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In Exchange 2010 OWA can run into odd problems if the user has a large number of Outlook rules which exceed the default allocated space, which is 64KB. Specifically, an error like this will show up in the logs and the user won't be able to turn Out of Office (OOO) on or off when using OWA - it works fine with desktop Outlook. The Rules quota of [...] Read more

MS Exchange (MSX) has been dependant upon the correct use of x.509 certificates since version 2010. They are used for internal SMTP traffic flow, external SMTP e-mail and, of course IIS. Most users are now (2023) probably using Let's Encrypt free certificates which need renewing every 90 days. Various tools exist to manage this process, some can [...] Read more

As of early 2023 ESXi 8.x is the current version of this hypervisor, but many users are quite behind in terms of updating. Partly this may be due to the costs of new licences but also the changes to hardware that 8.x requires. For instance, some CPUs are no longer supported and booting from SD cards or USB keys is also depreciated - the [...] Read more

Here are some useful links as the main VMWare site can be a little tricky to find stuff on at times. This is for the Dell OEM versions of the installer/updater ISO.

We recently had an odd problem with a Dell XPS laptop which used a RealTek USB3 to Ethernet adaptor and would often fail to transfer large files, showing a 'Network error'. It didn't matter if it was over the LAN or Internet and if one used Wi-fi it worked fine too. Repeatability is all in this sort of debugging so this script was written to [...] Read more

One of our clients has some automation on their Exchange box which 'autofiles' e-mails based on a reference number in the 'Subject' line. It is useful to know how many messages are in that particular branch of the PF tree. # # Script to count the number of msgs in the PubFol 'Recently added to Autofile' # and email. Result is both an attachment [...] Read more

There are a myriad of ways to restart Exchange services ut using Powershell is probably the quickest. [PS] C:>Get-Service *Exchange* | Where {$_.DisplayName -notlike "*Hyper-V*"} | Restart-Service -Force The above line restarts everything, whilst this just restarts those that are already running. [PS] C:>$services = Get-Service | ? { $_.name [...] Read more

Port 445 is used by newer versions (post 2000) of SMB and has recently (2022/23) become an increasing hazard for attracting ransomware and hackers. The issue is not the common one of stopping traffic entering a network but rather blocking traffic on 445 leaving the LAN and being tricked into connecting to a toxic source on a remote network. See [...] Read more