The new business class Linksys router (RVS4000) has lots of great features (very much like Cisco’s IOS).  I was recently setting one up for a customer that had an SBS server and a Symantec mail appliance.  The SBS server was not going to use ISA so I needed to set up a VLAN on the Linksys for the DMZ.  This was all easy enough, but when it came to publishing ports, I ran into a limitation in the configuration interface.  I needed to publish RDP (TCP port 3389) directly to the SBS server on the main/default VLAN, and SMTP (TCP port 25) to the mail appliance on the DMZ VLAN.  Unfortunately, the web interface for configuring port forwarding on the Linksys only allows you to modify the last octet of a published address (pre-filling the first three octets from the default VLAN).  Read More...

I was testing Symantec Endpoint Protection for a short while. After uninstalling endpoint protection I began receiving an error every time that I opened outlook. The error said something to the effect of “Unable to load Add-on please uninstall”.

In Outlook 2003 you should be able to simply remove the add-on within the add-on manager. In Outlook 2007 though it requires a different method. I had to delete a file called Extend.dat (location: C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook) which is the file that stores the cached add-ons. After running Outlook again this file was recreated but this time Outlook did not give me an add-on error.  This seems to apply to other add-ons as well. While searching the web I saw people report that this also works for similar errors after uninstalling AVG antivirus.

There have been many reports (Google AMD XP "serice pack 3" or visit Microsofts support forum) of problems primarily with AMD based computers after installing XP SP3.  Tom's Hardware http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Windows-XP-SP3,5334.html was the first report of this we found, but Computerworld http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9084418 also posted an article the same day.

Microsoft has come out with a new way to handle license keys called Key Management Service. Through this new way of volume licensing, Server 2008 and Vista machines will check in with a server to be authenticated instead of having to check in at the Microsoft site.  To do this, you have to set up a KMS server (with software from Microsoft) as well as install a KMS Volume License Key (which is different than a traditional VLK). Read More...

A few weeks ago, I was trying to backup the configuration for a Symantec Mail Security Appliance for one of our clients. The appliance sits in the DMZ and FTPs the backup file to another server on the internal network. To do so, I had to create an Access Rule to allow the FTP traffic through the ISA 2004 server. You would think that creating an inbound Access Rule to allow the FTP protocol to pass through the ISA server it would enable all inbound FTP traffic. However, this is not entirely the case. When you use the New Access Rule Wizard, you can choose the pre-configured protocol “FTP” to be the type of traffic that you are allowing. This is what I did in this particular instance. However, whenever I would try and transfer the SMS Gateway backup file, the write would fail. After checking folder and FTP account permissions 5,000 times, I happened upon a setting  the following setting by right clicking the the access rule I had already created and selecting the "Configure FTP" option: Read More...

Exchange 2007 introduces a concept called back pressure. This is a monitoring feature in the Exchange transport service that watches system resources like available disk space and memory. If a resources exceeds a specified limit, Exchange stops accepting new connections and messages so that it can deliver the existing messages without being completely overloaded.  Exchange starts accepting new connections and messages once resources have returned to normal levels. A large number of event log messages about the back pressure situation are logged.  We had this problem at a customer site recently and had to increase the RAM of the Virtual Machine to fix it. Read More...

When trying to use VMware’s Physical to Virtual (P2V) converter, I kept getting an error about “too many drives”.  I thought the message was related to my disk partitions, but after much troubleshooting and Googling, I found that the problem could be related to Daemon Tools (which I did have installed and running).  Daemon Tools allows you to create virtual CD drives for mounting ISO images.  I was also running the XP ISO Recorder Power Toy to have a few ISO’s permanently mounted, as well as VFD Control Panel (for virtual floppies).  Once I removed all my virtual drives, I was able to P2V the host without any problems.

We came across www.bankwide.com several weeks ago.  It appeared to be a growing site designed to provide a platform to share knowledge and resources with the banking community.  I began corresponding with Aiden Michaels (the founder and lead developer for bankwide.com) to find out a little more about Bankwide - below is a response I received from Aiden: Read More...

The following article titled "Professional hackers attempt to 'copyright' viruses" was posted on statesman.com yesterday.

http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/05/05/0505techfiller.html

I was trying to upgrade a SQL 2000 server to SQL 2005 and the upgrade kept failing.  The first error I would see was "An installation package for the product Microsoft SQL Server Native Client cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package 'sqlncli.msi'."  Other parts also failed to install.  I looked at the installation log files, but they were so large and there were so many messages about it trying to locate packages, registry entries, etc., it was impossible to tell what represented an error and what did not. Read More...