Bohack

When setting up a secure server farm you always want to filter egress traffic. This means that all outbound traffic is blocked by default, including the web traffic from the servers. When surfing is required for drivers and downloads, this is usually handled by setting the proxy in the Internet Explorer options.  However if you want certain processes / services like Windows Update to automatically retrieve updates and wait for manual approval, the next time you login. You need to set a proxy server up and force the Local Machine to use it. The setting in the IE properties page is for the Current User only.

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When you purchase a Dell server you can purchase the Open Manage software, so they ship you media. OpenManage is the software that installs the maintenance partition and the automated install of the operating system as well as firmware updates. However if you did not get media with your server or want the latest version of software; you might run into a problem if you download the software with Internet Explorer and never read the instructions.

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The key to mastering permissions at the command line in Vista and Windows Server 2008 Server is learning the icacls.exe command. With the introduction of Windows Vista, you can no longer select multiple items like folders and files and apply permissions to a group of objects. The recommended way is to use the command line and the icacls.exe command.

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Recently I found a problem when using Mac OS X and Windows Server 2003 R2 as a file server. The problem exists in the permissions that are applied to user folders. When applying permissions to shares you normally start out with a very restrictive permission structure at the top. As you create the folders you add permissions for users and groups to permit and restrict access for others. This structure of permissions is very common in dealing with corporate shares. We also share the folder with ‘domain users’ only having change or modify access to the entire share. This eliminates people applying their own permissions and locking everyone out including themselves. This is a common task for a network admin in setting up permissions.
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I’ve been using Microsoft’s Virtual PC for the past 7 years, ever since I spoke with a kernel developer at Microsoft and found that they solely use Virtual PC for debug and development. Since then I have used it to build images and teach in the classroom as a learning device. It allows me to teach with what I call a surgical approach, because every lab is perfectly clean every time for every student. However it is all about the footprint when it comes to storage of the Virtual Hard Drives, sometime you need to keep several VHD images around. So over the past few years I have put a collection of tools together that lead to the best compaction method.

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Microsoft Search should not be feared, it is now an optional install from Microsoft Update Services. It is integrates into Office 2007 for email search capability. However one problem is it changes the default search of Windows Explorer to Desktop Search. So it has pissed off a lot of people and made them uninstall it. There is hope and a way to switch it back.

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When upgrade from Exchange 2000 or 2003 to Exchange 2007 you must perform a transition. Mainly because you can not upgrade the binaries on the Exchange 2003 box to 2007, 2003 is 32 bit and 2007 is 64 bit. During the transition you will need to have the 2003 Exchange Routing Group connected to the 2007 Exchange Routing Group. This will allow you to delever mail to recipients on both platforms and keep business continuity. You connect the two with a Routing Group Connector and I advise you use the Exchange Manager Console to manage them.

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I am starting to warm up to Exchange 2007 and found that anything and everything can be fixed through the Exchange Management Shell. Recently I transitioned an Exchange 2003 administrative group to Exchange 2007. After migrating the users from the Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007, I decided to check to see if creating a mailbox is the same. So I opened the (ADUC) Active Directory Users and Computers MMC and ran through the creation of a new user and mailbox. When I went back to the Exchange Management Console the “Recipient Type Details” showed as “Legacy Mailbox”.

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Any day you can walk up to my workstation at work and find a command prompt open. Whether it is a Windows CMD prompt or a Linux Shell; I actually prefer it over the Windows GUI and over a KDE or Gnome on Linux. I can generally get more done in a few keystrokes then mouse clicks, especially when you need to start a task and have a log of the outcome.

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It has become culture to prepend the http:// prefix in front of a URL. In fact if you type the URL in most web browsers and hit ctrl-enter, the browser will prepend the http:// in front of the URL. The HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) works on port 80 TCP and is defined in RFC 2616. Since HTTP language is clear text over port 80 TCP that means that forms authentication will travel over clear text and can be intercepted. So it is recommended that HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer) be used to encrypt the session with SSL. HTTPS or SSL works over port 443 TCP and requires a private certificate be installed from a browser trusted Certificate Authority (out of the scope of this article).

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