Just no comments
I have no comments, nor I think one will need em on this.
MS Exchange and IIS inetinfo.exe process stuck
I have this strange problem now with one installation of MS Exchange server and IIS inetinfo.exe process on that machine. Whenever I restart the server running MS Exchange, the inetinfo.exe process start consuming 1GB of ram and stops all mail delivery. SMTP server just accepts mail and pulls it to “Messages Pending Submission” queue for later delivery.
It seems that inetinfo.exe does some indexing of MS Exchange store during which it consumes all resources and delay mail delivery. The only way to solve this is to wait until the inetinfo.exe finish this indexing, but normally it takes some hours. Since this is not the case (users need mail), I had to come up with some tricky solution:
1. Put a scheduled task to restart IIS every 2 minutes (%SYSTEM%\System32\iisreset.exe) since after the restart IIS manages to deliver around 10 pending messages before getting stuck
2. Make the IIS to be restarted until evening so that users can have their mail delivered (though with some small delays)
3. Stop scheduling after the working day so that the inetinfo.exe can finish indexing overnight. In the morning of the next day the server will be fine.
The biggest problem here is that I can not get what particularly the inetinfo.exe does, so that I could possibly find a better solution.
Brainbench certificates
I was planning to take a couple of tests and pass certifications from Brainbench for a while already but I never came back to actually do it. This Friday I occasionally got near by the Brainbench site and finally went to the test section. I found all the free/sponsored tests and I took almost all of the ones I thought I had some knowledge in. I ended up with 9 certificates:
- Linux Administration (General)
- MS Office 2003 Fundamentals
- Computer Fundamentals (Win 95/98)
- HTML 3.2
- Computer Fundamentals (Win XP)
- PHP 5
- Cisco Routers Fundamentals
- Network Security
- MS Windows Server 2003 Administration
Only two of the above (no 7 and no 9) are not very well, but still ok due to the reason that I am not too much into Cisco (consider myself a beginner) and I am more a Linux administrator, so I do not spend much time on Windows Servers and that is why my Windows Servers test was not as good.
Anyhow, I think that it is quite good for the time being. I hope that I will get better results on the two not-so-good tests and that I will take more tests later on (especially if they will be free/sponsored).
My transcript number is 6210735 and my results (and other stuff related to Brainbench) can be seen here
Win XP Install after Linux
Although I do not like doing it, sometimes I have to install Windows XP on machines which have Linux installed on them. Mostly when I have an option to give a newer machine to Linux, I do so and an older machine often gets Windows XP installed to be given out to a user.
For the past couple of times I have noticed that it is not so easy to install Win XP and to replace FC5. If going the normal way and booting from Win XP SP2 CD, it gets up to the point where it tells you “Inspecting Hardware Configurations” (which is right at the begging of install), then it shows just black screen and freezes there. I’ve been fighting with this problem for long time trying to disable different devices from BIOS (I though I had problems with devices if install freezes right after hardware detection stage), but nothing helps. The solution to the problem was to remove all linux partitions from the drive and then everything works! I really hate this!
HP nx6xxx series and XP install
If you will ever have to install win XP on the HP nx6xxx series laptop - switch off the WiFi both with button and from BIOS, otherwise the installation process will hang in the very beginning during the hardware detection process.