Cool storage dock January 28, 2008
Posted by Brenden Bryan in Tech Toys.add a comment
I found a link to this while reading through my daily blogs. Very cool.
Happy New Year! January 2, 2008
Posted by Brenden Bryan in Personal.Tags: IOS, Personal
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I hope everyone had a great holiday break and is prepared for what should be an exciting 2008. I’ve enjoyed almost 2 weeks off since before Christmas so I’m feeling well-rested and energized to get back in the swing of things. On a personal note, I decided not to accept the position as it would require more travel than I had anticipated so I’m continuing my job search in the KC area. At this point, I’m going to take a slow, deliberate approach to finding a good, solid position focusing on either VMware Infrastructure of Cisco networking with a well-respected company that has a good appreciation for work/life balance.
On a Cisco-related note, I wanted to highlight a blog I read on a daily basis that focuses on some really cool techniques with working with Cisco IOS. I’m constantly impressed with the quality of the posts at this site and the deep technical knowledge the author displays. I’d recommend adding it to your RSS and following it, even if you only touch IOS on an infrequent basis.
KB 840001: How to restore deleted user accounts and their group memberships in Active Directory November 21, 2007
Posted by Brenden Bryan in Active Directory.2 comments
Microsoft published an excellent KB article that details several methods to recover deleted security principles in Active Directory.
Post-Move update November 21, 2007
Posted by Brenden Bryan in Exchange.add a comment
We completed the physical data center move about 2:00 a.m. on 11/10 and proceeded to the startup procedures for all the systems. By 6:30 a.m., we had all almost all systems operational but decided to take a break since most of us were operating at 24 hours without sleep. We regrouped at 1 p.m. and by 4 p.m., all systems were operational. We had no major issues an only a single failed drive on an HP server. All in all, it was a very challenging event but the months of planning proved to be the key in getting everything back in a very quick manner.
I’ve placed some pictures from the event on my Flickr here.
On a personal note, I’ll be leaving my current employer in Mid-December to pursue a new position at one of the midwest’s leading systems integrators as an systems engineer focusing on Microsoft technologies and electronic messaging security/compliance. I’m extremely excited about the opportunity but also anxious as I’m switching “sides of the fence” from the customer side to the consulting side.
D-Day -1 November 8, 2007
Posted by Brenden Bryan in Personal.Tags: Personal
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Wow. I’ve been a busy boy preparing for this datacenter move. I’ve had the opportunity, if you could call it that, to work on some extremely challenging networking issues the last few days but I think we have a plan which we won’t be able to test until we actually make the move. I’ll post more technical details after the move.
Update October 23, 2007
Posted by Brenden Bryan in Personal.add a comment
Random personal update – the data center move is in 17 days; new network core is go-live in a handful of days; and big congrats to my good friend Adam on getting his first system admin position. You deserve it.
Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer October 3, 2007
Posted by Brenden Bryan in Active Directory.Tags: , Active Directory, Microsoft, tools
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Microsoft has released a new version of the old ADmap utility now named Active Directory Topology Diagrammer (ADTD). It requires a licensed copy of Visio.
If you need a quick way to document your Active Directory infrastructure at a high-level, this is your tool.
Nice blog post on Viridian in W2k8 RC0 September 30, 2007
Posted by Brenden Bryan in Virtualization.Tags: Microsoft, Viridian
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Here is a nice blog post with screenshots of the setup of Windows Server Virtualization a.k.a. Viridian.
Update: Outlook Free/Busy issues September 28, 2007
Posted by Brenden Bryan in Exchange.Tags: Exchange 2003, Free/Busy, Outlook
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Wow, that was an easy fix and somewhat obvious too. It turns out that the free/busy data for several of the resource accounts was corrupted in some fashion. To fix the issue, I logged in as the resource account and started Outlook with the /cleanfreebusy switch. All happy now. I wish I knew what root cause of the corruption was but I’ll save that for another day.
Outlook Free/Busy issues with Exchange 2003 resource accounts September 27, 2007
Posted by Brenden Bryan in Exchange.Tags: Auto Accept, Exchange 2003, Free/Busy, Outlook
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The company I currently work for is building a new corporate office and as part of the move to the new building, they want to implement a new conference room booking system that will allow users to book their own conference rooms. We chose to utilize the Auto Accept agent from Microsoft which is a CDO+ event sink which triggers when a calendering item is delivered to a registered mailbox. Implementation is straight-forward and is well documented. The Microsoft Exchange Team Blog has several excellent posts to assist in troubleshooting the agent if they happen to pop up.
Anyway, I’m past the implementation of the agent and a successful pilot of the system using several of the conference rooms in the existing building. My issues start when I’ve handed the new building conference rooms over to our facilities manager and he notices that despite all the conference rooms responding correctly to meeting requests, not all of the conference rooms are showing the correct Free/Busy. I check with my Outlook 2007 client, and everything looks good to me. I know he is using Outlook 2003, which is our corporate standard.
First thought might be an issue with server-side Free/Busy replication on our Exchange 2003 back-end servers, but we specifically don’t replicate Free/Busy, we have chosen to only have a single copy of Free/Busy that all Outlook clients query. So, I’m dealing with some type of Outlook rendering issue, possibly tied to Outlook 2003 as it doesn’t appear to affect Outlook 2007. I found KB 196885 which has some good tips for troubleshooting Free/Busy but none directly apply to me. I’m still researching the issue trying to find root cause. If I come up with anything really interesting, I’ll post a reply.
