So the pitch goes like this, why stub? You can just archive the data and the user still has access to their email on or offline with no third party intervention! You don’t have to train anyone and you can still search the email system and restore deleted emails.

On the surface this makes sense and in fact in some instances (albeit rare ones) it is what the customer wants to do, they only want to archive for discovery purposes and they don’t want their end users to know about archiving.

So I guess it’s not completely a bunch of crap. But my typical experiance as to why customers purchase email or data archiving systems is far different. Most customers want to:

• Shrink the amount of data stored on their exchange servers.
• Keep thier cost for high speed high availibility disk subsystems down.
• Move older less frequently accessed data to lower cost storage.
• Have one location for the humans to find their email data, online and PST (for Exchange users).

You can not accomplish these things if you don’t archive and stub, that’s it.

So why then would vendors try to lead you away from archiving? Well from what I have seen it’s the vendors who:

• Do not have a reliable system for stubbing. They have a system; just doesn’t work so good.
• They can only use high speed disk because they cannot accommodate the system archiving process and user data retrieval requests (humans clicking on shortcuts or stubs) at the same time without major slowdowns and errors.
• Their method for accessing the email server to stub is flawed, buggy and is a constant support issue.

So beware of the vendor touting this to you. You must really think about why you are planning on archiving data, is it for discovery? for data size reduction? for control? That’s the real question and if you follow that then you can make a correct choice and not be misguided by a sales person into buying something that doesn’t meet your real needs.

San Jose, CA ( PRWEB) November 9, 2009 - Arconi SoftTools Gives Powerful Microsoft Active Directory and Windows Server Utilities Away for Free… http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/11/prweb3174114.htm

• RDP Enable (remote desktop enable) http://www.arconi.com/rdpenable
• Active Directory Reporter http://www.arconi.com/utilities/active-directory-utils/adattributereporter.html
• Active Directory Editor http://www.arconi.com/utilities/active-directory-utils/activedirectoryeditor.html

I’ve added some new features that I was already wanting myself and some that users have requested.

And yes the first 2 are not free any more…what! not free!  Before you get upset let me explain. I have made the pricing really low, the problem is the economy is so slow that (I guess that’s the reason) that nobody is making donations or clicking on my advertiser links (My advertisers are getting lot’s of free page views though :-/ ).

So I need to support the site somehow and this seems to be the best solution. And the response has been good so far.

I’m going to release some new tools here soon, actually they have been in my arsenal for years and very popular with my co-workers but I never posted them because they were a little complicated to setup. So I’m removing the “complications” and they will be available soon.

Joomla allows for quick sweeping changes to an entire site without coding (or very little of it any way). It also gives the ability to maintain users account and control access to different parts of the site. But that’s the tip of the iceberg there is a whole lot more… Here is a quote from the Joomla.org site:

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

I don’t know if you noticed but the page load speed seemed slower and the site itself was getting a bit cluttered. So I did some testing a a few popular site created for testing other website speed rankings. Mine came in very slow and I found I was making a huge amount of SQL calls to the backend as well as loading a ton of CSS and images.

So I started on the update process to bring the site up to date and faster and beautify it.

This task is made much easier by going with Joomla. If you ever have an idea for me on the site in regards to how it should look or something that will make it easier for please contact me and let me know. I’d love to hear your suggestions.

This latest version is faster, cleaner and easier to navigate. It’s my goal to keep this site easy to access and easy to use website for you. So from time to time you’re going to see changes. In fact since I released this site some 4 years ago I have updated the interface 4 times. I mean complete overhauls.

So some more of the new features are…

• An updated menu system for easier navigation, check it out it’s much easier to find things in the new menu (and their cooler looking)
• Smaller faster loading images.
• Better, faster, more thorough search facility. If you type into the search box what you’re looking for; by the third character you enter it will start searching. Many times it will return pertinent information before your even done typing.
• New Layout for easier reading (including changing the font colors to black, boo to grey fonts, they suck)
• Less adds ( or at least more relevant ones)
• Lot’s of updates to the tools offered out here.

…and last but not least some of the tools are not free any more

Why are some of the tools not free anymore?

Well this was a tough decision but I was spending a lot of time supporting some of the more popular tools, answering questions and making little changes for different people (customizing them) and it was taking to much time from my family. Secondly for that last few months (sign of the economy?) no one has been clicking links to my advertisers or making any donations.

