Archive for November, 2008

Nov

2008

How to: Install a Windows 2008 Domain Controller

This evening i’ve build a new testlab at home. Everything is placed on a Intel Quad Core system with 8 Gb on memory, so there will be some performance

First of all I made two “base images”, one Microsoft 2008 Server X86 Enterprise and one Microsoft 2008 Server X64 Enterprise. This two machines will be cloned for the rest of the environment.

The first machine i’ve created is a new domain controller. Let’s see the screenshots i’ve made. There are a copple of new options through the promotion process of this server.

This wizard to install a new domain controller you get by typing in DCPROMO in the run box. A nice new feature you can see in screenshot 10, Export the settings. You can use this file for example promoting a second domain controller unattended, or you can use this file to promote a Server 2008 Core Edtion as a domain controller.

The second domain controller you can promote unattended with the following command: dcpromo /unattended:c:\unattended_dc_config.txt (make sure you select the right textfile).

Posted in Microsoft Windows 2008 Server | No Comments »

Nov

2008

TechNet “Get ready for Windows Server 2008″

Yesterday I was on the TechNet “Get ready for Windows Server 2008″ seminar with one of my collegues. We’ve had a great day with much technical information about the ins and outs of Microsoft Server 2008. A very nice presentation and demonstration was given by speaker Gerald van Grootheest. What we’ve seen was:

- Terminal Server 2008
- TS Gateway
- TS RemoteApp
- TS Easy Print
- RODC (Read Only Domain Controller)
- NAP (Network Access Protection)
- Server 2008 Core Edition
- Hyper-V
- PowerShell

To download the presentations of the “Get ready for Windows Server 2008″ seminar, go to the skydrive of Gerald van Grootheest.

Posted in Microsoft Windows 2008 Server | No Comments »

Nov

2008

Changing multiple passwords in Active Directory

All of you now that you cannot change multiple passwords of the user objects in the Active Directory through the Grafical User Interface (GUI). You’ve to click all the users one by one and so you can change the password of that specific user. There’s some good news Default in Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 there’s a command net user. With this command you’re abble to change the password of multiple users in the Active Directory. Let’s do this in my testenvironment.

Open the commandline
Run the following command, net user. Now you get an overview of all the user objects in the Active Directory
Open notepad
Copy and past the right user and add the following things
net user <username> <password>
Be sure that the new password meets the configured Password Policy of your Defautl Domain Policy.

So you can see this will save you a lot of time…..

Posted in Active Directory | No Comments »

Nov

2008

Opening the right ports…

When you use an Edge Server in your Exchange 2007 environment, you’ve to open some ports. Let’s open the right ports:

Incoming Traffic:
SMTP – TCP 25 – from the Internet
SMTP – TCP 25 – from the Edge Server to the Hub Transport Server

Outgoing Traffic:
SMTP – TCP 25 – from the Edge Server to the Internet
SMTP – TCP 25 – from the Hub Transport Server to the Edge Server
Secure LDAP – TCP 50636 – from the Hub Transport Server to the Edge Server
DNS – UDP 53 – from the Edge Server to the Internet
RDP – TCP 3389 – from the Hub Transport Server to the Edge Server

Posted in Microsoft Exchange 2007 Server | No Comments »

Nov

2008

How to: Implementing an Edge Server

In this tutorial we are going to install an Edge Server for our Exchange 2007 environment. We’re going to install the Edge Role on a Windows 2003 Server.

First you need to install the following prerequisites:
- Powershell 1.0
- Microsoft Management Console 3.0 (MMC 3.0)
- .NET Framework 2.0
- .NET Framewerk 2.0 SP1
- Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM)

First off all you have to now that the Edge Server will be placed in the companys DMZ, therefore the name “Edge”. The server is NOT a member of the internal Domain and will be placed in a workgroup, for example E2K7EDGE. The Hub Transport Server will push the Active Directory information to the ADAM on the Edge Server trough Secure LDAP, port 50636, so this is one-way traffic.

After the installation of the Edge Transport Role, we’re going to creat a new Edge Subscription file. This file will be imported later on on the Hub Transport Server.

new-EdgeSubscription -file “c:\Edgeexport.xml

Go to your Hub Transport Server, Organizational Configuration, Edge Subscriptions and select New Edge Subscription. Browse to your Edgeexport.xml file and select the right Active Directory Site. Click on New to import the Edge Subscription file.

Now we create a new Receive Connector, so we’re abble to receive e-mail from the outside world.

After this action, the Edge Subscription can be started, so the Active Directory will push some information to the ADAM.

Start-EdgeSubscription

As you can see, there are two Send Connectors available on the Edge Server. One for sending e-mail to the outside world, and one for sending e-mail from the Edge Server to the Hub Transport Server.

Now you can begin to fine-tuning your Anti-spam configuration on the Edge Server. So now your Edge Server is ready.

Posted in Microsoft Exchange 2007 Server | No Comments »

Nov

2008

Export Distribution Group details

When you have multiple Distribution Groups in your Exchange 2007 environments and you need an overview of the members per Distribution Group, you want to script this action. Whit the following script you can export all Distribution Groups in an Organizational Unit with the following information: Groupname, Primary SMTP address, Members. This will save a lot of time, while you don’t have to click around all your groups in Active Directory

All you have to change is the OU$=”edir”.

If your Organizational Unit is called “Distribution Groups“, it will be: OU$=”Distribution Groups”

_____________________________

## This script will get all distrobution Groups and print out
## the Group Name and Members alias and Primary smtp address
##
## Example
## groupName: Group.Name
##
## alias               PrimarySmtpAddress
## —-              ——————
## Group.Alias    Group@primarySmtpAddress
##
## groupsMembers:
##
## alias               PrimarySmtpAddress
## —-              ——————
## User.Alias      User@primarySmtpAddress

$OU=”edir”
##input OU path above

foreach($group in Get-DistributionGroup -OrganizationalUnit $Ou)
{
write-output “GroupName:$group ”
Get-DistributionGroup $group | ft alias,primarysmtpaddress
Write-output “GroupsMembers:”
Get-DistributionGroupMember $group | ft alias,primarysmtpaddress
write-output ‘ ‘
}
_____________________________

Here you can see the output of the script in the Exchange 2007 test environment.

Posted in Microsoft Exchange 2007 Scripts | No Comments »

Nov

2008

Saving time during the Exchange 2007 installation

As all of you now, the installation of an Exchange 2007 environment takes some time! First you install all the prerequisites, after that the installation Exchange 2007 SP1. After finishing this, you will install the rollup pack. So let’s save some time during the installation.

When you extract the Exchange 2007 SP1 setup, there’s also an folder called Updates. Here you can put the additional updates that are need to install after the Exchange 2007 SP1 setup. Easy as that, we put Exchange 2007 SP1 Rollup 3 in the update folder. The installation will be started automatically…..

Posted in Microsoft Exchange 2007 Server | No Comments »

Nov

2008

Total users per storage group

With the following script you can create an overview of all users in the different storage groups. Handy to see how many mailboxes you have in your Exchange 2007 environment
__________________________________

###
clear-host
write-host -fore yellow “This script will get each mailboxdatabase and the current user count ”
foreach($name in get-mailboxdatabase)
{
write-output “$name”
$count=(get-mailbox -database $name).count
if($count -eq $null)
{ write-host -fore red “Empty Database, no users”
}
else
{ write-output $count }
}
write-host -fore yellow “The system has a total of “$user=(get-mailbox -resultsize:unlimited).count
write-host -fore red $user

__________________________________

The output of this script you can see below: