Exchange Powershell Kung-Fu – Tracking Email and Mailboxes

nbeam published 1 month ago in Exchange, Microsoft, Powershell, Windows Administration. Tags: , , , ,

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I am going to get right to it today. I really don’t like Microsoft Exchange. I think it is a bloated, convoluted, over-priced product. Welcome to being a Microsoft admin :).

I was recently tasked with doing a bit of investigative work on an Exchange server and determining what all was using the box for mail services. To that end, I needed to answer two questions…

What mailboxes are currently in use?
What is currently using this machine as an SMTP server to send mail out?

Below I am going to provide the powershell commands I had to figure out which helped me answer those questions. (more…)

Ubuntu – Now with LUKS? Easy to Use Full Disk Encryption

nbeam published 2 months ago in Consumer Tech, Disk Administration, Fun, Information Security, Linux, Ubuntu. Tags: , ,

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I have decided to give Ubuntu 17.04 LTS Desktop a go. On a whim I installed it on a laptop I had lying about (being an IT person they tend to proliferate over a given period of time in my office… older units becoming doorstops, newer units lovely “Jenga” blocks and maybe the occasional Proxmox cluster…) Since this seems to be the final days of Unity (which I actually don’t mind as a Desktop all that much), I figured now was a good time to take another poke at it as a daily personal driver. I was happy to come across an option for full disk encryption during the install process and wanted to pass my few thoughts on it along. (more…)

IP Address Ordering – What order you place your IP Addresses in on a Windows Server NIC Matters

nbeam published 3 months ago in Microsoft, Networking, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, Server 2012R2, Windows Administration. Tags: ,

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I will keep this short and sweet. We have servers in our environment that have multiple IP addresses assigned to a single NIC. That’s normally just fine. However on occasion I will have very strange issues occur where essentially all networking appears to be working and yet web browsing won’t work. I can ping my default gateway, ping other systems in the same subnet, telnet out on port 80 and 443, etc, etc. But the network connectivity still behaves oddly. What’s the issue?

It all has to do with networking logic decisions made many years ago (I believe as far back as Windows Server 2000) by someone at Microsoft. (more…)

Ubuntu Boot Partition Fills Up Often Due to Bug – Quick Fix for Hyper-V Hosted Ubuntu Systems

nbeam published 3 months ago in Disk Administration, Hyper-V, Linux, Microsoft, Ubuntu, Virtualization. Tags: , , ,

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I run Ubuntu 14.04 LTS servers on Hyper-V.

If you do a fairly routine install you will end up with an anemic ~250 MB boot partition. The boot partition (located at /boot) stores your Linux Kernel and everything the system needs to boot. I am sure you could have guessed that.

Next, if you have automatic security update downloading enabled, then your system is downloading new versions of the ubuntu/linux kernel on a regular basis to this partition.

What should happen is that only a few versions of the kernel should be kept on hand and there is supposed to be some kind of job that cleans this up from time to time.

In reality that cleanup function seems to be bugged in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS so the boot partition will hit 100% full frequently and it is a constant game of manually keeping that partition clean… or else! (or else it turns into a real headache when it hits 100% full). (more…)

My Shell Scripts Need Help

nbeam published 3 months ago in Linux, Shell Scripting. Tags: ,

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This lovely item came across my feed today and I realized there is so much that I do poorly when it comes to shell scripting it is absurd 🙁

https://dev.to/thiht/shell-scripts-matter

Anyhow I am extremely thankful for this long and detailed post and wanted to pass it along to my readership.

I also wanted to crowd-source a bit of information from you all.

I am familiar with the idea of a code repository but have never really used one. I have had a lot of people suggest I use GIT. I am curious if that is the general consensus or if anyone else has other suggestions? I have a project that consists of some pretty crazy scripts (well, crazy for me, 1000+ lines). Trying to keep track of versions and changes in a script that large is difficult to say the least. I am looking for something easy to use and quick to deploy. Thoughts welcome.