Windows Ninja's questions

DFS-Replication is not supported on CSVs but is it supported/acceptable to do DFS-R on a file server whose VHDX resides on a CSV?

I haven't been able to find a definitive answer anywhere.

We're running Windows Server 2012 R2.

Thanks in advance.

Hopefully this question is objective and appropriate for ServerFault...

I've read in numerous places that DFS-Replication is not supported on CSVs but have yet to come across any information which explains why it is not supported and what sort of problems we can expect to face if we deploy our DFS file servers on our storage cluster.

We're running Windows Server 2012 R2.

Any information about this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

We have a user mailbox on Office 365 that we share out to a department at our company with around 20 users. We've had some problems with the mailbox regularly updating for some users.

Utilizing a Shared Mailbox is not an option due to the size and required functionality of the mailbox (sending out emails via TLS through O365).

We're being told by our Vendor of Record that provides support (as a middleman) for Office 365 that you cannot have that many users connected to a user mailbox with Office 365 but I cannot locate any documentation to support such a claim.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

We're working with consultants on a large DFS replication project and we experienced a significant loss of data during the initial replication.

While trying to identify what happened the consultant came back and said this was due to using the same drive letter on both servers involved in the replication. I'm trying to determine if this is a legitimate concern.

Technical details are below:

Server 1 has a file share residing on the D: named Share 1 to sync to Server 2's D:
Server 2 has a file share residing on its D: named Share 2 to sync to Server 2's D:

Would cross syncing these two shares to each other cause an issue? The initial replication was going fine, completing around 60%, until the servers got confused and then Server 2 thought it had all of the data from Server 1 and instructed Server 1 to delete all the rest of its data because it was no longer needed.

Any light you folks can shed on this would be very much appreciated. Thank you.

I'd like to be able to configure a GPO to set wallpapers computer rather than per user. However, reading through documentation and forums I've not been able to figure out what seems like it should be a simple thing to do.

This is for a Windows Server 2008 R2 domain environment.

Thanks in advance.

Recently an employee deleted their entire mailbox before leaving the company and there was no litigation hold in place.

Is there any way to recover all of the deleted items, preferably via a PowerShell script? We'd need to recover all of the folders, subfolders, and online archives.

I realize we can recover emails one by one up to a point but this will take far too long to be feasible.

Thanks in advance!

I'd like to disable the Protected View MS Office files open in when opening files from email and other non-local places.

We have a mixture of Office 20007, 2010, and 2013 in place so if these are controlled via different GPOs, I would need each of them.

Thanks in advance.

Title pretty much says it all. I'm just wondering if this makes a difference in the way VMs will process things and if one method is preferable vs. another.

I'm trying to enable WordPress to upload files to the wp-content folder without setting permissions for the folder to 777. However, I'm having some difficulties.

The group and user set for the wp-content folder match the group and user Apache is configured to be using in httpd.conf. However, when I run the below command, it appears that Apache is actually running as root rather than the user specified in httpd.conf.

httpd.conf Configuration

User xxx
Group yyy

Command Run to Determine User Apache is Running As

ps aux | grep httpd

Output from the above command

513       1294  0.4  1.4 316420 54864 ?        S    08:30   0:06 /usr/sbin/httpd

513 is the correct UID for user xxx, so that appears correctly. However, I'm still not able to upload files within WordPress without setting permissions for the wp-content folder to 777.

Can somebody tell me what the issue is here?

I recently ran into an issue where my Windows Deployment Services server stopped working after changing the name of the server. After looking around, I didn't really find a good answer for what settings need to be updated if you change the name of your WDS server.

Answering this below per the comment.

I'm trying to telnet into port 25 on a CentOS server that runs PostFix to test sending email messages from the server.

When I try to telnet in from another CentOS box on the same network I get the message below:

 Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused 

SELinux is disabled and I've opened port 25 in iptables...what else should I be looking at?

I have PostFix up and running on a CentOS box and would like to send mail from a Windows server on the same network out through the PostFix server.

When I try to telnet from the Windows server into port 25 on the PostFix server currently the connection fails.

Where do I set this up within PostFix/CentOS?

Thanks in advance!

In Exchange 2010, if an AD user is disabled but another user has access to their mailbox, will they still be able to access the mailbox or does that user need to remain enabled for this functionality to work?

I've setup an SMTP server in our DMZ to send emails out via postfix for a website we host.

If I want to send email outside our network from that server but emails being received will be going to our Exchange server, does the server still need a public MX record?

I am thinking the answer may be yes to whitelist that server as an accepted sender of email from our domain but I'd like some clarification.

Thanks in advance.

When I try to connect to a couple of our ESXi servers with my vSphere client I get the following error message:

"vSphere Client could not connect to "IP Address". An unknown connection error occurred. (The client could not send a complete request to the server. (The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send.))

I'm thinking this may have something to do with a version incompatibility but I'm not sure. Can somebody shed some light?

I'm trying to understand a config on one of our Cisco routers (teaching myself iOS) and have run into a problem with one line.

Can somebody please explain the "line enable" piece of the command below and check the rest of my information to ensure it is correct?

aaa authentication login default group tacacs+ local line enable
---
# Creates an authentication list that specifies the types of authentication methods allowed.

# aaa authentication login = command to authenticate users who want exec (enable) access into the access server (tty, vty, console, and aux).
## default = the named list is the the default one (in this case the default one is default)

# There are three authentication methods:
## TACACS+
## local
## line

# All users are authenticated using the tacacs+ server (the first method). If the TACACS+ server doesn't respond, then the router's local database is used (the second method). The local authentication, define the username and password::
## username xxx password yyy

# Because we are using the list default in the aaa authentication login command, login authentication is automatically applied for all login connections (such as tty, vty, console, and aux). 

We've been subpoenaed to send all emails exchanged with a couple different individuals for a court case.

How would I go about doing this in an Exchange 2010 environment?

I'm just trying to understand how ESX migrates a VM from one blade to another without any data loss...if I have a VM that is serving as a database server that is constantly getting data, is it able to migrate from one blade to another without losing any of that database information?

Edit: My idea didn't make sense since there is a SAN involved...if anybody can explain how vMotion does this I would greatly appreciate it!

Thanks in advance.

I'm looking for some general advice here. I've decided to take my first job in a lead sys admin position...I don't start until next month, but in the meantime I'd like to prepare for the position.

For those of you that have walked into this role at some point in your career, what were your primary objectives on Day 1?

The end users for the company use a mixture of 4-5 different distros of Linux in addition to both Windows and Mac. This is obviously a cumbersome environment to support so I'll likely see if I can limit the users to a single distro of Linux, in addition to Windows which will have setups controlled by AD, and all Macs configured on a single version.

Ensuring they have a good backup solution in place is where I think I'm most likely to concentrate my efforts immediately. After that though, I'm not sure what the most important objectives should be. What do you guys think?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Can somebody recommend an open source real-time network analysis program?

What I'm looking for the program to do is display a graph of bandwidth usage by IP within our internal network that can quickly be viewed any time we need to (typically when we want to quickly find out who is utilizing high amounts of bandwidth and slowing down the network).

We ideally simply want to hook up a monitor on the wall of our server room to a system whose NIC will be in permissive mode to log all network activity in a visual manner which can easily be seen and running 24/7.

Prefer open source as I do not have a budget for this project and prefer open source projects in general. I'd also prefer for this to be available for CentOS but any linux distro or Windows OS would be acceptable.

Thanks!

Edit: Also, it can't use SNMP. The gather needs to be logfiles or promiscuous mode.