New Hosted Exchange Provider

Just had the pleasure of signing off on a new project with Managed Hosted Solutions Ltd called MailHosted, whom are hoping to be one of the UK’s most economic hosted Exchange (2010) providers.

epicbackup.com launched!

Lanmark Technical Services Ltd has launched a new offsite data backup venture “epicbackup.com” and I have had the pleasure of coding this site for them.

The service itself is powered by custom built server hardware, Microsft Windows Server 2008 R2 and StorageCraft ShadowProtect server. Already they have signed up major players such as Miniclip, TM Lewin and Marriot Harrison.

I have also designed a “classic” ASP web portal that interfaces with the StorageCraft ImageManager software (access) database. With this cients are able to securely log in and view their replicated and onsite backup jobs via a web browser. I’m considering either selling this or releasing to public domain, dependant on the interest is generates.

Windows 7 Fails with Error Code c0000034

Should you get the dreaded “Fatal Error C0000034 Applying update operation 232 of 77899 (progra..)” message when installing Windows 7 Service Pack 1, here’s how to fix it:

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Reboot your computer while it’s starting up.
2. When your computer starts up again, choose the option “Launch Startup Repair”
   
3. When the Startup repair starts, click cancel.
4. Startup Repair send information. After you click cancel it will show a box. Click “Don’t Send”
   
5. Click the link “View advanced options for recovery and support”.
6. In the new window click Command Prompt at the bottom.
   
7. In Command Prompt type this and press enter: %windir%\system32\notepad.exe
8. Notepad will open. In notepad go to File–>Open.
9. Change the type of files notepad views from .txt to All Files
   
10. Now in Notepad, go to C:\Windows\winsxs\ (or whichever drive Windows is installed on, sometimes D:\ )
11. In that folder, find pending.xml and make a copy of it
12. Now open the original pending.xml (it will load really slow because the file is huge)
13. Press CNTRL+F and search for the following exactly: 0000000000000000.cdf-ms
14. Delete the following text (yours will be a little different):
    Your PC might not have all 3 sections of code (, , ). Just make sure you delete section “Checkpoint” and whatever other sections have “000000000000000.cdf-ms”. They will be right next to each other.
    
15. Save the file, close notepad, close command prompt, restart your computer.

Force an address list update on the Exchange server 2003

When a new email account is created in Exchange it will not normally appear in the address book of others until the following day. This procedure shows how to force newly created accounts to be visible in the address book:

1. Force an address list update on the Exchange server
2. Pull down the address list in Outlook.

Force an address list update on the Exchange server

1. On the server running Exchange, open Exchange System Manager.
2. Expand “Recipients”.
3. Select “Offline Address Lists”
   In the default configuration there will only be one offline address list shown in the right hand pane – “Default Offline Address List”. If other address lists have been created then they will also be listed.
4. Right click the address list to update (typically “Default Offline Address List”) and select “Rebuild”
   A message will be shown warning that this may take a long time depending on the number of recipients in the domain. Allow it to rebuild the offline address list.

Pull down the address list in Outlook
This needs to be done on each pc running outlook which requires the latest address book:

1. Start up Outlook.
2. Tools → Send/Receive → Download Address Book.
3. On the “Offline Address Book” dialog click [OK]

How to move a VM to a new storage area or drive in vSphere Client

How to move a VM to a new storage area or drive in vSphere Client

1. Run VMware vSphere Client and log in as root.
2. Stop Virtual Machines (VM) by highlighting the Virtual Machine and by pressing the red stop button
   
3. With the VM still highlighted, select the Summary tab on the main pane.
4. Now right click on the datastore and select "Browse Datastore
   




5. Open the storage where the VM is located.
   
   
6. Browse to the VM file(s) you wish to relocate, right click on it/them and select "Move to“.
   
   
7. You will be presented with the following warning, for now click Yes, I will be discussing how to remount the VM in another article.
   
8. Navigate to the destination storage folder.
   
   Click on “Move” to start moving the VM.
   

Using Exmerge on Exchange 5.5 / 2003 mailboxes

In order to perform a “Brick-Level” backup of one or more Exchange 5.5 or Exchange 2003 mailboxes you can follow these steps:
The first thing you want to do is create a new (temporary) admin user, to ensure other domain admins do not accidentally log your session off, whilst we perform the exmerge.

1. Create group called full_mailbox in Active Directory.
2. Add group full_mailbox to Exchange system manager in the security with full control to each exchange server you wish to use exmerge on.
   
3. Create user exmergeadmin with membership to the following to groups:
   
4. Log out the current user, then log in as “exmergeadmin”
5. Navigate to the \Exchsrvr\bin folder of your Exchange server and double-click EXMERGE.EXE. If you are using Exchange 2003, you may need to download exmerge from the Microsoft Website (here)
6. On the Welcome page click Next.
   
7. On the “Procedure Selection” dialogue box, select “Export or Import (Two Step Procedure)”.
   
8. On the “Two Step Procedure” dialogue box, select “Step 1: Extract data from and Exchange Server Mailbox”.
   
9. In the “Source Server” dialogue box specify the name of your Exchange server. If you have a multiple domain environment you’ll need to specify the name and LDAP port number of your Domain Controller. Click Next.
   
10. In the “Database Selection” dialogue box select the mailbox store you want to perform the action upon. Note: In a scenario where you only have one mailbox store you will not be presented with this page.Click Next.
11. In the “Mailbox Selection” dialogue box select individual mailboxes or press the “Select All” button to select all mailboxes found in that store. In this example I will only select one mailbox. Note that you can also see the mailbox size next to the mailbox name.
    
12. Click Next.
13. On the “Locale Selection” dialogue box select the Locale that you would like to use to search the mailboxes.
    
14. Click Next.
15. Specify the path to the folder where you want to place the .PST files. This folder should reside on a different HDD that the one where your mailbox stores are located, but this is only a recommendation for performance benefits, not a must. Also, make sure you have enough free space on that partition.
    
16. Click Next.
17. On the “Save Settings” dialogue box you can now save the settings you’ve configured so far, or you can just click Next. You can also chance the name and location of the files used by EXMERGE by clicking on the “File Names” button.
    
    Note: Notice where you save these files. You can later modify the settings of the EXMERGE operation by simply altering some parts of these files.For example, if you look at the contents of the MAILBOXES.TXT file, you’ll see that you can easily add or remove mailboxes by adding or deleting rows in that file.

    Take some time to explore these files, it’s well worth spending a few minutes on them.

18. After pressing Next the process will begin. This could take a considerable about of time depending on how many mailboxes you’ve selected and the size of the mailboxes. Notice an example of a successful process:
    
    If you get a window that states that there were one or more failures, such as this one:
    
    then it’s probably because of wrong permissions on the destination mailboxes.

Hi

Hi,
Sorry for the lack of content at the moment and especially for the generic looking site. It is basically it’s an out-of-the-box WordPress install to my server with a fairly nice-but plain template overlaid on it. I will eventually get round to coding my own template; should I be bothered.

Anyway first page done, at least the home page isn’t blank now.

Tony