Are you Binging yet?
Posted by Sheen in Tech Stuff on September 2, 2009
Bing sure is a funny name for a search engine. The only other Bing I know is Mr Chandler Bing and he was funny. This Bing however is serious stuff. For the first time since Google came around, it has serious competition and for the first time I (a serious Google search user) have started considering another search engine as an alternative. It is still early days for Bing and there sure will be a lot of improvements in the pipeline but Bing doesn’t fail to impress. Mr Ballmer must be very happy to hear about Bing’s apparent early success.
Who is competition for the mighty Google search engine? On paper, there is Yahoo! search, Ask search, and now Bing search. If you have used it you will find how close Bing is to being a real threat to Google. Bing is already making bigger plans for the future by teaming up with Wolfram Alpha.
Watch out Google!
What is the weight of Data?
Posted by Sheen in Tech Stuff on August 25, 2009
This HAS to be the most hilarious technical thread ever! A question was posted on one of Microsoft’s technical forums (by a person who apparently created that ID just to ask this question) to find out why his laptop was getting heavier the more he used it. The question sure was innocently dumb but the answers are wickedly funny. A great read.
Click here to read the article.
Dude, where’s my mailbox stats?
Posted by Sheen in Windows Server on July 20, 2009
One of the most frequently used Exchange 2003 mailbox management administrative features was the mailbox size, total item count, last logon time, log off time etc. For some strange reason, this convenient feature has been left out of Exchange Server 2007. If you are reading this blog then you probably are looking for a way to get these stats back.
The Exchange 2007 power shell is power packed to deal with this drawback and you can get all the info you need (displayed just like ESM 2003) in a jiffy by running this command (you will need to substitute MailboxServer01 with your server name):
Get-MailboxStatistics -Server MailboxServer01 | Sort -Property TotalItemsize | Format-Table DisplayName, LastLoggedOnUserAccount, ItemCount, @{expression={$_.totalitemsize.value.ToMB()};label=”Size(MB)”}, LastLogonTime, LastLogoffTime | Export-CSV ExMBXInfo.csv
All this info would get written to a csv file with the filename ExMBXInfo.csv (Edit the file name in the command if you want to call it something else)
The variables used here are DisplayName, LastLoggedOnUserAccount, ItemCount, TotalItemSize, LastLogonTime, LastLogoffTime. There are a host of other variables that can be used to get more information. Here are some of these variables that can be used:
AssociatedItemCount
Database
DatabaseName
DeletedItemCount
DisconnectDate
DisplayName
Identity
ItemCount
LastLoggedOnUserAccount
LastLogoffTime
LastLogonTime
LegacyDN
MailboxGuid
ServerName
StorageGroupName
StorageLimitStatus
TotalDeletedItemSize
TotalItemSize
Drop me a line if this article helped you!
The WinRoute tool
Posted by Sheen in Windows Server on July 18, 2009
WinRoute.exe is a tool that can be used to view and easily understand a complicated Exchange email routing topology. This tool is a recommended first step towards troubleshooting Exchange Email routing issues.
To install the tool, go through the following checklist:
IPSec Tunnel Netscreen (Juniper) and Cisco ASA
Posted by Sheen in Networking on July 13, 2009
I recently had to setup an IPSec Tunnel between a Netscreen (Juniper SSG5) and a Cisco router running ASA code. There were numerous problems that I came across when deciding on a workable Phase2 proposal. Eventually I found one that worked and am writing this post as a reference for later.
On the Juniper, the salient configuration points are:
- Ensure that there is a Proxy ID defined.
- Ensure that there is a policy for every proxy ID defined.
- Ensure that the Phase2 proposal is pre-g2-3des-md5
On the ASA, the cryptomap should look something like this:
crypto map xohm 3 ipsec-isakmp
set peer <peer ip>
set security-association lifetime seconds 28800
set transform-set <set name>
set pfs group2
match address <addressbook entry>
crypto ipsec transform-set <set name> esp-3des esp-md5-hmac
The tunnel should just start working when you start sending traffic after this.
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