“I spent several hours customizing a tool for one person/engineer (who was migrating about 500+ accounts) and even helped troubleshoot thier AD. When I asked them to make some kind of donation for any further work that’s the last I heard!”

So as a means to support the site (and my family) I’m not giving all the tools away for free any more and support services will also have to be paid for.

But dont start crying yet because I have made the pricing ridiculously cheap.

Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile(Apath)

With the “objFile” varible I was adding a letter to tghe end to create a new varible each time, instead I just left it alone so it reused the varible and now it works, the file has the correct date and time? Still cant create it by hand though?

So my customer is waituing for a call from permabit with an explanation or fix for the issue. I’ll update when I find out.

OK so I constantly am setting this up for customers, the IgnoreArchiveBit.txt

The basic steps are as follows:

1. Create a folder under the program files directory on your EV server system drive. Call it something like ArchiveBitProgram or whatever you suits you.
2. Place the VBS file from this article in the folder.
3. Open the file in notepad and modifiy it as needed (instructions below)
4. Create a scheduled task and set it to run after your snapshots are complete.
5. Do yourself a favor and test the VB script first. From windows explorer open the folder it’s in and open the folder that the partition is located in.
6. Double click the VB scipt and watch for the “IgnoreArchiveBitTrigger.txt” file to show up. Now change the exstention of the “IgnoreArchiveBitTrigger.txt” to .old. Now re-run the test and make sure it deletes the .old file and places a new one in there.
7. Now for Enterprise Vault 2007 make the following registry edit.
8. Create the following registry value:
   • FileWatchEnableIgnoreArchiveBit
9. This is a DWORD value registry key created under
   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\KVS\Enterprise Vault\Storage
10. When set to 1, this registry key enables the StorageFileWatch mechanism.
11. Now when the scheduled task runs it will create archive trigger bit file and in Enterprise Vault 2007 it will restart the storage service.

For Enterprise Vault 8.0.x you need to:

1. Open the Vault Admin Console (vac)
2. Expand Vault stores
3. Expand Each Vault Store Group
4. Right Click on the appropriate Vault Store Partition and goto the Properties
5. Select the Backup Tab and select
6. “Check for a trigger file” and choose the appropriate scan interval time.

Symantec has a detailed knowledge base article here:  http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/273151.htm

Information on editing the Archive Trigger Bit VB Script is located here.

The Archive Trigger bit VB script for EV 2007  is  here

The Archive Trigger bit VB script for EV 8.0.x  is  here

I was building a lab domain that needed to be an exact copy of my production AD (active directory). But as the lab runs its own network on a separate Internet connection and is less secure than the production network, I didn’t want the “real” domain name available for hackers. In other words if the lab domain got hacked and the AD security info was compromised at least they wouldn’t have the production network name to search for.

I’m not going into the procedure for a domain rename if that’s what you need you can get the rename procedure document  here. Also you can download the domain rename tools here.

But I ran into issues right away after the reboot of the domain controller and I wanted to post my very simple fix for that here. On that note I should say I have completed several domain renames and I have always had this same issue. After completing the Domain Rename and rebooting the controller the Directory service would not start. There were actual error messages (that I didn’t capture) that complained about the domain name. As I started scanning through the registry looking for a cause I noticed that the original domain name was still remaining in many keys. This is obviously a real problem. I researched the issue but couldn’t find any real answers. I’m not a 100% on this but I believe the problem may be in the domain name itself.

As you have probably seen yourself many AD’s have two domain names; the NetBIOS and the internet or FQDN. In my case it was “hollow” for the NetBIOS side and “hollowtech.com” for the “domain name”.
I restored the image and tried a second time, no go, still didn’t work. So I found this simple fix. (I tried this as a guess and got lucky.)
 

The Fix: After the domain rename tool is complete; open the registry editor and highlight the “root” of the registry tree. Right click and choose “export”.

Save the exported file to your desktop or wherever you can find it. Now go to that saved file, it will have an extension of “.reg”. Whatever you do don’t double click it!

Open it with Notepad, if it’s really large it may take a while but it will open eventually. Once open got to “Edit -> Replace”.

Type in the original domain name “whatever.com” in the “find what” box and the new FQDN in the replace box. After it completes do this same thing again this time using the NetBIOS name (whatever yours is).

Now scan through the file one more time to double check you found every instance of the domain name. If you’re confident you got all of them save the changes.

