Ant Drewery

I came across this great piece of free software whilst looking for a utility to help me recover a lost Excel password.

Free Word / Excel Password Recovery Software

Technorati Tags: Word, Excel, Password

I’ve just bought a PocketPower device from Gear4. It’s a rechargable power pack that can charge/power any of your USB devices. I bought it mainly to add some battery life to my iPod Video on long trips but I can also use it for my BlackBerry and mobile phone.

It comes with 4 rechargable AAA batteries but regular batteries can also be used. If using rechargables you can charge them in the device via the USB port on your PC/laptop. The device is light, compact and slips easily into my laptop bag.

Gear4 claim it will add up to 8 hours playback time to your iPod. The real test for me will be an 11 hour flight to the USA next month.

Technorati Tags: iPod, Gear4, PocketPower

I came across this interesting post on the BlackBerry Cool blog. I haven’t installed the desktop software as my BlackBerry was activated over the air with our BES 4.0 but I do sometimes connect it to my laptop to charge (I cancel the driver installation wizard).

BlackBerry Cool » Install Desktop Manager for Faster Recharge times

I was asked today if it’s possible to customise the text in the non-delivery reports that Exchange 2003 sends. To the best of my knowledge this can’t be done if you are just using Exchange. However, if you run a product like MailSweeper you could intercept outbound NDRs that match a particular criteria then modify the content before allowing to be delivered. That’s how I would tackle it if we had the requirement in our organisation.

Technorati Tags: Exchange, NDR, Mailsweeper

I’ve just signed up for 30 Boxes and whilst exploring the features noticed it has the ability to display your local weather to your buddies. As with a lot of applications I’ve encountered they prompt for a US zip code thereby giving the impression that only US weather can be displayed. However, in most cases you can also enter a code for other cities around the world. To get the code for your city try the following:

• Go to the weather.com World Search.
• Find and display the weather for your city.
• Now look at the URL for the page. After /local/ you should see a code that looks something like this UKXX0215.
• Copy the code and paste it into the Your Weather field on 30 Boxes.

With a bit of luck it will have found your local (non-US) city.

Technorati Tags: weather, 30Boxes, 30 Boxes

They say that every day is a school day and today is no exception. Maybe this is common knowledge for most but I learned that data is actually a plural from the Latin singular datum (in the same way that agenda is the plural of agendum).

Although it has become acceptable in modern language to refer to data as singular its correct usage would be as a plural e.g. “My data were corrupted by the server crash”.

Technorati Tags: grammar, language

I first started working with Exchange in 1998 and up until a couple of years ago usually avoided installing a file level real-time anti-virus scanner on a dedicated Exchange server. (The exception to this is where an Exchange server has other functions like file sharing, or is a Small Business Server.) Unfortunately with the growing number of nasties in circulation a file level (and memory resident) AV scanner has become a precautionary requirement.

If you do use file level anti-virus scanning you should exclude the databases, logs and SMTP Mailroot folders. Failure to do so could leave you with possible log/DB corruption and excessive CPU time on your AV processes. In fact, I’d recommend excluding all Exchange folders from scanning. This also applies to scheduled and manual scans.

Technorati Tags: Exchange, Anti-Virus

So you’ve got your nice front-end/back-end topology and you have an application that needs POP3 access to a mailbox. You enable POP3 on the front-end but your application still can’t connect? There seems to be a common misconception (and one that I had when I first started working with Exchange 2000) that in a front-end/back-end environment you only need to enable POP3 on the front-end servers. This isn’t the case. You also need to enable POP3 on any back-end servers that will be hosting the mailboxes that you require access to. This also applies if you are using IMAP4.

Keeping the above in mind the front-end/back-end principle works perfectly. We have several shipping applications that use POP3 to access mailboxes. By pointing them to the network load balanced address of our front-end servers we don’t need to reconfigure the application if we move the mailboxes around. We still have to follow strict change control with any move but it makes our lives and those of the application admins a whole lot easier.

