tearman's questions

I have two Exchange servers set up in a DAG, both with client access roles as well as database roles. One system is a physical machine hosted internally with a lot of horsepower behind it, while the other is a VM at a remote site offering DR capabilities.

For some reason, most if not all of my Outlook client have a preference set to connect to the remote Exchange server as opposed to the local Exchange server, even though the local has priority on all the databases and significantly more resources available to it.

Is there a way to set the priority of which Exchange server is selected as a Client Access Server by the Outlook clients?

I have a DAG set up between 2 Exchange servers at 2 different sites, connected via a dedicated gigabit circuit. For some reason, every so often, the remote host will get removed from the active failover cluster membership (even though its online), then the two Exchange servers will get into a fight over who's the primary (event logs report that the "File Share Witness failed to arbitrarte for the file share", the file share does exist and the Exchange Trusted Subsystem does have admin rights on that box and on that share but the DAG setup box reports that it does not).

then all the user's get prompted for a password and sometimes the entire thing goes down for a few minutes. Even Public Folders get knocked offline sometimes.

Its reporting that there are 3 different subnets (an access subnet, the iSCSI subnet, and a non-routable IPv6 subnet) and I have replication disabled on all but the access subnet. This is the same subnet where the DAG has its IP addresses (I gave it 2). Replication is disabled on the other two subnets.

Anyone run into this issue before?

I'm attempting to get SCCM running and one of the problems I'm running into is that WebDAV is not functioning properly on the server. After a lot of tracing, I've figured out that the problem is that IIS7 is giving a status 405 whenever the PROPFIND command is issued. However, its giving status 200 whenever OPTIONS is issued, and "Allow Anonymous Property Queries" is set to true. Further, I've also set the host header.

Anyone have any insight into this problem?

Well I made the horrendous mistake of advertising a task sequence to all machines which as resulted in a lot of Help Desk calls with people wondering what this wonderful pop-up box means.

But what I want to do is advertise a task sequence ONLY to computers that are booting to PXE. I tried the "All Unknown Computers" collection but this isn't functioning properly.

We're running SCCM 2007 R2

So our environment is basically we have an Exchange 2003 server, and we're attempting to move to Exchange 2010 gradually, and move to new hardware while we're at it.

So our first step was obviously to get Exchange 2010 installed on the new box. However, after running the domainprep steps listed in http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125224.aspx (including PrepareLegacyExchangePermissions) our mailbox permissions get messed up.

Normally, we have an AD security group for Exchange Administrators that allows anyone in that group to view all folders inside any user's mailbox. However, now, this functionality is gone and our Exchange Admins can't access anyone's mailboxes. We'd like to get this functionality back if we could.

Thanks

We're looking into the possibility of deploying our enterprise CA to users at their homes, and we're looking for a method to programmatically install a root CA.

I noticed certutil isn't included on the default XP install.

Does anyone know of a similar utility that can import certificates into certificate stores without prompting the user for any information?

We need to target XP, Vista, and 7.

I'm running Snort in conjunction with MySQL for logging, which is generating ENORMOUS datasets (currently the event table is over 2.5 million, I don't know exactly how much because it only goes up to 2.5 million before it clunks out from using too much memory).

Unfortunately, this data is not very useful anymore because I can't pull it out anywhere else (the stored procedure causes the server to crash).

My question is, is there a way to optimize MySQL for these huge datasets or is this beyond the technical capabilities of MySQL and I need to go to something like Oracle, MS SQL, or PostgreSQL?

We have both an Oracle and a MS SQL Server instance but both of these are business critical production servers and it would be very bad news to knock either one of those offline or inhibit their abilities.

Any thoughts on the matter?

We have quite a few Windows based servers and I'm attempting to figure out either A. How I can change all of their DNS settings automatically (they all have local static IPs) or, failing that, B. at least query what their DNS settings are and sort by those that're using our old DNS servers.

We have both SCCM and SCOM if that helps in the situation.

Ok probably a bit of an odd question, but is there a way to enable "finger" like functionality on a Windows network?

we'd basically like the ability to find out where a user is logged in on a network and possibly which users are logged onto a workstation if possible.

We're currently on AD2003 functional level, with the intent of going to AD2008 very soon, so compatibility in that arena is preferable.

