March 22, 2006

Book signing in Orlando

Paul, Missy, and I will all be speakers at this spring's Exchange Connections 2006 conference, held at the Walt Disney Swan Hotel in sunny Orlando this April 9-12. Not only will the three of us have 8 sessions of Exchange goodness to share with you, a bunch of other smart folks such as Kevin Laahs, Jim McBee, Kieran McCorry, Mark Minasi, Sue Mosher, Tony Redmond, Steve Riley, and Scott Schnoll will also be presenting Exchange, SharePoint, and Windows programming.

O'Reilly has arranged for Paul, Missy, and I to have a book signing at the conference bookstore. Come find us at 3:30pm on Monday, April 10th!

Posted by Devin Ganger at 10:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 04, 2005

DVDs or CDs? You decide!

Microsoft's KC Lemson asks over on You Had Me at EHLO whether people would want the next version of Exchange to come on multiple CDs or a single DVD.

I'm all in favor of DVDs -- I usually copy the install bits up to the network and install from a network share anyway. Over the last year of writing the Cookbook and working on the other various Exchange projects 3Sharp throws my way, I've found the following benefits from doing so:

Head on over and tell KC what you think.

Posted by Devin Ganger at 02:08 PM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2004

Disaster Recovery Chapter

Well, we're all busy writing the Disaster Recovery chapter, and I'm rather saddened that the Exchange 2003 DR white papers aren't available yet. Yes, I'm making my way through the recipes I'm writing, and I'm testing everything, but it's frustrating not to have the latest white paper.

In any case, we're including several recipes in this chapter. Among them are how to restore Exchange 2000 to a different server, and how to restore a single mailbox from backup. Recovery Storage Groups will be covered, including dial-tone recovery.

We'll also tell you how to backup your databases, which every administrator should know -- but I've certainly heard of cases where administrators didn't do this - in fact, I had a friend IM me about an ex-colleague of his yesterday - the ex-colleague had 40GB of transaction logs on one of his volumes, and Exchange had shut down because there wasn't any room left!

Ah well - that's what keeps consultants in business!

Posted by Missy at 02:58 PM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2004

Useful stuff for scripters and admins

This isn't directly related to Exchange, but I discovered it while setting up my Exchange server at home, so I thought I'd pass it on. In brief, Microsoft's new Services for Unix 3.5 is an amzing bit of goodness to have available when writing and using scripts.

Forget the NIS/AD/NFS services and interoperability; it's all sweet, but that's not my point. The absolute blow-me-away feature is the Interix POSIX sub-system. Previous versions of SFU included the MKS POSIX subsystem, which was functional but nothing to write home about.

Interix is amazing because -- get this -- you can invoke Windows binaries and scripts from within the Unix shell and shell scripts. I can write a Korn shell script, using awk and sed and all the nifty tools available on the Unix command line, and pipe input and output into VBscript and Jscript.

So how did I discover this? My installation archive of Exchange got mangled by some idiot filename conversion settings, and I discovered this while running through the install process. Happily, the damage was done in a predictable fashion, so I was able to fix everything using a few timely ksh scripts to rename the affected files based on regular expressions.

I'm sure I could have done the same thing with VBscript, but honestly, it would have taken far longer and required much more scripting. I was able to do many of the renames in a one-liner. And doing it this way saved me a drive back in to work over the weekend.

Moral of the story: having multiple tools in your toolbox is good.

Posted by Devin Ganger at 03:28 PM | Comments (0)