September 2006 - Posts
Last night my wife Sami and I went to go see Jackass 2. This was one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. We had never seen the first one but occasionally would watch the TV show along with Wild Boyz and Bam's show. I honestly couldn't stop laughing and crying throughout the entire film. The best skit was the one where the guy dressed up as a terrorist. The beard was CLASSIC!!! If you haven't seen it, go see it!!! If you think that it is not your type of movie then you don't enjoy laughing. What a great flick.
It has been almost a year since I’ve worked with Exchange…and the old adage is if you don’t use it, you lose it. My first experience with that was when I lost all my UNIX knowledge after years of not using it. Looks to me as if Exchange is going to the waist side too…although it seems it is slipping even faster. Perhaps I’m getting old…don’t answer that one.
Today I needed to view all the Exchange Hidden Mailboxes. Well my rusty old brain was telling me that it could be done through Exchange System Manager. The only down side to that was I didn’t have access to an Exchange server to view them nor did I have access to an admin box that had it installed. All I had was Active Directory Users and Computers. With that I knew that I could queries within AD to see this info. The only hard part was finding out what I need to query for to find hidden mailboxes. After seconds of thinking…okay so more like hours but seemed like days I figured it out. Below are the steps that will find that data for you.
1. Bring up Active Directory Users & Computers.
2. Right-click your domain name at the top, and choose Find.
3. In the Find combo box at the top, select Custom Search.
4. Click the Advanced tab.
5. Paste in the following LDAP query:
(&(objectclass=user)(msExchHideFromAddressLists=TRUE))
Another day another task…
Today I needed to stop and disable the Print Spooler and Telephony services on about 40 servers. Sure if I got paid by the hour I could just log on to each individual server and do it manually but I don’t get paid by the hour and that is the kind of work any monkey could do…including me at times. J
To solve this problem, I stood up I yelled “There has to be an easier way to do this!!!”. Ok so I didn’t really stand up or yell for that matter. What I have below is a script that will pull servers from a simple text document with server names on each line and then stop and disable both of those servers.
Hopefully this will save you some time when you are tasked with this silly task.
@echo off
set logfile=logfile.txt
for /f "tokens=*" %%a in (serverlist.txt) do call :stopservices %%a
goto end
:stopservices
echo Working on computer "%1"
net use \\%1
if errorlevel 1 echo %1 failed >> %logfile% & goto end
SC \\%1 config spooler start= disabled
SC \\%1 stop spooler
SC \\%1 config tapisrv start= disabled
SC \\%1 stop tapisrv
net use \\%1 /delete
echo %1 completed >> %logfile%
:end
One of the main things i've been waiting for in the Longhorn betas have been enhancements to Active Directory. Not much has been done thus far but some of the changes should be showing up in beta 3. I have been able to discover some new Longhorn DCPROMO options that are pretty interesting though. You will now see the options below within DCPROMO:
Additional options
Specifies that during the domain controller installation, the domain controller will also be configured to be a DNS server, global catalog server, or RODC.
Site selection
Specifies the site in which the domain controller should be installed.
Set functional levels
Sets the domain and forest functional level during the installation of a new domain or forest.
Password Replication Policy
Specifies which account passwords to allow or deny from being cached on an RODC. This page appears only if the UseAdvanced mode installation check box is selected.
DNS delegation creation
Provides a default option to create a DNS delegation based on the type of domain controller installation (as specified on the Choose a Deployment Configuration page) and the DNS environment.
It sure is nice that a lot of these options are included within DCPROMO especially for small to medium size companies that may use some of these options for tweaking. However I don't see larger companies taking advantage of these because of the all the hoopla they have to jump through to make changes.
Although I really like what Microsoft has done with Server Manager in Windows Server Longhorn, it gets rather annoying having it pop up every time I log on. I'm sure there are easier ways to stop this but being a Directory Services MVP I thought it would be best to calm this down with a Group Policy...or two. Enjoy:
Setting name:
Do not open Initial Configuration Tasks window automatically at logon
Location:
Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Server Manager
Setting name:
Do not open Server Manager automatically at logon
Location:
Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Server Manager