News

I was looking for a GUI rather than CLI tool to test a smarthost issue and found this: Portable SMTP mailer Free, simple, can be run from a USB stick, needs .Net so Windows only.

As security on Internet traffic gets taken more seriously old ways of working have to change. I have a client who runs their own in-house SMTP mail server which works fine - unless it is sending mail to users on the BT network (btinternet.com) In this case the mail bounces as the outgoing IP does not have a correct reverse lookup name set. And [...] Read more

I have a client who had a Windows 2012 Standard edition server set up as a DC with DNS, DHCP etc - typical SME operation. They wanted to upgrade to R2 but thought the datacenter edition was too expensive and where surprised that they could not 'downgrade' to Standard Edition and the upgrade - with a new key - to R2. However, it turns out [...] Read more

I know Exchange 2003 (which runs on Windows Server 2003) is well past its sell by date, but in the Real World there are many businesses still using it. Some on Windows SBS 2003 and others on stand alone servers. To them the cost of new hardware and operating systems, let alone the cost of Exchange and it's setup are too much to consider in the [...] Read more

About once ervy six months or so I come accross a cleint's Domain based PC which refuses to log the user on with a stored profile and so any changes they make to their Desktops or Outlook get lot at log off. The underlieing cause of this is not at all clear but the proximal cause is a registry setting being renamed to .BAK. Run up the regedit [...] Read more

Since the end of 2014 and the Poodle bug discovery which left SSL 3 sites being vulnerable to exploitation, Google and Mozilla - but not Microsoft - sigh - have now disabled the use of SSL 3 by default. So if you try going to a site - or a router - which uses SSL3 then this is what you will see: So the result is one can not connect. Which is a [...] Read more

The excellent Draytek 28xx series of routers has been around for many years and are much used in SME & SOHO situations. One bug they all seem to have, regardlesss of firmware level, is that the session timeout is set to 24hours, and so on busy WANs it is quite possible to exceed the defult limit and end users will then get an error message [...] Read more

One of our clients still runs Exchange 2003 - like apparently several hundred thousand here in the UK - and was having problems with iPhones synching messages. The IIS logs are not particular helpful and so this MS page was invaluable. [...] Read more