Backup Exchange 2010 SP1 on Windows 2008 R2 with Windows Backup

First install the Windows Server Backup Features using the Server Manager. Select both the Windows Server Backup and Command-line Tools. Now locate the “Microsoft Exchange Server Extension for Windows Server Backup” service and set the service to automatic and start it. Now we are ready to begin the backup process from the Windows Server Backup tool. From Start […]

Beefing up your security

In light with adding as many security layers as possible to various environments I am responsible for I have come acros several interesting (Knowledge Base) articles, one of the foremost is this link http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/10-crazy-it-security-tricks-actually-work-196864 which details 10 steps on improving security in large and small networks. Although I find honeypots and tarpits a bit overkill for […]

Webfarming on Windows Server 2003 & 2008

http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/loadbalancing/networkloadbalancingwindows2003.asp This guide is a very comprehensive walk-through on several key points on creating webserver farms, both in 2003 but this is also still relevant in 2008 (R2) A small pointer here is that also there is an old MS article which states you should make a binding of you cluster IP on your IIS […]

Hyper-V Time drift on Virtual DC

When working with Virtual domaincontrollers on Hyper-V you are very likely to have come across the time drifting problem. I have found a very nice site which gives so good insight in the workings of Hyper-V Time Synchronisation and also why you should keep it enabled. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2010/11/19/time-synchronization-in-hyper-v.aspx Ofcourse it is always recommended that you keep […]

Pending Reboot

If you are running into issues with unexpected “Pending Reboot” status on a Windows box it’s worth while to check the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager should contain a key named “PendingFileRenameOperations” which is a REG_MULTI_SZ key. This contains the pointers to all files currently being updated. This key can, in some cases, get poluted by […]

Debugging Scheduled tasks “Last Result 0XE0434F4D”

Ran into a problem today with using a scheduled task which was not executing properly after changes being made to it’s batchjob. Ofcourse the Windows Task Scheduler doesn’t give a very good description on the error message so I found a nice article that uses the following code: @echo off echo %date% %time% Start of […]