Balancing) Manager, by defualt you need to manually open the NLB cluster group you wish to manage. This makes perfect sense if you are managing multiple NLB clusters. In my experience however, many administrators are only managing a single NLB cluster in their environment.

In order to automatically popluate NLB Manager with the name of you cluster group, you can create a hostlist file and point to it in the shortcut path. For example, (1)create a text file in notepad called “hostlist.txt”. (2) Open the file and enter the IP address of the NLB Cluster on the first line. (3) On the next lines enter the FQDN of the NLB host names. It should look something like this:


192.168.100.100
fe-svr1.company.local
fe-svr2.company.local
fe-svr3.company.local


Now in the shortcut path of NB Manager, you must specify the hostlist file you just created. For example…


"c:\windows\system32\nlbmgr.exe" /hostlist "c:\hostlist.txt"


Now whenever you open NLB Manaer using this shortcut, the farm will populate automatically.

If you are using Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services in a NLB (Network Load Balancing) Cluster configuration, you can remove a server from the cluster group so it will no longer except new user connections from the cluster name or ip address. This will allow you to take a server down for maintenance, while not disconnecting current user sessions. This setting is similar to unchecking the option of “Allow Logons to Server” in Citrix Presentation Server environment.

Even thought this option has a non-descriptive name, it will prevent new users from connecting to the server while keeping existing user sessions active.

Windows Server 2003 has a new securty architecture which introduces new configuration needs for Terminal Services users. If you are using roaming profiles for terminal server users, which is recommened, you may run into these issues:

These issues are caused because of the more restrictive access to the system partition or C:drive on the server. If you have changed the default location of the “Documents and Settings” folder, to a non-system partition (which is not recommended by Microsoft) you may not experience this.

In order to enable the saving of templates, and creation of files to the desktop, the Group Policy you have created for the Terminal Server needs to be modified. Folder Redirection needs to be enabled for the “Desktop” & “Applicaiton Data” at a minimum. This can be redirected to a folder in the users home directory, or their profile.

TheLazyAdmin.com has an easy to follow article on How to Isolate FTP Users using IIS. If you have ever setup a web server for shared hosting or for shared FTP access, this article describes in easy steps how to set up the FTP services. Discovering this on your own can take some time. Read the article here.

The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities

Burn4Free: Free CD/DVD buring software

SSL Explorer: Free SSL VPN Solution

PC Inspector File Recovery: recover deleted files from a hard drive.

PC Inspector Smart Recovery: recover deleted files from memory sticks.

FreeMind: Free Mind Mapping Software

InstallWatch Pro & InstallRight Pro

RAID 5EE offers 10% - 20% improvements in performance over RAID 5E. However, there is a possibility of data corruption if you are using RAID 5EE on an IBM xSeries 366, type 8863 (any model) or IBM xSeries 460, type 8872 (any model) server.

More information is available at http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=psg1MIGR-60771

The Cisco PIX firewall does not allow Microsoft VPN client traffic through the firewall by default. This is apparently caused because of an issue with applying an IOS update on the firewall. To resolve this, you must enable the fixup protocol for pptp 1723 to allow Microsoft VPN client connectivity out of the network.

fixup protocol pptp 1723

After you have the mailboxes moved from the Exchange 5.5 servers to the new Exchange 2003 servers, there are several steps which need to be completed. This includes replicating and re-homing Public Folders (user and system folders), moving connectors, and removing the ADC and SRS components in a particular order.

The following KB Articles provide the step-by-step information in order to remove Exchange 5.5 from your messaging environment. They should be read all the way through before starting the process in order to get an overview of what needs to be done. They should be read in the order listed below.

This KB article provides step-by-step information on how to remove the first Exchange 2003 server from your organization. Which is commonly an interim server deployed to run the ADC and SRS services.

There are times when Citrix based applications use the server time zone instead of the client device time zone. This can cause all kinds of problems with Outlook appointments, reminders, and mail time stamps, and saving documents with the correct time stamp.
There is a troubleshooting article from Citrix on this for MetaFrame XP and 3.0. This applies to 4.0 as well.

CTX303498 - Troubleshooting Client Time Zone Issues In MetaFrame XP

If you try to mount a Exchange Mailbox or Public Folder Store using an alternative server, such as a separate recovery server, you may get a 0×80040102 error. This is because the recover server machine account needs to be given full control of the store before it can mount it in the Recovery Storage Group. See Microsoft KB 299680 for how to make these changes.

If you are recovering to the same server that the backup originated from, you should not experience this error.