Has anyone noticed that after certain actions, a Windows folder will just go hidden? Like its been entirely removed from the taxonomy of the file system, but is still accessible if you type in the exact path?

Does anyone know how to remedy this?

We're attempted to set up a high availability network for our file servers, and we're wanting to do a DFS file system cluster using the same back-end storage (our back-end storage has its own clustering mechanisms that it manages itself).

The question being, A. how would one go about setting up DFS clustering, and B. how can we get Windows to cooperate with multiple servers accessing the same SAN volumes?

Basically, when we installed Exchange 2010 alongside our Exchange 2003 server (we assume), this is what caused our problem. The Exchange 2010 server is not active, just running on the domain.

What's actually going on is that user groups like Enterprise Admins are getting a single deny flag on Full Control over mailboxes currently residing on the Exchange 2003 server which is preventing any of us from making changes.

It says these permissions are inherited from the Parent Object, but we have no idea which one that is.

Any idea on how to go about fixing this?

I've been using grep to run a few PII scans and while it's finding results, it's indeed finding too many false positives.

Is there a way that I can tell grep not to trigger a match for a file unless it contains other data?

For instance, can I tell it not to trigger an alert on a regex for a SSN unless the file includes text like "ssn" or "social security number" somewhere else in the file?

Basically the situation is, I have a box running Debian, the box internally has an Intel SCSI RAID controller which is controlling 2 hard drives in RAID1 mode which is where the OS is installed.

Further, I have a QLogic fiber channel adapter that connects the unit to a Fiber Channel SAN.

My process of installation is I'll install Debian to the local drives, and leave the QLogic firmware out of it for the time being.

Then once I get the unit online, I'll install the firmware drivers.

This flops my internal drives from /dev/sda to /dev/sdc, which is a bit annoying, but recoverable. Probably should address these by UUID anyways.

Once I get back online, I have to install multipath-tools (the framework is a multipath framework).

However, once I reboot the machine again, it fails on boot after discovering multipath targets, saying my local drives are busy and cannot be mounted to /root.

Any help in what may be the problem here? Or at least how to disable multipath until after the unit boots and then ignores the internal drives?

I have a QLogic Fibre Channel card installed in a Debian box (Lenny), and after some tiffs with the firmware, I managed to get the operating system to recognize the card (DKMS driver, and the "firmware-qlogic" package for firmware).

However, for some reason, no block devices are being created for the two SAN volumes being exposed to the unit. They show up when I 'cat /proc/scsi/scsi' but there's no /dev/sdX block device that I can see and further, I have to run the rescan-scsi-bus.sh shell script every time I need to get the /dev/sgX devices back.

How can I get the system to recognize those fibre-channel volumes persistently?

EDIT: Found out that the dual devices being seen are part of the Multipath I/O system we use with our SAN array. Does multipath i/o need to be set up prior to the volumes being recognized as block devices?

Is it possible to push out changes to the registry on a local computer from the domain policy? Or does a special script need to be written to do so?

I've got a Windows XP Virtual Machine (VMWare system) and a thin client. Now the product looks like it will support sound, I think this is a "Windows" issue though (because of how Windows behaves).

Basically, everything looks fine for sound but when I go to the "Sounds and Audio Devices Properties" dialog, it shows me that its trying to pump sound through "Microsoft RDP Audio Driver" but its muted and won't let me unmute it (every time I try, and hit Apply, it will immediately re-mute itself).

Whenever I attempt to play some music through Windows Media Player, the error comes up "WMP cannot play the file because there is a problem with your sound device. There might not be a sound device installed on your computer, it might be in use by another program, or it might not be functioning properly"

This same problem also exists when I connect via plain vanilla RDP from another Windows client.

Any ideas on how to remedy this?

I've set up a Windows Preinstallation Environment on a USB Thumb Drive (version from the latest iteration of the Windows Automated Install Kit/WAIK), and I'm working on getting a deployment environment set up.

However, we'd like to make it so our Level 1 technicians can use the deployment system, and because of this, I've written several batch files to minimize the amount of command line work the technicians have to do.

Is there a way I can get these scripts to autorun after the PE environment has finished initializing?