• Active Directory,  Microsoft Exchange Server,  Windows Server,  Windows XP

    Kill Processes In Windows

    You always want to stop a process gracefully. However, sometimes it’s just not possible to do so. Sometimes, you have to kill a process. Sometimes you have to end a process or a process tree when you can’t restart them gracefully. To stop a process in Linux and Mac, use the kill command. In Windows, there’s a Powershell cmdlet called Stop-Process that enables you to terminate a process. As with kill, just add the process ID at the end of the command. For example, to stop process 318: Stop-Process 318 Or you can stop based on the name of the process using the -processname option. For example, to kill a…

  • Microsoft Exchange Server

    Exporting Mailboxes to PST From Exchange 2007

    I’ve written an article on doing this in 2010 but seemed to have skipped 2007, so here goes… The first step in exporting mailboxes is to make sure that the account you’re using to export mailboxes has permissions to do so. In this case, we’ll give the exportadmin account Import and Export options using the New-ManagementRoleAssignment cmdlet in Exchange 2010: New-ManagementRoleAssignment –Role “Mailbox Import Export” –User exportadmin Next, you’ll need a system with Outlook 2010 and the Exchange Management Tools installed. From here, you can export mailboxes into PST files. To do so,  run the Export-Mailbox cmdlet with the -Identity option to include the account name of  a user and…

  • Microsoft Exchange Server

    Selectively Import PST Files Into Outlook

    I’ve written plenty about exporting mailboxes from Exchange. But what if you need to perform a selective import into Outlook? This is helpful for importing mail in date ranges, using an import to search for terms (common with litigation holds) and importing contacts and calendars. To get started, click Open from the File ribbon. When prompted, click on Import/Export. At the Import and Export Wizard screen, click on “Import from another program or file” At the “Import a File” screen, click on “Outlook Data File (pst)”   At the Import Outlook Data File screen, choose the mailbox to import into and then click on the Filter button. Using the filtering…

  • Microsoft Exchange Server

    Migrating Symantec Enterprise Vault SQL Tables

    If you use Symantec’s Enterprise Vault solution and you need to migrate the SQL tables for Enterprise Vault to another server, you might have noticed that it’s not as simple as dumping tables from one host, restoring tables to another and changing some information on the Enterprise Vault server. This process takes a lot of time and is a relatively painful endeavor. But now Symantec has made the process much simpler, releasing a migration tool just for the database, available here: http://www.symantec.com/business/support//index?page=content&id=TECH214373 I guess they were listening to customers who complained about the process. Good for them!

  • iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Microsoft Exchange Server,  Network Infrastructure,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  VMware

    Quick nmap Hacks

    The nmap application is a pretty easy-to-use tool that can be used to port scan objects in a network environment. To obtain mmap in an easy-to-use package installer, for OS X check out the download page at http://nmap.org/download.html#macosx (use the same page to grab it for Windows or *nix as well). Once downloaded run the package/rpm/whatever. Before I scan a system, I like to pull the routing table and eth info to determine how scans are being run, which can be run by using the mmap command anong with the —iflist option: nmap —iflist Basic Scanning To then scan a computer, just use the mmap command followed by the host…

  • Active Directory,  cloud,  Consulting,  iPhone,  Kerio,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Microsoft Exchange Server,  Network Infrastructure,  Windows Server

    Dig TTL While Preparing For A Migration

    Any time doing a migration of data from one IP to another where that data has a DNS record that points users towards the data, we need to keep the amount of time it takes to repoint the record to a minimum. To see the TTL of a given record, let’s run dig using +trace, +nocmd to turn off showing the version and query options, +noall to turn off display flags, +answer to still show the answer section of my reponse and most importantly for these purposes +ttlid to toggle showing the TTL on. Here, we’ll use these to lookup the TTL for the https://krypted.com/ A record: dig +trace +nocmd…

  • Microsoft Exchange Server,  Network Infrastructure,  Windows Server

    Delete Messages From Exchange Using PowerShell

    Before I type anything else, allow me to state that running a search and deleting things with a script from a users (or a loop of all users) is a very dangerous process. However, I’ve often noticed that an outbreak of bad things can cause us to do some pretty awesome things. So, you can use the get-Mailbox cmdlet to pipe a mailbox into the search-mailbox cmdlet and from there use the -SearchQuery option to search for an attachment, following the attachment option with a filename and then delete it using the -DeleteContent option. The example would be as follows: Get-Mailbox -Identity “cedge” | Search-Mailbox -SearchQuery attachment:ichatsmileys.pkg.zip -DeleteContent You can…

  • Microsoft Exchange Server,  Windows Server

    Disable OWA Theme Selection In Exchange

    Outlook Web Access (OWA) allows administrators to setup themes. I’ve noticed a lot of people configuring custom OWA themes these days. And when they do, they are always annoyed when users change the theme back to the default. So, let’s disable theme selection using the set-owavirtualdirectory cmdlet. Here, we’ll do so on a server called krypted, on the default web site, for the default owa virtual directory using the -identity option. The option we’ll use is -themeselection enabled and we’ll set it to $false: set-owavirtualdirectory -identity "krypted\owa (default web site)" -themeselectionenabled $false To set it back, just swap $false for $true: set-owavirtualdirectory -identity "krypted\owa (default web site)" -themeselectionenabled $true

  • Microsoft Exchange Server,  Windows Server

    Redirecting Exchange Login Pages

    By default, when you require an SSL certificate in IIS on an Exchange server, if users hit the page without providing an https:// in front they will get an error. Rather than require certificates, it’s better in most cases to redirect unsecured traffic to a secured login page. In order to do so, first configure the redirect. To do so, open IIS Manager and click on the Default Web Site. At the bottom of the pane for the Default Web Site, click Features View if not already selected. Then open HTTP Redirect. Here, check the box for “Redirect requests to this destination” and provide the path to the owa virtual directory (e.g.…