en Passant

Scenario: I was given a list of 15,000 email addresses and asked if they were still valid in our Exchange environment.

Easy method: I ran a simple VBScript that does an LDAP query against each email address. This worked great, except that it took close to 5 seconds per email address to query our environment. (~20 hrs!) The over-all run time was going to be too extreme.

I had an interesting request. A user wanted to search their mailbox for all read/not read/delivery/non-delivery receipts in their mailbox. You would think that it should be as easy as searching for "READ:" in the subject line. Unfortunately, Outlook does a wild-card type search on what you enter. This means you may get read:, bread: and read:s.

This HTA applet allows you to grant extended AD permissions to a specific user. I use it to assign permissions to the Associated External Account of an AD user rights to modify their own delegates.

I found what values I needed by configuring a single user with permissions, then using Richard's DACL export script to dump that user. I then modify the script (see line 248) to match the permissions I want to grant.

I just got off the phone with my financial advisor. He reminded me of something that I learned quite awhile ago. See, in uncertain economic times, like we are currently experiencing, people tend to get rid of what they are worried will lose value. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds all tend to drop in price as people sell them off. If you are a short-sighted investor, you tend to follow suit and sell also, hopping to the next safe thing.

I ran into an occurrence where I needed to create a really big file. I was having an issue with a backup procedure failing at only 16gb. After extensive troubleshooting, I thougth that maybe the issue was with the hard drive. The backup solution would reach the 18gb mark and fail due to some inconsistency.

So, where I can I find a big file?

1. Copy an existing large file off another server or workstation - great, but all the large files are open and I didn't want to shut something down.

The company I am working for has a slightly different security model than I've seen before. It is probably because the largest Exchange server I've supported previously only had 3,000 mailboxes. This one supports 10x that number, with plans to grow to over 100,000 mailboxes by this time next year.

The migration process used to move a number of mailboxes created a couple hundred dead mailboxes objects in our environment. Their mailbox information needed to be cleared before their mailboxes could be migrated to the server for the final time. To fix this, I looked into a script. First I found the script at TelnetPort25, here. This script goes through the entire environment and purges all deleted and non-system mailboxes.

One of my first contract jobs was for a small IT company in the area. I worked with them for about 4 months before a permanent, salaried position came along. (Sorry, I like having someone else pay for the benifits) One of the most memorable things the owner shown me was his background.

Working on network workstations, I found I needed a method to tell when they came online. I wanted a script to email me so I could receive it on my PDA when the connection worked. This way I could be working in the wiring cabinet and hear it successfully connect.

During my work day, I probably send a 20-30 email messages. Each time I typically look up someone's email address, copy it to the (keyboard) buffer (CTRL+C), click on a shortcut I have to open a new email, then paste the email address into the new message. I thought, what if my new email shortcut, would test the keyboard buffer and then automatically paste the address for me?