en Passant

Due to technical issues, I haven't posted here in several months. Now the server has been stable for almost a month, I have to work to get back into the routine of doing so.

Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of World of Warcraft, maintain an 'armory' site. This site allows players like myself to review their characters gear, stats and various achievements. The entire site is a XML dump formatted with a XSLT style sheet.

We are on the verge of migrating 20,000 mailboxes from our older Exchange 2003 envivornment over to Exchange 2007. Some of these mailboxes have been around many years on 03, and before. This has created a number of mailboxes that have over time have very mixed up storage limits, usually a decimal place off. For example:

100 mb Warning Limit
10 mb Send/Receive Limit

Because of this, running any Powershell script against our 03 environment, we get tons of warnings. This script is the byproduct of that clean-up.

We recently had a secretary who created a personal distribution list (PDL) with too many members.

This is a limitation of distribution lists that are created and stored in a Microsoft Exchange Server mailbox store or in a personal folders (.pst) file. There is no definite limit to the number of contacts that you can add to a distribution list.

Recently we've had a rash of SPAM email messages going to distribution lists. This has led to the limiting the permissions on who can send to these lists. For the largest lists, we are assigning mail-enabled security groups permissions to send to these lists.

Problem: Some of these mail-enabled groups are very large, containing nested lists inside of other lists. Trying to determine if a specific user has permissions to send to a list can be difficult.

Of course, you make one thing, then people come up with something better. That same guildie who is working on my robe, came back and said, "Why don't you just read the ingredients directly from Wowhead?".

My warlock has reached 80. He has just about all the regular quest rewards that one can get through soloing the area. Now comes the long haul of playing the more advanced group areas of the game, except even my best quested gear wasn't cutting it for some of the lowest heroic dungeons.

In my environment, I am always looking up a user's email address, or trying to find out what Exchange server their mailbox is on. That's why I developed the attached script.

It will do a wild-card search against your currently logged on domain to find any account with those values. It searches the Displayname, proxyaddresses and mail fields.

The default Outlook Address Book is saved in the Windows registry. I've created this script to be used to push down a new Address Book view at logon for a large group of users. The script will read the current default Outlook profile for the currently logged on user, then push down the address book view you specify.

The following script will search all users specified and remove email addresses in a specific domain. I have successfully tested it in my domain, to only have Exchange RUS add it back in. Good enough for now.

This uses the Quest ActiveRoles Powershell add-on to gather the DistinguishedName value for all impacted users. You could read this from a file. Otherwise, this script should work on Exchange 2003 and 2007 mailboxes.

I was just watching the home screen of the Car's DVD. It repeats the title sequence and a blurred Piston Cup flys by. Repeats 3 times, on one segment a DinoCo logo shows up in the corner. If you use your DVD remote and move over to it, it plays one of the Pixar shorts using Car's characters. Funny!!