emtunc's questions

I'm not sure if I worded the question correctly to be honest but basically what I want to do is:

When a user types in something like Expenses in the URL bar of a browser, I want the browser to be directed to a specific web address (very very similar to how OpenDNS shortcuts work)

The IP address of the web address will not change amongst the different 'shortcuts'... i.e:

mycompany.com = 10.0.0.0

mycompany.com/expenses = 10.0.0.0

mycompany.com/tracker = 10.0.0.0

When a user types expenses in the browser address bar and presses enter, I want the browser to automatically direct to the specified address as above.

Would this be tricky to implement? I hope I have put my question forward appropriately :-)

Additional notes:

• We are on a Windows envionment

• I believe the exchange server is running as the DNS server in the office

We have a Netgear FVS336G VPN firewall at our office and we use it to access our e-mail and files when we are working from home/outside of the office.

At present, the performance is not too bad, however, sometimes it can take quite a while to complete a small file transfer.

What I want to do is test the performance of the VPN connection (i.e. baseline it) and try a few things on a test VPN policy that I have created.

For example, I want to measure the speed on different algorithms - right now, the main policy everyone is using is set to 3DES; from what I have read, AES is 'faster' (as well as being more CPU friendly and secure), however, when I tried it on my test policy, I did not notice very much - of course, this doesn't mean anything as it's not very scientific... I'm just looking at a bunch of numbers on the screen and trying to determine which is higher.

What I am looking for is some sort of command prompt/line based tool that will bypass all the Windows (the environment is all Windows based) file transfer-y stuff. For example, the 'discovering' phase which takes about a minute or two to complete before it gets on to actually transferring the file.

Is there such a tool for a Windows platform that will help me measure the performance accurately?

Our set-up looks like this:

To receive email:

[[Our e-mail host]] --> POP3 [[Our Exchange 2003 server]]

To send e-mail:

[[Our Exchange 2003 server]] --> SMTP --> [[Zen internet]] --> [[[email protected]]]

Is the above set-up the way to go? Is it best practice to host your own exchange e-mail system? (we receive a lot of SPAM and many of the products only work when mail is retrieved via SMTP)

We are a small sized company of about 20-30 mailboxes - we use many of the Outlook 07/10 features such as meetings and calendars - I say this because I read that IMAP doesn't support this (I was looking at all possible options).

So my real questions are:

1. So what are the main differences between POP3 and Exchange?

2. Is it worth us switching over to Exchange hosted when we do an upgrade to SBS 2008?

3. Apart from two (is that correct?) public IP addresses, is there any other 'special' requirements?

4. Would it be safe to open up the Exchange server to the public internet? (of course, opening up anything to the outside world is dangerous, but will it be fine if set up properly?)

5. Is there anything else I have not thought through properly? The main reason I want to do this is because I don't think that retrieving our e-mail via pop 3 from an external provider is how it's supposed to be done. Also, I do not believe we are making full use & flexibility of Exchange 2003's (or 2010 when we upgrade to SBS 2008) features by using POP3.

The boot up process for our laptop-domain users takes literally, forever to start. It sits at the "Applying user settings" stage and when you press ctrl+alt+del, it takes like another minute or so before actually being able to enter a login.

Now... I've kind of 'fixed' the problem by manually entering the DNS server in the wireless (that's how it connects) adapter properties; however, I don't want it to mess up the connection when they get home.

How can I further trouble shoot this problem? Why is it taking so long for the laptops to query for the DNS server - if indeed, it is what it is trying to do?

I have also checked the Group Policies and there is nothing I can see which could be causing this problem - also, the GP isn't very complicated; just a few account lockout and Windows Update settings.

The server is running Small Business Server 2003. The laptops are running a clean install of Windows 7 Pro.

So basically, we have a dozen or more group policies which make the process of applying/changing/adding new policies a PITA.

What I want to do is merge all the policies together and basically end up having two - one for desktops and the other for laptops.

Is there a nice and easy way of merging all these policies together?

The server is running SBS 2003.

Thanks!

I've read a few articles as to why performing an IISReset is not safe as it doesn't completely save XYZ (can't remember exactly what now).

What is the safest alternative to IISReset?

I ask this because I did an IISReset on one of our servers on the weekend and the exchange store service froze in the 'stopping' state - ended up fixing it by killing the store.exe process and restarting the service.

We're running windows server 2003 and as of now, we are using NTBACKUP - however, we are looking for another tool, preferably something free which offers mediocore features.

The reason we want to move away from NTBACKUP is that it is not very reliable. Sometimes our full backups are 70GB and sometimes they come up to 110+GB with the exact same options and files selected. Incrementals (run a day after) also run up to something silly like 40GB which is impossible since nothing much changes on the server.

edit: We're looking into remote backup too (something like jungle disk) but for now, we have 2 hdd's; one for offsite storage and one onsite.

edit1: Okay so one thing I'm trying tomorrow is a tool called 'handy backup'. Apparently we already have a licence for it on the server so I'll see how that goes. Still open to suggestions - we did have a trial of 'shadow copy' however, the licence (500$) was a bit too expensive for our liking.

Is there a way of making all the computers in our domain/environment go to sleep after say, 8PM and wake up at 7AM in the morning?

I understand that this may need some sort of application for the server to communicate with but I believe this will not be so difficult with SCE and due to the fact that we only have about 10 PCs in the office.