Posted on: November 21st, 2011 by Famous Phil

Most of the Matthouse infrastructure is running on old Celeron processors and limited RAM, you may laugh at me, but that hardware has been very reliable and has lasted Matthouse for the better part of 3 years, and some of it may continue to power Matthouse well into the future!  But there are some applications out there that require a little more juice to run well, and (unfortunately) Exchange falls into this category.  I say it is unfortunate since the Exchange server hosts a handful (< 10) mailboxes, yet it costs quite a bit to maintain compared to other Mail Transfer Agents (MTA).  So anyways, this blog is dedicated to the procedure that I took to migrate Exchange over to brand new, shiny, fast hardware.

First, I had Server 2008 R2 Datacenter as my operating system on both the existing server (denoted double) and the new server (denoted ruby).  The servers could clearly communicate with each other within the same datacenter as well so that file / data transfers could be effective.  The first thing to adding any server is to give the new server a name and know its network configuration details ahead of time.  I’m not going to go into details about how to install Windows, since it’s pretty simple.  Just make sure that you have the correct drivers installed for your server after the installation completes.

Note about installing Windows: just so that you don’t run into any issues with your system, make sure that your primary hard drive is attached to the first port for your motherboard’s interface, in my case, the first hard drive was connected to SATA 0.  If you don’t do this, you’ll run into a lot of problems and waste a lot of time (like I did!).  In addition, make sure that your BIOS has AHCI enabled prior to installing Windows, this also caused problems in my scenario.  Once Windows is installed, make sure that you can disable write caching on your hard disk without the operating system freezing (in computer management, under storage, right click the disk and optimize for quick removal).  If you followed the above, this shouldn’t cause Windows to hang, and will prevent Active Directory from incapacitating your system during the restart phase of the installation.  In addition, this is a good time to name your computer, join it to some default workgroup, add remote administration features, and change the time zone / clock settings.

Before continuing, I’d also recommend disabling Internet Explorer’s advanced security features; this is done by going to the computer management main screen and scrolling down, finding IE ESC and turning it off (acknowledging all of the warnings).  If you keep them on, you’ll find yourself doing way too much work to download necessary applications, etc.  These features are only useful if you plan on doing general web surfing on the server (which I would not recommend for security reasons).  I also activated windows, ran all the necessary windows updates (several reboots and optional updates as well).  After this all has been done, I ended up rebooting the machine a final time.

At this point, I installed several applications (using IE to get Google Chrome initially).

• Google Chrome (http://chrome.google.com) for web surfing / downloading the rest of these
• Adblock plus for chrome (http://adblockplus.org/en/) to block malware / ads
• 7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/download.html) for good archive file support
• Microsoft Security Essentials (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/security-essentials), Windows 7 version works fine, this is a quick, safe, free antivirus solution for all of those who hate Symantec’s ability to slow down the entire system (hey, that’s me!)   This is also good for desktop users!  I would recommend disabling the scheduled Sunday scan since real-time protection is sufficient in my case.
• Magic ISO (http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htm) to mount ISO images (including the Exchange 2010 ISO if you downloaded it from MSDN like I did).
• Office Filter Packs which are a prerequisite for Exchange 2010 (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17062) Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: active directory, exchange, exchange 2010, migration, owa, Transfer, upgrade, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Technology
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Posted on: August 20th, 2010 by Famous Phil

This is an annoyance that I constantly have to look at 2 sources to remember so I’ve decided to consolidate my 2 sources into a single blog that I can refer to in the future. Basically, every time I set up a new Server 2008 R2 box to act as an Active Directory domain controller, I always run into passwords having to be complex and changed every 42 days by default. This is an annoyance because users don’t like having to do that so frequently. The location to change this isn’t in a common sense location either.

To change the policy, goto your start menu and in the search area (provided it will run commands), type in “gpmc.msc” and hit enter.  This will bring up the Group Policy Management Console.  Expand the local forest that you want to modify the password policy for.  Expand Domains, and the domain that you wish to modify.  Right click on Default Domain Policy and click edit.  This will bring up a new screen.  You want to navigate to Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Account Policies -> Password Policy.  From this screen, you will be able to modify the password policy.  You can either reboot or type in a new command “gpupdate /force” and the new settings will take over.

I don’t recommend disabling features such as complexity because your users will then be able to use passwords such as “letmein, password, changeme”, etc.  These are insecure passwords and those who use them are simply asking to get their accounts compromised.

Also, the solution above will not work if you have a password window open that is forcing you to use a complex window, you will have to go through that wizard again.  This also won’t reverse the force password changes on next login if a user needs to change their password due to the old policies.

Tags: active directory, domain controller, password complexity, password policy, server 2008 r2
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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Posted on: June 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil

First I guess I should apologize for not posting anything in the past week here!  I really hate it when I have to ignore my own blog for more important admin business elsewhere.  The good thing is, I always manage to learn a lot of new stuff that I can easily share

Over the past week, I got a new server to host Microsoft Exchange which is a powerful email server from Microsoft.  Before you go all crazy on Microsoft (I know I typically do), Exchange is one of the few excellent products they make.  I am actually very hard pressed to find anything that compares to it that is open source and can easily run on Linux which 99% of  my hosting business up until now has ran off from.  Man, I never thought that I would say that

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Tags: 1and1, 3dgwebhosting, active directory, Admin Reference, administration, Elite data hosting, email, exchange, exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, fsckvps, mailxchange, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange, mobile, outlook, outlook web access, owa, server 2003, vaserv, vps, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site
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