Jason Berg's questions

I'm trying to accomplish a few things via Group Policy on Windows 7. Software Installation, map drives, map printer, etc.

I've got these computers set to autologon. The problem I'm running into is that the computers logon before DHCP has done its thing. Therefore, they don't apply any group policies properly.

How do I fix this? I've already set a policy to "Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon". I've read up a bit and this doesn't actually mean that it waits for DHCP. So it's a little pointless.

Anything that would delay logon would work. Or if I can somehow make the computer wait for DHCP.

Most of my file server installs these days seem to involve far too much downtime. The actual server install isn't too bad but migrating the data takes forever now that we have 1TB+ arrays we need to worry about. My typical method is to strip share permissions and use robocopy to copy all of the data over. Rather than wait for all of the data to copy over, I'd prefer to copy the data over the night before, then sync over changes after I strip permissions to the old server. Is there a nice way of doing this on Windows? I've looked into using DFS-R to accomplish this, but I'd prefer something a little...eh...smaller.

So I've been handed these 2 drives that were part of a RAID0 (eek!) array in a NAS. One of the drives had failed. Turns out, the drive had a bad controller card. What I've done is copied the information from the good drive to another good drive (dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb) then swapped the controller card to the bad drive. The bad drive now spins up and I can see bits on it.

I'm trying to rebuild the array but it's failing. For some reason, there's no superblock information on either drive. I'm not sure why that's the case. The drives came out of an Iomega Storcenter, so maybe it did something weird to create the array. I've tried rebuilding the array like this:

mdadm --assemble --scan

and this:

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --assume-clean --raid-level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda4 /dev/sdb4

That second one creates the RAID and I can pick out certain data when reading it with a hex editor, but the filesystem still won't mount.

Anybody have any tips for what I should be trying next?

We all know it happens. A bitter old IT guy leaves a backdoor into the system and network in order to have fun with the new guys and show the company how bad things are without him.

I've never personally experienced this. The most I've experienced is somebody who broke and stole stuff right before leaving. I'm sure this happens, though.

So, when taking over a network that can't quite be trusted, what steps should be taken to ensure everything is safe and secure?

Is there a way to remotely power on a PowerEdge 2900. I can ping the ip address that the BMC was set to, but I don't know how to access it. I've used ports 80, 443, and 1311. What port should I be using? Can I telnet in or just http? Once in, is there an option for power on?

I took over a network where it appears that domain users were added to the domain admins group at some point in the past. This caused every account to block security inheritance in Active Directory. Is there an easy way to force inheritance on all user account objects again?

I've seen it mentioned on Server Fault as well as in a Technet Blog that you should never pause or suspend a domain controller. While searching through Microsoft's documentation on the subject, I only find one instance where that would be bad. Microsoft's official support documentation states only that Domain Controllers shouldn't be suspended for more than the Tombstone period (which is 90 or 180 days) as that could cause lingering objects. Are there any other reasons why somebody wouldn't want to suspend a DC? I don't see how it could cause a USN Rollback. I'm sure there's another bad thing I could be missing. Thanks for your input.

Here's what I'm doing to get a connection count on my ASA

asa# show conn count
100 in use, 3389 most used
asa#

I want to reset the most used count. How do I do that?

I'm running an Exchange 2010 server. I need to allow POP3 authentication using an email address as the user ID instead of the domain username. Here's an example:

AD Domain: domain.local
Email domain: domain.com
Username: johndoe
email address: [email protected]

John logs into his computer using the username [email protected] but has an email address that is [email protected]. Can I enable POP3 authentication using the email address rather than the UPN? How do I do this?

I'm about to deploy a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine with the Hyper V role. I'd like to get away from having to use a network management card with my APC UPS as I'm only shutting down 1 server (it just seems like an unneeded point of failure). I'd like to look into using apcupsd instead.

1. Will this work properly if I use a serial connection?
   
2. Have you got it working yourself?
   
3. How is the SNMP monitoring? I really like being able to easily monitor my UPS with SNMP when powerchute is installed. Will I be sacrificing this completely?
   
4. Is the network management card really the way to go with this? If so, why?

Bonus question: Is there a better UPS out there that I should be recommending in the future?