Now open the registry editor again and choose import. You could also double click the reg file you just changed and it will also import it for you.

Now restart the server and you should be good-to-go. This has worked for me several times. I have used this on one and two server domains (lab systems). If you have more than one controller (server) you should dcpromo to remove all the other systems and then re-promote them into the new domain.

First clarify the scope of your ”infrastructure merge” and get some dates. By “dates” I mean when are you expected to have these services migrated and how “operational” do they have to be?

Below is a list I threw together that should be used as a starting point for your migration. You may have many more items than I listed or less…

What are you merging? 

•  
  • Desktops?
  • Laptops?
  • Servers?
  • Switches?
  • Applications – Which ones? (You can ask to delay this one until you’ve done some research on what apps you have running on the network.)
  • MX records – Other DNS records?
  • Phone systems (VOIP and other analog systems)
  • Email systems?
  • Mobile messaging (Blackberry, Good Link, Active Sync, etc)
  • Wireless infrastructure
  • Edge Security devices (SSL VPN’s, Firewalls, Blue Socket or similar,etc)
  • Databases?
  • Remote employees?

Take stock – Hardware 

•  
  • How many Computers (end user systems) do you have? Will they all be migrating? (Some companies use a migration as a way to phase out old systems and buy new ones. A technology refresh of sorts.)
  • How many Servers will be moving to the new domain? (remember I said this series will have a Microsoft lean to it) As I said in the first paragraph this could be a way to refresh some of your systems and get rid of some that are not in use anymore.
  • Switches, you may not have to do much here since these are’nt domain specific (for the most part) but you probably will have to set up some new subnets or deal with other routing issues to the other domain or realm.
  • Printers
  • Security Systems

 Take stock – Software

•  
  • Determine the networked and desktop applications on your domain that are specific and important to the function of your company.
    • Business intelligence – SAP, etc.
    • Finance – Payroll, Purchasing, QAD, etc.
    • Databases – Access, SQL, etc
    • Office Applications
    • Graphic Applications
  • Note: In one company I performed a merger at we identified over 265 applications used by employees. 120 of them were deemed “business critical” and 75 of them were deemed “must have running” on the first day of the merger.

Employees

•  
  • How many employees are there locally?
  • How many remote?
  • What is the expectation for computing services for employees during and after the migration?
  • Will everybody be staying or is there going to be a large staff reduction?
  • How many have handheld devices? – smart phones, pda’s, etc.

Services

•  
  • Intranet - will it still be available to employees after they have moved? Will they need it during the move?
  • Wireless Access – Will the “other” company employees be coming over during the migration and need access back to the home office? If you have a wireless perimeter security device like Blue Socket then you will need to set up access for them. As well, make sure your firewall is open for the VPN client “they” use.
  • Helpdesk – which one do they use for requests?
  • Order Entry Systems -
  • Financial Tracking Systems –

So after you compile the list of hardware, systems and services that will need to be migrated you should work with the different “Migration Teams” to develop timelines around when these different pieces can be migrated. You may not be able to migrate various aspects of your infrastructure until other items are migrated. I know this seems elementary but I have seen the smallest planning mistakes bring and entire migration to a halt.

Once you have some definitive dates get it into a plan, an excel spreadsheet works well sometimes better than MS Project or other high end planning solutions (Everybody has excel so that means everyone can open your planning document).

One thing I didn”t put into the list above but is critical is your budget. Without it your just guessing at what you can complete and when. You may need outside consulting help to perform the migration (if it’s your first it’s a good idea) do you have the money for consultants?

You may need to purchase new equipment, money?

You see what I mean, money is the driver for every merger or acquisition so get your piece of the pie early in the planning phases so you don”t get caught short at a critical juncture in your migration. 

Next I will discuss the technical aspects of a migration in “Migrations – The Technical stuff”

So I have been through many of these and with a lot of success so I want to share that experience with you as I know information about this process can be hard to come by. I’m going to break it up into several articles or “phases” that you will help guide you towards a successful migration. I’m going to include the tools you’ll need and where to get them. As well I’ll give the instructions on how to use them.

So stay tuned for the first article “ Domain Migrations – First Steps” I should have it posted in a few days.

This one is called AD Attrib Change, I know not a very “cool” name but all I really care about is what it does.

