Wesley Levels's Blog

Currently I’m running Microsoft Exchange 2007. I’m really happy with it, however, there’s a new version, Microsoft Exchange 2010. I wouldn’t be me if I won’t check out Microsoft Exchange 2010. And what would be a better possibility to check it out and get to know it than to install it for my own!

I will be making sort of a todo-list that I can look back at when installing a Microsoft Exchange 2010 server in the future:

Since last year I have a HTC Hero. Since somewhere end of last year/beginning of this year HTC promised an Android 2.1 update for the HTC Hero. The update still isn’t released. It took me to long, so I just rooted the HTC Hero and put a Custom Android 2.1 ROM (VillainROM) on it. It works like a charm!

This website helped me rooting my HTC and applying a custom ROM on it:

TheUnlockr.com

Noticed some strange behaviour with “Send As Permissions” on my Exchange 2007 server. I couldn’t get the send as permissions to work. After doing some research, I found some known problems, that I will list in this post:

- To apply a user “Send As” permissions, the user also needs to have “Send on behalf” permissions on the mailbox.
- A mailbox that is hidden from the Exchange Address List can’t be used for a user to “Send As”.
- Exchange updates its permissions like “Send As” permissions every 120 minutes only. This means it could take 2 hours before your “Send As” permissions are configured. There are people saying that an Information Store restart would force the update of permissions, however there is no proof that this works.

Because most people today use Outlook 2007 with cached RPC over HTTP, the “Exchange Address List” won’t be updated directly when creating new users. This also means it’s not directly possible to use the newly created mailbox to send as this mailbox. Turning of caching will show up the newly created mailbox and enable the functionality to send as this mailbox.

When implementing a Nagios Monitoring solution and looking at the default map output, It’s really boring. I like to give the eye something to, so I decided to find out how to use downloaded icons and/or custom created icons you made yourself. 

I will explain how to configure icons for your nagios map:

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I was checking for a good back-up solution for my ESXi VM’s, because of the lacking Exchange-aware back-up solution in Windows Server 2008. I checked some 3rd party solutions, but wasn’t exactly convinced.
I then came by a VMWare thread with a back-up solution using a script on your ESX(i) server, automatically creating a live (or offline) back-up of one or more VMs.

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I wanted to configure my MikroTik Router so I can remotely connect to my home network.
I configured my MikroTik to be a PPTP Server.

This is what was needed to configure a RouterOS based router to accept a PPTP Client session:

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I have a customer who has a Windows SBS2K3 server behind a pretty crappy router (installed by ISP). It’s not possible to create a Site-to-Site VPN between the location where my Nagios Server is located and the location where the SBS2K3 is located.

Because I insist throwing all monitoring traffic over an Encrypted Tunnel, I thought about letting the Nagios Server log in as a PPTP Client onto the WSBS2K3.

I did the following the configure everything for the above:

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Backup MBR on your Linux server(s)

It’s always useful to backup your hard disk partition table(s).
You can use DD to back-up and restore your partition table using the following commands:

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Configuring your RouterOS based router (did this on a Mikrotik 450G)

For monitoring a remote Small Business Server (2003) I used the built-in PPTP server from SBS. This way my monitoring packets are encrypted, and I don’t have to built an IPSEC tunnel.

My Nagios server runs behind a Mikrotik 450G with RouterOS. I wanted to let my Mikrotik log in as PPTP Client and forward traffic between the remote SBS and my Nagios server behind my Mikrotik.
This can be done by doing the following:

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Installing SBS 2003 (premium) from scratch

Some days ago I got a call about a broken SBS 2003 server (server wasn’t in production yet). Because it would take me more time to check what somebody else did wrong, I just reinstalled the server. During this install I came by some weird problems, so I wanted to put it on my blog as a reference.

Note: I had a worst case scenario. I had the first version of the installation CD’s. They didn’t had any Service Pack’s and had a bug; some problems with a DLL verification algorithm that prevents you from installing Sharepoint successfully after 24 November 2003. To check if you have an old installation medium, do the following:

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