WheresAlice's questions

We have Postfix configured for virtual domains and virtual mailboxes and it's running quite nicely. However, Postfix now thinks that everything except my_destination should be delivered virtually. And this is a problem because it means we can't use virtual aliases to deliver external mail.

Whenever I try sending an email through this server to a domain which we are not responsible for (ie. does not appear in the mysql table of virtual domains and is not in my_destination) then we get the following error message:

554 5.1.1 : Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual mailbox table

And this happens for every single domain we do not host, regardless of what the domain name is. When I send email to an existing user at a domain listed in my_destination then it delivers locally ok.

How do we tell Postfix to not attempt virtual delivery for domains that it is not responsible for? How do I get it to deliver that email to the correct external host (presuming of course the sender has permission to relay).

Back in the day (late 90s) I worked with a school who partitioned their desktop systems into two drives, the main Windows drive and a secondary hidden drive which held a system image for easy restore when the users inevitably screwed up the main Windows drive. They could restore an entire computer suite in half an hour (or so they claimed). I've been trying to replicate this setup but failing.

I'm aware of Ghost and Clonezilla but they're not working quite right for me. Ghost is a commercial product which would be a problem for us - we'd then have to license that to the people we're selling Desktops to, which although isn't the end of the world is a lot of admin work in tracking licenses. Clonezilla isn't quite right because it's not automated enough - you have to mount the drives, find the image, then restore it to the right place; I want a boot option which will let the users do all of this automatically.

I'm aware of system manufacturers who provide this sort of setup, HP in particular, but we mostly work with refurbed machines of all different manufacturers and I'd like a solution to handle every machine. And yes I know the image would have to be created for each machine, so I'm hoping that can be automated as much as possible too.

Is there some better software that will handle this or am I going to have to start creating something myself?

We have a Windows network running in Workgroup mode with no server. There are around 14 machines on the network so it's clearly time we moved to a SBS 2008 server in domain mode. My question surrounds migration of user accounts to this domain setup.

There are multiple accounts on each machine, and some people have accounts on multiple machines. There are around 15 users in total plus some guest accounts for visitors. All of the machines are running Windows XP Pro but there is one Windows 7 laptop about to be added.

We want to transfer the profiles and not just create new accounts, and we probably want to move all the user's files to user home directories on the new server.

I've seen recommendations of USMT, moveuser.exe and ADMT in the past. I've also seen recommendations of migrating manually by creating the new accounts and then copying profiles across - though the last time I tried this method (around 2004) it was pretty messy. Using any of these methods would presumably mean we need to decide which machine we migrate from.

I'm expecting to be told we're going to need to do this fairly manually given the duplication of accounts across machines, but tips and good methods would be welcomed. How would you handle this situation and what potential issues and problems would you expect?

We had two Dell Poweredge servers donated to us yesterday which I want to install ESXi on. I'm used to HP servers, but I understand that it is possible to buy Dell servers with ESXi pre-installed. I've seen a lot of references to OpenManagement and Drac and other monitoring and installation tools, and I'm confused as to the best way to install ESXi on a Dell Poweredge server.

Do I install ESXi from the iso downloaded from VMware and then add Dell management tools? Do I install some management tools first? Is there a special Dell version of ESXi? Do I configure raid first, and what tools do I use for that?

What Dell tools should I be using and installing alongside ESXi?