Bohack

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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In part 1 of the Xbox Media Center article I explained the hardware modifications, basically the mod chip installation. The purpose of the mod chip installation is so that you can use unlocked hard drives in the xbox. The locking mechanism of the ATA specification was to stop people from poking around with the contents of the drive. Even after unlocking the hard drive the format of the drive is not FAT or any recognizable partition scheme. The second reason for a mod chip is to load an alternate dashboard or the software you see when you start it up. The third reason for the mod chip is large drive support, the original xbox comes with only an 8GB hard drive.

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To kick the new year off right I am sharing a strategy to fight SPAM and email annoyances; it is a common sense approach to SPAM. This concept I can not take full credit from, although I can no longer find the original source to cite; so I will take credit for it now. If you can find the original cite, please post it in the comments; I only remember it was a security consortium and it was in their best practices (circa 1990).

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I finally found my recipe for Christmas Chili and cooked about 2 gallons of it for Christmas week. The Christmas Chili is perfect because it beats ham on Christmas day and if done right; its Red and Green for the Christmas theme. The recipe cooks about 5 quarts of Chili. It is best to season to taste with the Habanero hot sauce on your own portion, not everyone likes to melt down on Christmas day.

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The original Xbox was released in November of 2001 by Microsoft and it created a new age of console gamers. Since the Xbox 360 came out the original Xbox has been thrown in the corner. However after 7 years this console still has a very important function for video junkies and ROM junkies. The Xbox Media Center is the ultimate use for the old Xbox console platform. The units can be purchased from GameStop for less than $50 dollars and for less than an hour of work plus a modchip, you too can have the ultimate media center. No other multimedia product can come close to the Xbox Media Center or XBMC.

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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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During the day I always have a command window open on my desktop. It helps get simple tasks done; like reseting a password for a user or opening an ssh session with a remote box. I have a multitude of Windows command or cmd scripts that help me through out the day. Often I may want to change or tweak a script and then the hunt is on… Which directory was it created in? I know that it is in the path; because I can just execute it without typing it’s full path, but where is it?

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I think we have all rebooted a server and then asked ourselves “Did it actually reboot?”. So we hunt through the logs for the event and then move on or reboot it again. During patch day for the servers this can be a real nag, knowing when something is back online so you can finish patching it; is key to getting the job done. So I wrote this little batch script a while ago to help keep track.

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