Search results

  1. T

    what did you learn today?

    Most of our customers are small businesses who don't see the value of DR (lucky this one forked out 5K to throw a tape library at their datacenter earlier this year so we could get a full backup) until it bites them on the ass. We're making a very strong push for virtualization across all of our...
  2. T

    what did you learn today?

    Well after a very exciting weekend, I've come to appreciate how far a full drive backup with Backup Exec 12.5 can take you when the primary drive on a RAID1 crashes and the spare has bad sectors. Typically I know most people just backup their data and not the whole kitten kaboodle (Program...
  3. T

    what did you learn today?

    After my second Exchange 2003 to 2007 conversion, it's really not that bad of a process. There's a really nice walkthough on msexchange.org plus some other great PowerShell scripts to make it easier.
  4. T

    What is everyone using for anti-spam (SMB/Enterprise)?

    ++ for MailFoundry As a IT solutions provider, we have one of these appliances in use as a hosted spam filtering solutions for our clients. Currently we host about 60 different domain names for about 50 different customers, averaging about 2.5 - 3.0 million messages a month. We see about 85-90%...
  5. T

    Cost of T-3 of similar type connection

    Do you really need a T3 connection, or would something like an ENLAN (aka, metro Ethernet) connection make more sense? If you take a look at someone like TW Telecom, they have a local presence in the Denver area (that's the location of their national NOC) and in parts of CA. Here's a pic of...
  6. T

    Email hosting....

    I would have to agree. If you're happy with your service, work with them to turn off the spam filtering and find a company to oursource it to. We've used AppRiver, MXLogic, and brought in an appliance to our datacenter to provide these services to our customers at a cheaper price, so I'm sure...
  7. T

    Data Archiving

    Can you tell us what the budget for this expenditure is? Based on the fact that you're saying it's not going to be more than 80GB of data then you could probably even look at an older LTO1 system (so yes, this is another hat thrown in the ring for LTO as well). I typically check...
  8. T

    Hosted Exchange Versus In House Exchange

    You're thinking Enterprise CAL versus Standard CAL - not Standard Edition versus Enterprise edition: http://www.microsoft.com/excha...uation/editions.mspx If you're a small organization, you can still get away with the lower end version of the Server software while getting the Standard +...
  9. T

    Hosted Exchange Versus In House Exchange

    Typical Microsoft. That goes back to a comment I made just a few days ago that Licensing is such a grey area at Microsoft, given the fact that if you ask 5 different licensing team members the same question, most of the time you'll get 5 different answers. Whoever told you that you that the end...
  10. T

    Hosted Exchange Versus In House Exchange

    If you're looking at an idea for hard costs in the licensing realm: $28 per Windows Server Standard CAL (if you don't already have an infrastructure in place) $64 per Exchange 2007 Standard CAL, which covers: - OWA/MAPI users $33 per Exchange 2007 Enterprise CAL, which covers: - Unified...
  11. T

    Yet another question on MS licensing

    Based on this information, no, it does not count towards your software license count. However, if the machine sits on your domain and authenticates to ANY of your server you will need a Windows server CAL for that machine. And yes, MS Licensing really does suck and it seems that if you call 5...
  12. T

    Need suggestions on setting up a new Exchange system...

    As an IT consultant who works with small/medium businesses and has deployed hundreds of networks over the past 8 years, let me throw my recommendations in the ring. Here are the facts: in order to CORRECTLY run a native Exchange 2007 setup (meaning, not SBS), you need at least 2 servers. If...
  13. T

    Experiences with a Dell MD3000i

    We implemented a few MD3000i/ESXi setups in the last quarter of 2008. The typical setup was: PowerEdge 2950 with 0 hard drives, 32GB RAM, Dual Quad core. We purchased a 2GB flash drive and following some of the documentation online, created a boot from flash configuration for ESXi. Dell...
  14. T

    Windows 7, what apps work, don't work for you?

    MagicDisc -- :( -- Installing Office 2007 was a PITA, having to mount the ISO from my 2003 server and sharing the virtual CD drive. Bah.
  15. T

    Troubleshooting SBS2008 reset password intranet page

    Here are the complete password complexity requirements in Windows 2008: Password Policy Settings Particularly this: Passwords cannot contain the user's account name or parts of the user's full name that exceed two consecutive characters. I've ran into this before where users have tried to...
  16. T

    Is there any way to speed up iTunes on XP?

    I wonder if the x64 version is any better...
  17. T

    A big fat script inventory application I've been writting ...

    Very, very nice script here, kudos! I as well work as a consultant that has been using the likes of Belarc, WMI Asset Logger, SpiceWorks, Beacon Auditor (from a local company Intepro) and so on, in the quest for an all encompassing solution that will provide key information such as apps...
  18. T

    Consultants/technicians: what remote support/presentation software do you use? Why?

    Here's another bonus for Bomgar: Ever dread having to walk a user with a new Windows Mobile phone through configuring Exchange ActiveSync options? Get them logged into Bomgar and you can dial into their phone to configure it for them. -- :) -- Another huge benefit I'd agree with you on is...
  19. T

    Install SBS 2003 in existing domain with the other server out of commission?

    No offense, but being an IT consultant myself it's reasons like this that companies get themselves into situations that you're in now. Individuals who haven't made a profession of IT being forced into IT can cause far more damage than good, especially when their employers are too cheap to hire...
  20. T

    Corporate IM

    I'm a huge Openfire/Spark fan, and yes now they support video both on their software client plus in the web-based version of the client. http://www.igniterealtime.org/...s/openfire/index.jsp It supports all of the above: audio, video, LDAP integration, content filtering, logging, IP phone, and...