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.

1. Linux Administration (General)
2. MS Office 2003 Fundamentals
3. Computer Fundamentals (Win 95/98)
4. HTML 3.2
5. Computer Fundamentals (Win XP)
6. PHP 5
7. Cisco Routers Fundamentals
8. Network Security
9. 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

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!

Monitoring Linux servers in not a big deal and a lot of custom plugins can be (and already) written for watching different stuff, but monitoring Windows servers were not so easy for me until this days. Now it seems that I found the way.

It is well known that SNMP under windows really sux (I mean the standard one), the thing that really caught my attention was Performance Counter. This can do the job well.

My idea was to integrate nagios, windows performance counters and rrd graphs. For this I have set up nagios, installed NRPE plugin on windows to be able to check it and added a plugin which is able to watch performance counters. Now I have everything: performance counters are monitored, nagios updates the state of services and does all that fancy stuff it is supposed to do and in addition, the output and performance data of the plugins is written by nagios to the named pipe from where my small perl script takes it and updates a bunch of rrd databases. A simple web GUI shows me all needed graphs.

This time I decided to look into Gnome. The reason for this was that I was trying to find some simple and nice desktop which would fit the basic needs in most of the offices. I have many friends who would like to try linux, but they want the desktop to be simple and ready to work out of the box.

I have installed the “Personal Desktop” package selection of Fedora Core 4 to see what it offers. Seems to be very good. Gnome is quite strait forward. It does not look so fancy and is not so flexible as KDE, but it is right what the most people who do the usual office job would like to see in front of them.
From the set application to check were Gaim and Evolution. Since I use OpenOffice.org for a long time already I didn’t bother myself checking it, I just knew it is fine.

I remember that I had problems with Gaim and russian encoding while using ICQ – now it is gone. I noticed a field in the account setup wizard to specify custom encoding and after all it worked fine.

Evolution really impressed me a lot since its abilities to integrate with MS Exchange just amazing. Just specify the MS Server OWA URL and hostname of MS AD and it gives you almost everything you need including email, contacts (both Exchange personal, Exchange common and AD Global Address list), todos and whatever else.

The are only few problems which I found with Evolution:

1. The are no multiple identities as is. In order to have an option to have them, I need to create new account with “None” in type field. So basically instead of just plainly creating an identity I have to create an account.

2. Sub-folders of exchange public folders are not displayed – this really sucks. For instance if I have a trea of public folders (what is quite normal) than I will see only the root of the tree and all messages under it, but not the sub-folders (not their content).

3.Message threading by subject is not very intelligent since I have many mail with the same subject unthreaded. This irritates me a lot.

4. Almost no UI customization.

Anyway, overall I liked the expirience, although I still prefer KDE and its software, but for those who needs a simple business desktop – try Gnome, since I beleive KDE needs some tweaking inside of KControl until one can feel fully comfortable.

First of all, when using Kontact with Exchange webdav (covers Calendar, Contacts, …) you need to be logged in into Exchange web-mail with konqueror, because Exchange gives only NTLM authentication for webdav. This is a bit uncomfortable but still… For instance I start konqueror, login to Exchange webmail, then minimize the konqueror, move is in some far corner and use Kontact.

Here comes one more problem – authentication times out in a while (possibly 15 minutes) and you have to go back to konqueror to relogin. I was tired of this and finally I have found an auto-reload plugin which does the job. So after I login to Exchange webmail, in Konqueror main menu go to “Settings->Configure Extensions”, Select “Tools” tab in the popup and enable the “Auto Refresh Plugin”. Then in Konqueror “Tools” menu, at the bottom, select “Auto Refresh” with the reasonable time interval.

I know this is kinda long and complicated way, but unfortunately I can not see any other better way of using Kontact with Exchange. Hopefully KDE team will make better integration some time later.

Another tip is how to use “Common Contacts” from Exchange in Kontact in addition to personal Exchange Contacts. The same way as you set up personal contacts, while adding a resource to contacts module of Kontact, give this webdav address: webdav[s]:///public/Common Contacts/

The only thing is in my case it makes Kontact a bit slower since this address contains around 10000 contacts in a row and parsing them is not so easy task :)

I am waiting for the stable release a lot, since I really like this topic and spend a lot of time around it. So far I have a couple of places where Samba (3) is acting as PDC for Win XP clients and I am happy, but there are some limitations and uncomfortabilities which I hope will be solved in the 4th branch of Samba.

Some tries and I figured out the way:

1. Migrate the server:

- stop the old server

- copy /etc/* and /var/cache/samba/* to the new machine

- add user accounts and groups to /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group and /etc/gshadow

- testparm on new machine to remove all obsolete config directives

- adjust the config (change the paths and other stuff)

- copy the files from old server to new one

- start samba on new server

2. Migrate clients:

- remove client from the domain to workgroup using the administrative account from the old domain (it is cached so will work even with old samba server offline)

- join new domain with new administrative account

No user migration is needed since all the samba files are transfered on the new server and user SIDs as well as server SID remains the same. The only thing I needed to do is to disconnected all mapped drives so that they connect back from new server at next login, otherwise clients will use cached information about mapped drives and will try to connect them from the old server.