In it’s current state it will update the bussiness phone, cell phone, department and location fields in AD for a user account. It will perform this on as many accounts as you throw at it. I recently ran it on a list of about 1500 users and it updated all of them without a hitch.

The nice thing is your list only needs a user acoount id or “SAM Name” in the list not the entire DN to an account. This is becuase I search at the root for each user. This way you can put together a list of user you need to make changes to without worrying where they are in Active Directory (what OU).

This is a screen shot of the interface:

**DownLoad it here**

You can see it’s really simple. Just modify the LDAP path to point to one of your domain controllers ( I include a defualt path to get you started.) You should probably use the path to your PDC emulator if you can. On a large amount of changes you can really hammer the direcory service.

Next click the “choose list of users” button and locate your user list file. It can have any extension; just aas long as it is formated correctly.

The format is as follows: 

“userid, business phone, cell phone, department, location”

If you choose to leave any field blank make sure you still put the surrounding commas in place or it will fail. so if you left out the cell phone field then it would look like this:

“userid, business phone, , department, location”

Also dont put quotes around each line like I have here. That’s just for readbility in this article.

Thats about it. Oh yeah this tool is free so you can download it above and run it all you want and I’ll even answer questions on it’s use for free (if you ask nice). If you want to change some of the fields it updates or anything else about it I’ll be happy to do that for you for a very low price. How low? Well if I only need to change or add 4 or less fileds I’ll do it for $19.99.

So if you would like it customized for your enviornment let me know.

If you only need the four or less changes I mentioned and your in a hurry just click the “Buy Now” button below. You can pay the $19.95 now and as soon as it post’s I’ll contact you for the changes you want. In most cases I can have the changed program to you within 24 hrs (many times within just a few hours, depending on how busy I am).

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281308
Microsoft says:

“When a client computer connects to a Microsoft Windows 2000-based computer or a Microsoft Windows Server 2003-based computer by using an alias name, the client may receive the following error message:
System error 52 has occurred.
A duplicate name exists on the network.

This problem can occur when you try to connect to the server by using a CNAME alias that is created in the DNS zone. For example, this problem may occur with a command similar to the following sample command
net view \\alias.domain name.com where alias is a CNAME record that is created for the server in the domain name.com zone. The server is not “listening” on the alias, and therefore is not accepting connections to that name. ”

I experienced this recently when after creating a share on a server for a specific application we also created a CNAME pointing to that share so users could easily connect to it by the applications name. This made it easy for them to remember how to get there. After creating the CNAME we could not connect to it and we received the error – “System error 52 has occurred. A duplicate name exists on the network.”

We located this article and made the registry change and it worked fine from then on. But my issue wasn’t making the registry change but more in the fact that we would be doing this on a regular basis and the network group was not going to be handling it every time. In fact IT people with much less knowledge around this type of event would be handling it. So I wrote the “StrictCNAME” utility to make it easy to apply the Microsoft fix for an engineer of any level. And also because it made it so much faster for me to do it as well.

Using the tool is easy:

1. Download it here.
2. Run it

3. Enter the name of the system or it’s IP address.
4. Click “OK”
5. Restart the server.

Here is the Microsoft text dealing with the manual method of fixing it:

“Additionally, to resolve this problem in Windows 2000 Server you must complete all of the following steps:

1. Create the CNAME record for the file server on the appropriate DNS server, if the CNAME record is not already present.

2. Apply the hotfix to the computer for which the CNAME record was created, not the DNS server. (Unless the DNS server and file server in question is the same computer, and then all of the changes is applied is to that server.) This hotfix affects the LAN Manager Server Service and does not affect DNS functionality.

3. Apply the following registry change to the file server to which you installed the hotfix. To do so:

a. Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
b. Locate and click the following key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters
c. On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value:
Value name: DisableStrictNameChecking
Data type: REG_DWORD
Radix: Decimal
Value: 1
d. Quit Registry Editor.

4. Restart your computer.

Windows Server 2003

To resolve this problem in Windows Server 2003, complete the following steps:

1. Create the CNAME record for the file server on the appropriate DNS server, if the CNAME record is not already present.
2. Apply the following registry change to the file server. To do so, follow these steps:

a. Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
b. Locate and click the following key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters
c. On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value:
Value name: DisableStrictNameChecking
Data type: REG_DWORD
Radix: Decimal
Value: 1
d. Quit Registry Editor.

3. Restart your computer.