Well RTM (Release To Manufacturing) of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are here and boy have I been a excited and busy little beaver the past week! Thus far I have only put Windows 7 RTM on to my work laptop as I’ve been pretty flat out, but it fixed a few bugs had…the smallest but most gratifying was that it now saves username and password for VPN connections properly.

So I ran into a few hiccups when installing Exchange 2007 SP1 onto Server 2008 R2 RTM, but nothing that wasn’t too hard to overcome. So I thought I would share the knowledge with anyone out there banging their head against a brick wall too.

Firstly, make sure you have IIS installed…I installed all components of the IIS package as I plan to use this server for other web related tasks, that covered all the Exchange crucial components. Check http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb691354.aspx for all the system requirements and command lines to install them (you can add them as roles via the GUI also though).

So once that was done, you will have to run the exchange installation in compatibility mode for Windows Vista SP2. This will get you past a stop error…but you will eventually get to the screenshot above:

Error: An error occurred. The error code was 3221684346. The message was The data area passed to a system call is too small…

It was a very vague area, but the whole installation succeeds except for installing the mailbox role. The way I eventually got around this was to then close the setup (as it has successfully installed everything but the mailbox role, it does not fail entirely). I then installed Microsoft Update and applied the Update Rollup 9 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB970162). After a reboot, I ran the setup from the CD again, this time with both Vista SP2 compatibility and “Run as Administrator” enabled. This will launch the change / uninstall version of the setup, from here just tick the “Mailbox Role” to re-install that roll. Then, Robert’s ya mother’s brother.

(Something to note it is that I am now using 7137 x64 or x86 on all of the PCs)

1. VPN Connections not saving passwords: When I create a VPN connection to dial in to work, it will never remember the user name or password, even when the box is checked to remember it. I just can’t work it out and it is definitely a bug which I have reported with feedback. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass having to put it in every time (randomly generated password), but it’s doable. It remembers all the other settings, including security parameters though, so not all lost.
2. Issues accessing domain resources on Windows 2003 Domains: I haven’t looked at this issue too much yet, but now that my work laptop is setup with Windows 7 it is becoming a more prevalent issue. Both at work and home, the domains are setup with roaming profiles and redirected folders (my documents). There seems to be an issue with Windows 7 accessing these resources in a timely manner, there is quite a delay and I am not sure what the issue is, with the Windows XP PCs it works just fine. With my home network, the problem even crashes my server; with lots of traffic from bit torrents etc. I’m suspecting some kind of DNS related problem at the moment, but still investigating.

If anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears!

Well it has been a bit over a month since I upgraded my little beasts and I have been slack and not uploaded any of the photos I took. So here they are, a little story board through the stages of building and customising the new computers.

Some highlights:

• Silverstone TJ07 with customer painted satin black interior
• Custom mounted HDD on case panel of an Antec Minuet 180
• Thermalright CPU & GPU Cooling with Zalman fan controller and Coolermaster fans

I was planning on putting my Intel Q6600 in to my server, but it just would not play nice with the GA-EG45M-DS2H motherboard, so I ended up sticking with my Intel e7300 and just installing Server 2003 with Exchange on to it. The plan was to run a VM server but the e7300 doesn’t have the VT (Virtualisation Technology) on board support to run VM’s. I plan on getting an Intel Q9400 and maybe 8GB of ram for it in a month or two, at which time I plan to put on Citrix XenServer, which is another free alternative in the VM server market and looks superior to VMWare ESXi and Microsoft Hyper V Server 2008.

Anyway, enjoy the happy snaps!

Its a pretty simple thing to set up in Exchange System Manager:

1. In Connectors, right-click on Internet Mail SMTP Connector and choose Properties.
2. Change the radio buttons to: Forward all mail through this connector to the following smart hosts
3. Enter your ISPs SMTP server in here, if you have the IP be sure to enter it within square brackets, below is the address for iiNet in Australia.

1. All SMTP servers these days require authentication to send outbound through them, so select the Advanced tab.
2. Then click Outbound Security
3. Choose Basic authentication
4. Click Modify
5. Enter your ISP user name and password and click OK

The Exchange server is now setup to relay outbound mail through your ISP, so that should see all your mail successfully arrive at it’s destination 100% of the time. But be sure to test it out and check that your ISP allows the use of a Smart Host.

For inbound email I have also now added a 2nd MX record for my domains which points to my web server (which is how I used to have email set up), which means I will have another layer of redundancy for inbound emails, should I lose my ISP connection for the server or it crashes etc.

Now time to kick back and wait for the emails to flood in, though not SPAM anymore!

So firstly, I setup my Exchange server to cross reference emails against a publicly available SPAM black list, SpamHaus. You do this via adding a connection filtering rule in message delivery properties (in the Exchange System Manager snap-in):

1. Under Global Settings, right-click Message Delivery and select Properties
2. Select the Connection Filtering tab
3. Click Add
4. Enter zen.spamhaus.org as the DNS Suffix of Provider and Display Name
5. Clock Ok

Next you have to manually enable filtering with this rule on your SMTP Virtual Server. To do this:

1. Under Servers > *Server Name* > Protocols > SMTP, right-click your SMTP server and select Properties
2. Click Advanced next to IP Address
3. Click Edit
4. Tick all the Check Boxes in this window and choose OK

So now that has blocked dynamic IP ranges and publicly known SPAM servers / address ranges for sending you email, too easy! As I don’t have that many address on my domains, this and some basic SCL filtering is thus far proving to be very effective at blocking SPAM. Obviously on an enterprise level you will need some 3rd party SPAM / Virus software on top of this basic SPAM protection available in Exchange.