To enable POP3 on a regular back-end mailbox server just enable the Microsoft Exchange POP3 service in the Services MMC console and ensure the POP3 Virtual Server is started in Exchange System Manager. Depending on your policy settings you may also need to enable POP3 on the Exchange Features tab of the user object in Active Directory Users & Computers. However, if the mailbox resides on a cluster server there are a few more steps to follow:

Firstly enable the Microsoft Exchange POP3 service on all nodes. I speak from bitter experience when I say that if you leave it as disabled when you add a POP3 cluster resource the cluster will be unable to bring it online and will try to fail over.

Next you need to add the cluster resource. In Cluster Administrator right click on your cluster group and select New > Resource. Complete the required information making sure you select the correct Resource Type.

On the next screen select the nodes to be the possible owners.

Finally select the Microsoft Exchange System Attendant as a dependency. Once the setup of the resource is complete you should be able to bring it online successfully.

Technorati Tags: Exchange, Cluster, POP3, IMAP4

I use a Linksys WRT54G router (pronounced ‘rooter’ here in Blighty) on my home network. Lately I’ve been having issues with poor Internet speeds and the router becoming unavailable, both of which are usually fixed by a reboot. I suspected it was due to my use of Bittorrent and some Googling seemed to confirm this. First I configured Azureus (my Bittorrent client of choice) to optimise my download speeds. I then looked at ways to optimise my router and to configure some Quality of Service options. This led me to some posts that suggested I would be better served by replacing the default router firmware. I had heard this was possible but had never really given it much thought. It wasn’t something I was interested in doing ‘just because I could’. However, I headed over to http://www.linksysinfo.org to see what it was all about. Using their comparison guide I decided to try DD-WRT. Some of the points that attracted me were:

• A reboot button on the web interface (the Linksys firmware doesn’t have this).
• Scheduled reboots (just in case I continue to have problems).
• A ‘mini’ version of the firmware is available without all the bells and whistles. They have a standard version as well as VPN and VOIP versions if I want more functionality in the future.
• It supports DDNS.
• It’s free.

There’s a whole bunch of other features and functionality but it’s a little over my head. They’re aimed more at people like my friend and Linux weenie Ben Stokes. Installation was well documented and very straight-forward. The basic process I followed was this:

• Connected via Ethernet (don’t try this over WiFi!)
• Noted down my existing settings.
• Backed up my existing config.
• Reset the unit to factory defaults
• Updated the firmware via the router web interface.
• Reset to factory defaults.
• Updated configuration with my settings.

The only other changes I made were to the IP Filter settings as recommended in a post that I didn’t bookmark. I changed the Max Ports to 4096 and the TCP & UDP Timeouts to 120. So far, so good but I’ll need to run it for a week or so to see if it has really improved things.

Technorati Tags: Azureus, Bittorrent, Linksys, Router, WRT54G

A DMZ (de-militarised zone), also known as a perimeter network, is an area of network between the Internet and your internal LAN. It is commonly used to place servers that are accessible from the Internet in an effort to protect your internal infrastructure.

There are differing opinions on how a DMZ should be used with your Exchange/messaging environment. Some feel that Exchange front-end servers should be placed within the DMZ which requires some configuration on the servers and firewall. Others, including myself, feel that port forwarding/filtering on a good firewall is sufficient and the front-end servers can be placed on the LAN, which is a more convenient approach. Microsoft offer a guide on front-end/back-end topology including the use of a DMZ. You can also find information on hardening your front-end servers here.

My ideal topology, and one we have implemented here, is to have a 3rd party mail gateway in the DMZ that then forwards to front-end servers on the internal network. This allows for multiple layers of defence and should prevent the majority of viruses and malicious payloads reaching the internal servers/network. Services like OWA, RPC-HTTP and ActiveSync are offered by port forwarding from the firewall to the front-end servers. In my opinion this approach offers a good balance between administrative overhead and security.

Technorati Tags: Exchange, Firewall, DMZ