en Passant

One of my current projects is helping with the removal of a legacy DNS server. I am reviewing Wireshark logs to determine which devices are statically set to utilize the old DNS servers. These devices range from servers and workstations to printers, digital senders and ILO servers. Each device should be logged into, and updated with the new DNS server IP address.

For quite some time, I have wanted to develop a batch script that I could use to automate the process of backing up my documents then email them to myself. Using my GMail account's enormous capacity, I can keep several copies of my documents accessible online without having to worry about drive space.

This short script will map a drive letter to all the admin shares to a remote computer. My plan was to use this script when I use RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) to access a computer from home. I will run this script and map all my home computer hard drives to the work computer. Now I can transfer files between the two locations, without using tricks like emailing the file to myself.

Now that Daylight Saving Time has begun, I am constantly getting requests for help on why the calendar info is wrong. I suggest that maybe they need to install the Microsoft patch (931836). Unfortunately it is not easy to scan a computer to find a single patch. Since Service Pack 2, there has been at least 150 patches for various issues, updates, and such.

Working on servers, you inveriably need to reboot them. One of the primary tools I use to determine if a server has shut down is to PING the server.

This will PING the server repeatedly until I quit it. When the server goes down, it will return "Request Timed Out" instead of a valid PING response. Here is what it would look like when the server shuts down, then comes back up again.

I was recently tasked with the process of setting up a fairly automated report to display each time one of our Executive Management Team's mailboxes had been accessed by internal users.

We had already turned on the log generation on the server according to the Microsoft tech article 867640. This generates a 1016 event in the server's application log each time a mailbox is accessed.

We are working to decommission our existing Exchange 5.5 environment and looking to migrate all services to Exchange 2003. As part of the decom, we need to re-direct the Internal SMTP traffic off our Exchange 5.5 bridgeheads. This meant, determining which servers were connecting to the server. First we changed all MX records in our DNS to point to the new server. Then we watched the Application logs on the server for MSExchangeIMC - ID: 2000 events.