Well it has been a few weeks now since I got my server going and I had yet to get Exchange fully functional. I had only got as far as installing it and having all the services running, but hadn’t hooked it up to my websites or started using it rather than my web server’s POP3 email accounts.

I have started studying for my 70-284 (Implementing and Managing Microsoft Exchange Server 2003), so that inspired me to get everything going; especially as it’s exactly what I am learning about right now. I have actually decided that I will sit this exam next as I am finding it very interest (and a little easy!) and it will break up the studies a bit. I want to do the exam within the next 2 weeks as I really need to get some of these exams out of the way and get back on my certification war path.

I really didn’t have that much to do, and I’m pleased to say everything went exactly to plan and I had everything hooked up and working in no time at all; a pleasant surprise to the norm. So I changed my domain’s MX records to point to my FQDN address, which is a dynamic forwarder (as I have a dynamic IP from my ISP, the router updates this FQDN any time it changes). Then I setup the following port forwards to my server:

• 80 – HTTP (already activated for other services)
• 25 – SMTP
• 110 – POP3
• 443 – Outlook Web Access
• 389 – LDAP (required for remote access user authentication)
• 143 – IMAP4

Then I enabled and started the POP3 and IMAP services (for access on PC’s I have linked to other Domains & Exchange Accounts) and I was in business. Too easy!

I did hit one stumbling block though. I want to use one exchange account which is configured with 2 SMTP accounts for different domain names (Pixsoul and XXIV) which works perfectly for receiving email from either account. However when you send email it address it from the default SMTP account, so you can only send email from one of the accounts – no choice. I have done a lot of playing and poking around but it appears the only way to have this work is to create 2 separate user accounts in AD, linking each individual email to their accounts…I will keep searching though and post up on the success / failure of that tomorrow.

Just a little update; I have been far too busy with work and also spending the last 2 weeks building and fixing up both my PC’s to post. But I am finally done and will catch up on posts, especially build posts / pics this week. In the meantime, here is a quick snap I took last night of the new machine, doing what it does best; gaming!

I was planning to get some work done on these during the week, but work was insanely busy with a critical issue we had with our primary domain controller. For some reason, when any user attempted to log on it was a lottery whether the domain controller would respond properly and load their profile and security settings over the network. It was functioning to the extent it would accept/deny a user for the correct username and password; but beyond that it was pot luck whether the computer would pull down security / profile settings, scripts etc. You could get it working by restarting the PC / logging on and off, as many times as required to make it work…there seemed to be no logic in the problem or solution what so ever. I ended up sounded exactly like the guys from The IT Crowd, “have you tried turning it off and then on again?”.

Fortunately I resolved the problem via use of dcdiag.exe and also by setting up a secondary domain controller on a virtual machine. I resolved several issues using dcdiag.exe and then troubleshooting individual problems, but a key problem we had was that the schema for our domain was not a 2003 schema, even though we are running a 2003 domain. We upgraded our domain from 2000 to 2003 in mid February, part of which you have to run forest and domain preps to upgrade the schemas from 2000 to 2003 before the upgrade; without this the upgrade installation will not continue. Which puzzles me, as the upgrade needed the upgraded schema before installing…yet this week I find that the schema was not the appropriate version. Anyway, while setting up a VM as a domain controller it would not join itself because the schema was incorrect which was the only way I found out about this. After upgrading the schema as well as fixing a few other errors all my domain login issues dissapeared…which was great, I didn’t have to spend all day restarting and re-logging people in until it magically worked!

Anyway, back to the computers, I am still reinstalling my gamer and server and have a heap of photos etc of the whole process which I will put up later in the weekend as well as a bit of documentation on the process and problems encountered…time for another beer.

I’m doing some research at the moment on installing VMWare, looks like it might work…or might not. Basically their HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) are enterprise level servers, where as I will be installing  on a “white box” aka home level hardware. So none of my hardware is “officially” supported or gauranteed to work, but after some research it looks like I should be able to get almost everything, if not everything, functioning. I checked out some “white box” HCLs, which are lists of hardware that punters like me have tested and successfully got VMWare working on. It looks like the CPU (Intel Q6600) is supported, my Intel Pro 1000 NIC is also supported, but I will need to purchase an additional one as the on board Marvel Yukon LAN controller isn’t supported (I need 2 for Routing / Quality of Service / Bandwidth Control). The main issue that I would face is the onboard RAID / SATA controller, an Intel ICH10R, which apparently might need a bit of tweaking to work.

So I guess the question is, can I be bothered going to all the effort of getting it to work…currently I am unsure. Time to ponder over it all.

5x 3pin Fan poer splitter

3x Siliceous Washers (10 pack)

1x Evercool Fan Speed Controller

6x 4pin to 3pin Adapter

1x SilverStone TJ07 Black

1x Sunbeam Rheobus Extreme Black

1x AC Ryan Blackfire4 Kameleon 80mm Black UV Blue

1x AC Ryan Dual 30cm Cold Cathode Kit UV

1x Bulgin Illuminated Switch Kit Black Housing / Blue LED

2x CoolerMaster Silent Blue LED Fan 120mm

1x Thermalright T-RAD² VGA Cooler

3x Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB WD6401AALS