The ramblings of a computer geek
PROBLEM: You need to check if two domain controllers are in sync with each other. SOLUTION: To do this you need to understand a bit about how Active Directory reports if a domain controller replication is in sync. There is something called a UTDV up-to-dateness vector that is basically a number representing what the domain … Read more
You’ll probably find yourself using the message tracking logs to find if an email has gone missing. But what should a normal working mail transaction look like? Well below shows it, where the mailboxes are stored on the same server. EventId Source Sender Recipients MessageSubject NOTIFY STOREDRIVER {} RECEIVE STOREDRIVER fred@sender.com {bob@receive.com} Hello! SUBMIT STOREDRIVER … Read more
In Exchange 2013 you can set an email to be put in the user’s Junk E-Mail folder based on if you think it is SPAM or not. This doesn’t use the Exchange built in spam filtering, it assumes you have a spam filter external to your Exchange environment that can tag an email that it … Read more
I had an interesting request, how to move a load of PDF files from one directory structure to another but leaving behind that directory structure so all the files end up in one directory in a huge list. I thought XCopy, but this appeared to be a better way. Note: Files with the duplicate names … Read more
VMware resource pools are a bit weird. They don’t work the way you would assume them to, so it is easy to get the wrong. This article details quite simply how you can use them for an example to illustrate this I will use my live production environment to illustrate how and how not to … Read more
I had this as a challenge, we have SAN replication, so you could replicate and promote your storage to achieve the same thing, but I was looking for a quick and dirty way to get a VM from one data centre to another data centre quickly and easily. So in this example I have two … Read more
We had a weird graphical glitch on the timeline webpart on our SharePoint installation, we couldn’t figure out what was happening. Until that is we checked out the element in F12 Developer tools, within one of our customisations we used the .ms-rtestate-field img directive within our custom site CSS file. So this is what we … Read more
You can monitor the Dell PowerVault TL4000 Tape Library using the Nagios check_snmp plugin. After setting the TL4000 to accept SNMP connections on v2 SNMP you can run the following command below. This queries for the status of the library as a rollup. # ./check_snmp -H <IP Address> -C community -o .1.3.6.1.4.1.674.10893.2.102.2.1.0 -r3 SNMP OK … Read more
The changes to the ASA IOS post version 8.3 changes the way that NAT works. NAT Exemption is normally used to disable translation for certain addresses e.g. for VPN tunnelling. So for this example below you create an access-list containing the IP addresses that are to be exempted from NAT. So say these are the … Read more
On a Cisco ASA firewall you will probably want to use the DMZ for servers that are web facing, and also restrict/deny any access they have to the internal network. The idea being that a connection to a web server say in your DMZ would get into the DMZ, and if another connection is required … Read more